Fewer than a dozen vendors sell the raw-milk cheeses. Usually, lines of customers wait to be served. Most transactions are conducted in a dialect of German. If you speak only English, don’t be shy. Point, smile, and say, “100 grams,’’ or “200 grams,’’ and you are sure to be understood.
What makes this market unique is that so many of the sellers are also the farmers who produce the cheese and those who age the products. There are few middlemen. Unlike the bland product sold in the United States, this cheese has a terrific sweet and nutty taste because the holes are not scraped free of bacteria, which provides enormous flavor.
The best cheeses are Emmen tal, Sbrinz, Stanser Flada, and a few Alpine varieties from tiny farms. Emmental can be bought young or aged. The latter, often 15 months old, has a rind the color of chestnuts. The overall impression it leaves on the palate is of pure, fresh milk. The Sbrinz also has lots of texture, almost a chewy quality; it tastes faintly of hazelnuts, but the taste is flatter, less dramatic than that of the Emmental.
The Swiss like to say that Sbrinz is the cheese on which Parmesan is based. It could be true: Lucerne, the most Italianate of all Swiss cities in its architecture, was one of Italy’s chief trading partners for centuries.
The taste of the cheeses is influenced, too, by the flowers and herbs among the grasses the cows graze on in summer.
Stanser Flada, from the village of Stans, 26 minutes away by postal bus, is the market’s most interesting and tastiest cheese, best eaten with a spoon from its small, round, wooden container. The rind - dark, wrinkled, orange-brown - smells like a barnyard, but when you break it, the cheese that oozes out smells sweet and buttery. The flavors emerge in layers: fresh milk, cream, a hint of almonds.
