Raclette

the Valais half-wheel melted at the fire and scraped over potatoes in their skins, with cornichons and pickled onions

Origin: Sion & the Valais

From the journey of Potato.

Raclette is often described as a cheese dish, which understates the potato. The cheese is scraped over something, and what it is scraped over is a waxy potato boiled in its skin and kept hot: firm enough to take the weight of the melt, floury enough at the edge to hold it, and bland enough to make the cheese taste of more than it is. Take the potato away and the dish stops working, which is why the modern form of raclette can be no older than the potato in the Valais. The name is nineteenth-century and comes from racler, to scrape. Before that the German-speaking upper Valais called it Bratchäs, roasted cheese, and the French-speaking lower valley fromage rôti, and both described a herdsman's meal rather than a dinner: a half-wheel propped at the edge of a fire, the face softening, the softened layer drawn off with a knife onto whatever bread or grain was to hand. Its promotion from a mountain habit to a cantonal emblem is generally dated to the Sion cantonal exhibition of 1909, where it was presented as a speciality of the Valais. What almost everyone now owns is not that at all. The tabletop electric grill with its little sliding pans arrived in the 1950s and 1960s and turned raclette into a communal winter meal that anyone can cook indoors, and it is now the ordinary way the dish is eaten across Switzerland and well beyond it. The half-wheel at an open flame survives in the Valais and is what the Raclette du Valais AOP, protected since 2007, actually describes: raw milk from cows of the canton, and a wheel melted at its face rather than a slice melted in a pan. One piece of the ritual is worth naming as folklore. There is a firm and widely held belief that one must never drink cold water with raclette, on the grounds that the cheese will set into a lump in the stomach. It has no physiological basis whatsoever. The custom, on the other hand, is entirely real: what is poured is white wine, a small glass of Valais fendant or a kirsch, or hot tea, and a guest who asks for iced water will be corrected.

Ingredients

The plate

  • 1.2 kg small waxy potatoes, unpeeled and of even size
  • 2 tsp salt, for the water
  • 800 g raclette cheese, sliced 5mm thick, or a quarter wheel

To serve

  • 150 g cornichons
  • 150 g pickled silverskin onions
  • 200 g air-dried beef or cured ham, thinly sliced
  • 1 black pepper and paprika, for the table

Method

  1. Choose potatoes of a size, since they have to finish together, and scrub them but do not peel them. The skin is what keeps them from going watery.
  2. Boil them whole in well-salted water for twenty to twenty-five minutes, until a knife goes in with slight resistance. Underdone is better than overdone here: they will sit in a warm dish for the length of the meal.
  3. Drain them and keep them hot, covered, in a bowl or a low oven. They should be hot when the cheese goes on, or the melt will set on contact.
  4. Set out the cornichons, the pickled onions, and the dried meat in dishes on the table, with pepper and paprika alongside.
  5. For a tabletop grill: heat it thoroughly first. Lay a slice of cheese in each little pan and slide them under the element.
  6. Each person crushes a hot potato open on their plate with the back of a fork whilst the cheese melts. Do not mash it, just break the surface so the melt runs in.
  7. The cheese is ready when it has slumped and blistered at the edges and is beginning to colour, three to five minutes. Do not wait for it to brown all over, since it turns oily.
  8. Scrape the pan out over the crushed potato with the wooden spatula, grind pepper over, and eat it at once with a cornichon and a pickled onion.
  9. For a half-wheel or quarter at an open fire or under a raclette lamp: bring the cut face up to the heat, wait until the top few millimetres are running, and draw the melted layer off onto the plate with a broad blade in one pass.
  10. Reload and repeat for as long as people are eating. Raclette is a meal served in rounds rather than in courses, and it takes as long as it takes.

Notes

Buy proper raclette cheese; a mild washed-rind cheese from a supermarket will melt but will not smell of anything, and the point of the dish is the aroma that comes off the pan. Waxy varieties such as Charlotte, Ratte, or Jersey Royal hold their shape. Floury potatoes collapse into the melt and turn the plate to paste. The dried meat and the pickles are not optional in practice: eight hundred grammes of melted cheese across an evening needs the salt and the acid to stay eatable. Serve a dry white or hot tea, never a cold fizzy drink.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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