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Fond and drink: Fond of fondue

Dipping-food fun spells party time any time

Tonight’s the last-chance party time for good old 2008, and since any New Year’s Eve celebration deserves special treatment worthy of commemorating the old and welcoming the new, the idea of a fondue — impromptu or otherwise — may well save your holiday bacon if you haven’t come up with a concept yet.

Fondue is super easy and fun; it also pretty much guarantees you a party, even at the last minute.

Just say the word “fondue” and people light up like the little gas lamp that keeps the whole event simmering. There’s something archetypically social and reassuring about gathering around a hot burbling pot to dip in tasty tidbits. It must be lodged in our limbic brain from the days of our furry ancestors gathering ’round a fire outside the cave entrance.

If you don’t have on old fondue pot to dust off, don’t worry. A bunch of forks along with an old pot on a stove burner on low will nicely do the trick since the best Canadian parties are kitchen parties anyway.

No one is 100 per cent sure where and when fondue originated. Mongolian hot pot, with its ringed pot full of bubbling hot water or oil for cooking bits of meat surrounding a funnel up the centre to allow fire smoke to escape, goes back to pre-history.

A passage in Homer’s Iliad (an older translation, not Robert Fagles’ recent one) describes Hecamed è, who was “as fair as a goddess”, serving an Achaean chieftain and his companion a meal which included Pramnian wine, which is thought to be a type of Lesbian wine from the Greek island of Lesbos, that she had mixed with goat’s milk cheese “grated on a bronze grater” and some ground barley meal.

While the passage definitely says that the soldiers drank this mixture to quench their thirst, some epicureans consider it the first reference to fondue. The wine/cheese combo, I guess.

In more contemporary times, it’s the Swiss who have been given the honour as originators and long-standing guardians of the fondue.

Food expert Thelma Barer-Stein notes the Swiss “consummate art” of blending tolerance and politeness with simplicity, along with their capability to blend and adopt anything, including foods, from other cultures as being a bastion of Swiss sophistication and good taste, and generally all things Swiss-like.

That may be the case for fondue as well, as even Swiss history does not clearly spell out from whence it came and we have the two sources noted earlier in ancient Greece and Asia. Or it may simply have been a case of how to use up supplies of rock-hard cheese and stale bread in the coldest months of the year.

Either way, most of us think of “fondue” and “Switzerland” in the same brainwave, and today, most Swiss homes have a sturdy dish called a caquelon dish for heating the cheese over a small burner called a rechaud .

Traditionally, there have been a number of different types. There’s the Valais fondue, which contains no butter, eggs flour or starch of any kind. And the Fribourg fondue, which uses soft Vacherin cheese made from cows’ milk. But the one fondue most of us Canucks are familiar with is the Neuchâtel fondue from western Switzerland, which is made from Gruyère cheese, a delicious cheese with a slightly sweet and nutty taste. It’s perfect for fondue, not just because of its fantastic flavour, but also its fat, moistness and saltiness.

In North America, fondue was pretty hip back in the days of disco balls and Magnum P.I. It also enjoyed a resurgence a few years back, so you can find a million and one recipes for “cheese fondue” if you Google it.

But don’t get intimidated by the sheer numbers, or by the complexity of some of the recipes. For as Larousse Gastronomique points out, the essential cheese fondue is simply grated cheese melted in white wine seasoned with pepper and flavoured with a little kirsch at the very end.

You’ve probably got some dry white wine kicking around after the holiday season, and maybe even a baguette you can cut up into 1-inch cubes. Apple is nice too. Cut it into smallish slices or chunks and rub a bit of lemon juice over it so it doesn’t turn brown while waiting to be dunked.

If you don’t have a baguette, crackers or melba toast will do, just don’t expect to stab those onto the end of a fork, fondue or otherwise. But there’s one thing you should spring for if you don’t have it on hand, and that’s the Gruyère. Grate it and after you’ve melted it slowly, keep your heat even so it doesn’t turn into a ball or stringy mess.

If you’re really stuck, no pun intended, or just like life easy, spring for one of President’s Choice fondue cheese packs in the deli section of Superstore. You know I ain’t no fan of processed foods, but this is a dream. Easy to use, all the right ingredients, tastes fantastic and never gums up. Plus if worse comes to worst, you can just heat up a couple of packs on the stove top in any old pot and have a good time with pals hanging out and dipping away.

While white bread chunks and apple are the traditional dipping foods, why stop there? The mouth of our fondue pot is wide enough that people will dip just about anything they find on a buffet table that they deem dip-able — red pepper strips, carrot or celery sticks, chunks of raw cauliflower or broccoli. Kids are especially great at being inventive: I’ve seen them dip everything from corn chips to meatballs.

As for oil or chocolate fondues, those are altogether different kinds of party animals. Oil fondue, also known as meat fondue, can be fun, but you really should have the right equipment, meaning a suitable fondue pot and burner. Plus the thought of all that hot oil and raw meat at room temperature around a party scene is enough to make even me nervous.

As for chocolate fondue, which was supposedly invented by Swiss Chalet Restaurants, it’s definitely worth a try (again, just Google “chocolate fondue recipes”). Like oil fondues, these can be a little more finicky and demanding, but they are guaranteed to bring out the epi-curiousity in all your guests, just in time to ring in the New Year in a deliciously decadent way.

 

IT’S A FACT

“Epicurean” originally referred to someone who follows the teachings of the Greek philosopher, Epicurus. Now it has come to mean people who are devoted to sensual enjoyment, especially that derived from food and drink.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who likes to “ring in the New” with something new.