Cheese Fondue

Switzerland's pot of Gruyère and Vacherin melted into dry white wine, held smooth by the acid in the glass

Origin: Fribourg, the Vaud & Switzerland

From the journey of Grapes.

A fondue is a chemistry problem before it is a recipe. Cheese heated on its own tightens, squeezes out its fat, and turns to a rubbery lump in a pool of grease. What prevents that is acid, and the acid comes from the wine: roughly a third of a litre of dry white to eight hundred grammes of cheese, which is far too much to be there for flavour alone. The tartaric acid lowers the pH enough to keep the casein dispersed, the starch slaked into the kirsch finishes the job, and the pot stays glossy. The wine specified for it is a Valais Fendant, the Chasselas grape, chosen precisely because it is sharp and says very little: an aromatic wine would fight the cheese, and a soft one would let it seize. The word is older than the dish. The fondue that Brillat-Savarin gives in Physiologie du goût in 1825 is eggs beaten with grated cheese, closer to a rich scramble than to anything served in a caquelon. The earliest recognisable Swiss instruction for cooking cheese in wine yet found is a Zurich text of 1699, Käss mit Wein zu kochen, and even that is some way from the communal pot on the table. Its standing as the national dish was, in part, sold to the Swiss. The Schweizerische Käseunion, the cheese cartel that controlled Swiss production and export from the First World War until it was dissolved in 1999, promoted fondue energetically from the 1930s as a patriotic dish, supplied it to the army, and in the 1950s ran the Swiss German slogan FIGUGEGL: Fondue isch guet und git e gueti Luune, fondue is good and puts you in a good mood. The dish was genuinely old and genuinely Alpine. Its promotion to a national symbol was a campaign to move a cheese surplus, and it worked completely. The blend is regional and argued over. Moitié-moitié, half Gruyère and half Vacherin Fribourgeois, is the Fribourg standard and the smoothest; a fondue neuchâteloise uses Gruyère and Emmental and sets firmer; the Valais brings its own raclette cheese to the pot. Savoy and the Franche-Comté cook their versions with Beaufort, Comté, and Emmental, and since Savoy did not become French until 1860 the pot is a good deal older than the border now running through it. What every version agrees on is the religieuse, the disc of crust left on the bottom of the caquelon at the end, which is lifted out whole and divided.

Ingredients

Fondue

  • 1 garlic clove, halved
  • 300 ml dry white wine, ideally a Valais Fendant or another Chasselas
  • 1 tsp lemon juice
  • 400 g Gruyère, coarsely grated
  • 400 g Vacherin Fribourgeois, coarsely grated
  • 2 tsp cornflour
  • 2 tbsp kirsch
  • 0.25 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
  • 0.5 tsp freshly ground black pepper

To serve

  • 1 large day-old country loaf, cut into 3cm cubes with crust on every piece
  • 12 cornichons
  • 12 pickled silverskin onions

Method

  1. Cut the bread the day before if you can, or at least several hours ahead, and leave it uncovered. Fresh bread disintegrates on the fork, and every cube needs a crust to spear.
  2. Rub the inside of a caquelon or a heavy enamelled pot all over with the cut garlic, pressing hard enough to leave the oil on the surface, then discard the clove.
  3. Pour in the wine and the lemon juice and bring it to a bare simmer over a medium heat. Do not let it boil.
  4. Add the grated cheese a large handful at a time, stirring continuously with a wooden spoon. Wait until each addition has gone before adding the next, and keep the heat low.
  5. Stir in a figure of eight rather than in circles. Circular stirring spins the melting cheese into a rope around the spoon, whilst the figure of eight keeps cutting through it.
  6. Slake the cornflour in the kirsch until there are no lumps, then stir it into the pot. The fondue will thicken and turn glossy within a minute or two.
  7. Season with the nutmeg and a good deal of black pepper, and taste. It should be sharp enough to make you want another mouthful.
  8. Move the pot to the table burner set as low as it will go. The fondue should barely tremble; a rolling heat will break it.
  9. Each person spears a cube of bread through the crust, turns it in the pot in a figure of eight, and lets the excess run off before eating.
  10. When a thin layer is all that remains, turn the heat up briefly to set the crust on the base. Lift out this religieuse in one piece and share it round.

Notes

The commonest failure is heat. Cheese added to boiling wine, or a pot left over a high flame at the table, will separate into oil and strings, and no amount of stirring will bring it back; if it begins to split, take it off the heat and whisk in another teaspoon of cornflour slaked in a little cold wine. Grate the cheese rather than chopping it, and buy real Gruyère and Vacherin Fribourgeois if you possibly can, since the processed blends sold as Swiss contain emulsifying salts that melt smoothly and taste of very little. Serve white wine or hot tea alongside, and keep the bread cubes generously sized: a small cube slips off the fork, and the traditional forfeit for losing your bread in the pot is buying the next round.

The Gastrographer

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Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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