Wednesday, February 26

Just Fondue It

Ladies and gentlemen: start your forks. Fondue is back.

After years of collecting dust in basements and the top shelves of pantries everywhere, vintage seventies electric fondue pots are once again in high demand. Young soon-to-be-marrieds are registering for stainless-steel versions of the seventies classics at Williams-Sonoma. Melting Pot franchise restaurants are opening at the speed of light.

Why fondue in this time of trouble? It goes back to the beginnings of fondue as we know it. Alpine Switzerland gets cold in the winter, and Swiss cheeses – Emmenthaler and Gruyere – get dry and hard. Back in the day, the goat-herders figured out that melting the cheese with a hearty dose of alcohol and serving it with chunks of bread made a much more warming meal than just the old dry cheese itself. Hence the word fondue comes from the French fondre, "to melt."

Fondue spread through the States like wildfire in the sixties when French food was introduced to the masses. Fondue parties were common throughout the seventies; to someone who was not an adult then, it sounds as though fondue parties and key parties were often one and the same. Old fondue cookbooks are heavy on the etiquette of eating fondue: you must dip your bread and swirl it in a figure eight. Should you drop a piece of bread into the fondue, you must kiss the neighbor sitting to your left. And so on.

I went to a dinner party recently that featured two categories of fondue: cheese and chocolate. We had the tried-and-tested Swiss cheese with kirsch and that old favorite dark chocolate. In the spirit of experimentation, our hostess had also chosen a fondue based on Welsh rarebit (cheddar cheese, beer, dry mustard) and a milk chocolate fondue made with Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bars and orange essence.

True to form, the women at the party chopped and stirred while the guys sat in the living room, drank beer, and talked sports. Of course, to be honest, we were drinking beer and talking babies and recipes, so I guess there were stereotypes to be had all around. Within forty-five minutes, the cheese fondues were on the table (one in an authentic avocado green fondue pot and the other in a lovely copper fondue pot) and the eight of us were clustered around, dipping. I have to say that, despite the preponderance of broccoli, cubed boiled potatoes, and tart Granny Smith slices, I swirled mostly bread.

We moved directly on to the chocolate fondue, where surprisingly the milk chocolate and orange variety was the clear winner. Someone expressed surprise that the chunks of blood oranges and regular oranges and even limes were so delicious in the fondue, but they were; they provided a bit a citrus spark against the milky rich chocolate.

So the citrus was delicious and the marshmallows were sweet and the California strawberries were classic, but all of those were outpaced by none other than the lowly Peep. You might scoff, but the first shipments of Easter Peeps had just arrived in the stores, and after all, they are just marshmallows. Peep fondue etiquette is as follows: you stab the Peep (Peep chicks, in the instant case) with your fork and swab it around in the chocolate to the amusement of your fondue-friends, and then you realize that Peeps are meant for just that treatment; the marshmallow is puffy and the colored sugar outside is crunchy and the chocolate offsets it just so. Yum.

Some people liken fondue to Chinese food, or steamed crabs: they are hungry half an hour after they eat. I'm not one of those people. I am one of those people who thinks that there is not a more convivial and slightly campy way to spend an evening with one's friends. A bottle of wine, a harvest gold fondue pot, and thee: that's all I ask.