Fondue

So you have invited a few friends over for dinner. The house has been spruced up a bit and you have planned after-dinner activities but you can’t decide upon a menu that will impress your friends. Why not let the dinner menu be one of the activities by planing a fondue, which in French means “to melt”? This delightful method of preparing and eating dinner began first in Switzerland. Historically, fondue recipes were comparatively simple where diners dipped bite size pieces of bread into a pot of melted cheese. That fondue comes from Switzerland should come as no surprise considering that this country values its cheese and chocolate as much as other countries value gold. We are told that one of the earliest known recipes appeared in a 1699 in book published in Zurich where fondue was first called “Kass mit Wein zu kochen”. Translated into English, this term means “to cook cheese with wine”.1 Years later fondue recipes were sailed across the great Atlantic from Europe to North America where fondue was enthusiastically embraced in restaurants and at home dining alike becoming popular in the 1930s, undergoing a resurgence in the 1960s and 70s and has now regained popularity once more in the 21st century.
Now that fondue is popular again, on the menu you will find a wide range of food categories such as meats, seafood, vegetables, fruit, bread and pastry for dipping into melted cheese, chocolate, hot oil or broth in a communal pot and cooked to taste. Traditional cheese fondues for instance, are usually melted on the stove, then transferred to the serving pot, where it is kept at a temperature just warm enough for dipping and serving. Popular today are electric fondue pots used with gel fuel allowing for an increased degree of safety. Fondue pots that use a flame as the heat source are only appropriate for cheese or chocolate as they don’t get hot enough for hot oil cooking or for simmering broth. Electric pots, on the other hand, can be with oil or broth because they can reach the higher temperatures required for cooking meats and seafood. Each diner uses one of their forks (total of six per diner which resemble small spears) to cook their food in the communal pot to their preference, or dipped in cheese or chocolate and then transferred to their own individual plate. If the course contains meat or seafood, sauces may be added to the diner’s plate providing additional flavor.
The extensive choice of food items and selection of cooking pots and equipment has brought wonderful changes as fondue moves from flame-heated pots to electric models. Another positive change has occurred in the finishes and coatings now available on most fondue pots including ceramic coatings which help eliminate scorching and burning. A wide variety of recipes, cooking pots, tools and valuable cooking hints are available on the web, so spend a little time educating yourself about fondue, a simple yet very entertaining method of friendly dining.
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fondue