Today is National Cheese Fondue Day. 10 things you didn't know about fondue:
Fondue originated as a way to eke out Bread in the winter months when fresh food was less available. People discovered that stale bread would soften when dipped in melted Cheese with Wine.
The first recipe for cheese fondue appeared in a 1699 Swiss cookbook. The dish was called Kass mit Wein zu kochen—meaning "to cook cheese with wine."
The word fondue is French for “melted”.
Another word for the fondue pot is a caquelon.
Over the course of a fondue meal, a crust of cheese will form at the bottom of the pot. This is called la religieuse (“the nun”) because it looks like the caps nuns wore in the Middle Ages. It’s considered a privilege to be given this to eat.
Fondue has been the national dish of Switzerland since the 1930s when the Swiss Cheese Union (Schweizer Käseunion AG) used it in a campaign to get people to eat more cheese.
According to tradition, only white wine, kirsch, or herbal tea should be drunk with fondue.
Fondue etiquette rules include always stirring in a figure of 8, not scratching the bottom of the caquelon with a fork and adding an Egg and kirsch schnapps to the caquelon when the cheese is almost finished.
Losing your bread in the fondue pot can have dire consequences. If a man loses his bread in the fondue pot, he’s expected to buy a round of drinks. If a woman loses her bread in the pot, she must Kiss all her neighbours. Sometimes the penalty is to sing a song or strip naked and run around in the snow. This is parodied in Asterix in Switzerland, where a character is sentenced to be drowned in Lake Geneva after losing his third piece of bread.
Cheese fondue isn’t the only type. There’s also fondue bourguignonne, in which pieces of meat are cooked in hot oil or broth, and Chocolate fondue, which, while inspired by the Swiss dish, is actually an American invention.
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