In my first cookbook, How to Eat Well and Stay Single, I wrote about this communal dish that was popular in the 70s. I think everyone had a special fondue pot, with a burner in the stand and a set of long fondue forks.

I hadn’t had the dish in years until a family celebration last year, when my eldest Ontario-dwelling daughter pulled out a fondue pot and we all dug into the delicious melted cheese sauce with gusto. I wonder if she’d found my long lost pot?

Back in the day I wrote:

The classic cheese fondue is from the French speaking part of Switzerland and comes in several varieties, depending on the area and the cheese you use. I can’t believe that the phlegmatic Swiss invented the custom that the first one who drops a piece of bread in the pot has to pay a forfeit. Their forfeiture could be that they have to do the washing up (a chore which I still hate)! Don’t tell them the secret, which is to have a piece of crust on each piece of bread and spear through the crust.

Authentic flame coloured Le Creuset fondue set

I also added that there are two sorts of fondue pot: one for food that is to be deep fried in oil and the other for heavy sauce fondues, such as this one. The former (typically a meat fondue) is a thin walled pot, often enamelled aluminium or steel. But if you ever think you might like to try a cheese fondue, then you will need a pot that is thick walled, and is often made from enamelled cast iron or ovenware. With the latter, there is much less chance of the cheese burning. You can probably substitute any heavy bottomed saucepan and you could even use regular forks for the bread chunks. Worth giving a try until you are ready to invest in a true fondue pot. In the part of France which borders Switzerland and in Swiss German, fondue pots are called caquelon. The burner is rechaud, literally stove. Often the set of pot, burner and forks are sold as one item. Le Creuset make a fabulous (and very expensive) version.

I was amused to read in one Swiss recipe book that the cheese fondue mixture should be kept warm enough to keep the fondue smooth and liquid but not so hot that it burns. When the fondue is finished there will be a thin crust of toasted (not burnt) cheese at the bottom, called la religieuse (French for ‘nun’). It has the texture of a cracker and is delicious when lifted out and eaten.

Fondueziit (fondue time) in Switzerland

It was promoted as a Swiss national dish by the Swiss Cheese Union (Schweizerische Käseunion) in the 1930s and was popularized in North America in the 1960s. After WWII, the Swiss aggressively promoted cheese fondue as a way to increase sales of regional cheeses, with slogans like La fondue crée la bonne humeur (fondue creates a good mood) and in Swiss German this snappy example from 1981: Fondue isch guet und git e gueti Luune (fondue is good and creates a good mood). It featured at the Swiss Pavilion’s Alpine restaurant at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and caught on internationally, in spite of their soppy campaigns.

Honestly, I thought fondue parties had been left behind in the Seventies along with bell bottom jeans and avocado bathroom suites, but it seems they’re back in the UK as well. Two department stores report that sales of fondue sets are up hugely. Chef Armin Loetscher who owns the St. Moritz, London’s oldest Swiss restaurant, said last year: “We have eight different types on our menu and it’s never been more popular. We serve at least 100 a day.”

Like many other popular dishes, fondue has peasant roots. The word fondue comes from a French root that simply means ‘melted.’ In Switzerland, the types of cheese used haven’t changed much over hundreds of years. The standard Neuchâteloise recipe calls for Emmenthal and Gruyere, and the other favorite variant, the moitié-moitié (half and half) mixture, is half Emmenthal and half Vacherin. Regional variations have been created, mostly as a marketing ploy by the SK, but I name mine after the classic dish I had on an Alpine skiing holiday long, long ago and never forgot.

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This is Nigel’s 294th blog on Gentleman’s Portion. The SEARCH function at the top works really well, if you want to look back and see some of his previous stories. The link to Gentleman’s Portion: The Cookbook is now live, well priced at $9.99 or £9.99 and available on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Google, Kobo and Scribd.