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.