Vogelheu—literally, “Vogelheu”—is a Swiss dish with toasted bread, cubed and cooked with eggs and other ingredients for a tasty meal that makes efficient use of leftover bread. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Vogelheu, Bird’s Hay, a Swiss Dish and a Family Memory”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi there.
My name is Tim Affalter, which is a Swiss name, and I’m calling about a word that my grandparents used. They were immigrants from Switzerland in the early 1900s. My grandmother was a pretty basic cook, and one of the dishes that she made for us was cubed up bread. I think it was probably the day before bread that she would fry in a frying pan with butter until it was kind of toasted on all sides. And then she’d break eggs over the top and scramble them. So you’d get these crunchy little croutons inside scrambled eggs. It was really good. And I still make it to this day. She called it fogahoy.
Fogahoy. Now, I’m not sure if that’s just how my youthful ears interpreted it or whether that’s the actual word, but it sounded like that. And I just wondered if you had any knowledge of a dish or a word from the Swiss area. I guess it would be Germany as well. That might explain what that means.
And Tim, you said that your Swiss grandparents immigrated. Where are you now?
British Columbia, straight north of Spokane, Washington. We’re about a half an hour over the Canada-U.S. border in a little town called Castle Gar.
Oh, lovely. Got it. Yeah, good country up there.
Yeah, it’s beautiful. So this sounds like a really yummy dish. Toasted bread, fried in a pan with butter, coated with egg. Your pronunciation is incredibly close to the actual word. You’ve kept it. After all these years, you maintained the actual word. The Swiss German dish is Fogelhoy. And it’s spelled, believe it or not, with a V because the V sounds like an F. V-O-G-E-L-H-E-U. And it means bird’s hay. Fogel means bird and H-E-U, hoy, means hay. It’s etymologically related to the English word hay. You can actually see it in the spelling, H-E-U. H-E-U. It’s because it resembles a bird’s nest or a pile of hay.
One of my Swiss-German dictionaries describes it as, quote, a rustic dish made from bread, cubes, egg, milk, and onions. Did your grandparents put onions in it?
You know, they didn’t, but I actually add onions and actually a little green pepper to mine. I always thought I was bastardizing the dish, but that’s how I actually like it, with a little garlic salt and some onion in there, and it just tastes really good and crunchy little egg cubes. So it does pop up again and again and again, and they specifically talk about, just like French toast, this is how you use stale bread or scrap bread pieces. So that’s what this is mainly for. You wouldn’t take really quality bread. You would use the random little bits of scrap bread from the end of a loaf or something.
And there are other recipes by the same name, Fogelhoi, again, V-O-G-E-L-H-E-U, that in Germany and Austria and other parts of Switzerland, but the recipes can vary quite a bit. They tend to have bread almost always, and they tend to have egg almost always, but sometimes they’re very sweet, and sometimes they’re actually far more like a dessert, and very much less like an egg dish. They’re almost always breakfasty.
Yeah, how cool that you have that linguistic heirloom. That’s really cool, Tim.
Yeah, it is. Tim, thank you for sharing your memories and your recipe with us. I guess we’ll try that this weekend.
Yeah, there you go. Take care now.
Take care, Tim. Nice talking to you.
Bye-bye.
All right, bye-bye. You too.
Bye-bye. My stomach is growling.
