How to make the perfect bircher muesli — theguardian.com

When I first encountered bircher muesli on the bountiful breakfast table at Ireland’s Ballymaloe House I assumed they’d invented it, so perfect was the combination of Irish oatmeal, homegrown apples and thick yellow cream. In fact, as I quickly discovered when I tried to recreate this mushy beige manna at home, bircher muesli’s origins lie a long way from the green fields of County Cork. It is the creation of Maximilian Bircher-Benner, a Swiss doctor and nutritionist, who developed it for patients at his Zurich sanatorium at the turn of the last century as a way of shoehorning yet more raw fruit into their diets. His charges started every single meal with a bowl of his “little mush” – which may, I concede, have been rather too much of a good thing.

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