It’s Fondue Season!
In the beginning there was only old cheese and stale bread. Then there was light. And heat. And fondue. And the world became new. And for this we are thankful to the Swiss or French or Greeks, depending on who you ask.
Fondue didn’t really get rolling here in the US until the 1960s when the Swiss Cheese Union marketed the bejeezus out of it at the 1964 World’s Fair. Posters of apple cheeked, blonde families sitting down to bubbling pots of cheese somewhere in the snowy Alps appeared in restaurants and women’s magazines, planting the seed in all our American heads that when the weather turns cold, fondue should be on the menu. Even though farmers and herders were eating bread and cheese in the mountains all year round, there became something especially satisfying about eating fondue when there was at least a bit of frost on the ground.
With temps in the 30s, I am certainly inspired to make a fondue feast. Excuse me while I toot the cheese shop horn, but my favorite recipe is our Divine Alpine Fondue, which includes the Swiss cheeses we love. It’s classic, it’s perfect, it’s impossible to resist.
If I’m feeling sassy (and we’re all feeling sassy these days, amiright?) Blue Fondue is next on my list. It still has Alpine influence, but some cayenne, mustard, and a good chunk of Bayley Hazen Blue add pizazz *jazz hands, jazz hands*.
What to dip? Crusty bread is traditional, but how about pickles, potato chips, olives, salami, and crackers studded with fruit and nuts? And you know my love for condiments, so I like to go overboard with the spreads – mustard, hot sauce, jam, aioli, and spicy honey. Now the combinations are endless! Cheese, cracker, mustard, perhaps. Cheese, chip, hot sauce, yes please! Cheese, salami, spicy honey, oh yeahhh buddy!
For the love of cheese, especially if it’s melted,
Kiri
Shop Fondue Accompaniments
P.S. For Martin Luther King Day, NPR put out a poetry challenge I thought was pretty cool, based on Langston Hughes’s poem, “I Dream A World” that inspired Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. If you’re so moved, take a crack at it! Or just check out the poem in which Hughes tells us his dreams for our world. And I added another one that always gets in my brain, because one Hughes poem just isn’t enough.