The history of cheese fondue, Part I

The origins of cheese fondue are sketchy and unlikely to ever be established with any certitude. Wheeled out regularly as a prototypical example of cheese, wine and a binder is Book 11 of Homer’s Iliad (800 BCE). Here is the translation of the relevant passage by Samuel Butler:

”…The woman, as fair as a goddess, mixed them a mess with Pramnian wine; she grated goat’s milk cheese into it with a bronze grater, threw in a handful of white barley-meal, and having thus prepared the mess she bade them drink it. When they had done so and had thus quenched their thirst, they fell talking with one another,” etc.

Swiss and French antecedents

If one looks at old recipes for fondues, yes, there is one for melting cheese in wine and dipping bread in published in Zurich in 1699 thought to be the oldest in existence. However, according to a Swiss researcher, the actual name fondue, which just means ”melted” (fondre in French, fondere in Italian = the verb to melt), dates back only as far as the end of the 18^th century. And the dish in general is considered to have become widely known in the Swiss-German part of the country only in the 1930s.

In French epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût, ou Méditations de gastronomie transcendante, published in 1825, he gives a recipe for fondue that he discovered in Vaud. The translation is by M.F.K. Fisher.

”Weigh the number of eggs you want to use, relative to the number of your guests. Then take a piece of a good quality Gruyère that weighs one-third and a piece of butter that weighs one-sixth. Break the eggs into a saucepan and beat well. Then add the butter and the cheese which has been grated or thinly sliced.

Place the saucepan on the stove over medium-high heat and stir with a [wooden] spatula until the mixture becomes thick and soft. Add some salt, or none if the cheese is old, and a fair amount of pepper, since this is one of the important characteristics of this time-honored dish. Serve the dish on a heated plate. Provide the best wine, which will be quickly drunk, and you will see miracles.”

The only mention of wine here is that drunk with the dish, not in it. One can only assume guests had bread to go with this, and it seems logical enough that some would have dunked the bread in the mixture. The resemblance of this recipe to Italian fonduta, a specialty of Valle d’Aosta and Piedmont, which contains egg yolks, milk and Fontina cheese - no wine in the mix - and is also usually served in individual bowls is very striking. Valle d’Aosta is just to the other side of the Matterhorn, the peak of which is also an iconic image for that region.

A look back

That said: it seems impossible that prior to that 1699 recipe in the Zurich cookbook, given that cheese existed (in 77 CE Roman writer Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, evoked the number and variety of Alpine cheeses and hard cheeses were also known) and given that bread existed, nobody in the villages where cheese was made, or in the wealthier towns where the cheese was sold, was melting a little of it to dunk bread into, maybe even adding some wine. And this could be anywhere in the Alpine area, perhaps imported from one place to others, perhaps springing to life in several different places at once.

What’s missing or at least not widely available is documentation, not the possibility. It cannot be excluded that somewhere there is a grain of truth to the most often cited background stories about cheese fondue: that it was originally a way for poor herders watching over livestock in an Alpine meadow to make a lump of cheese and some stale bread more appetizing, or (other variant) that it was a way for poor villagers to improve winter dishes when all they had was a bit of cheese and some old bread.

Fondue in the latter part of the 19^th century

There are other 19^th and early 20^th century fondue recipes besides Brillat-Savarin’s in the annals of mostly French cookery quoted by US chef and writer Peter Hertzmann in his thoughtful article on the history of fondue, but except for one that’s more a soufflé than a fondue all basically are the same as Brillat-Savarin’s. Writes Hertzmann: ”By the time Madame Saint-Ange includes a recipe for fondue in her La Bonne cuisine in 1927, the recipe no longer includes eggs-just cheese, wine, flour, garlic, soda, and seasoning-what most people today think of as fondue au fromage.”

But there is also Swiss documentation, as on-going research into the history of Swiss fondue being done by Isabelle Raboud-Schüle, a University of Neuchâtel-educated ethnologist, shows. Formerly with the Nestlé food museum, the Alimentarium in Vevey, Raboud-Schüle is presently director of the Musée Gruérien in Bulle.

She cites a Swiss text dating from 1869 that refers to Vacherin-based fondue fribourgeoise, and fondue franc-comtoise (French Jura). Further documentation shows that, in 1881, a Bernese restaurant was listing both Fribourg and Neuchâtel fondues on its bill of fare.

To Raboud-Schüle, as the dish progressed from cheese bound with eggs and without wine, to cheese with wine bound (post-1905, when it came to Switzerland) with cornstarch, it was essentially an urban, bourgeois one.

Evidence points to French, Swiss and Italian Alps

Whatever the history, poor or not poor, rural or urban, what is striking when you look at  readily-available documentation that does exist is how the details concentrate in the Swiss, French and Italian Alps and Jura. The Parisian recipes all seem to have gotten there via Brillat-Savarin, who discovered fondue in Vaud. Today, you have your Italian Valle d’Aosta and Piedmont fonduta, your Swiss fondues, the nearby Jura mountain fondue jurassienne, and then you have your French Alps and fondue savoyarde. Savoy, like Paris, according to Raboud-Schüle, also received notions of the dish from the Swiss.

It seems safe to conclude that no matter who started exactly what when where (the borders we know as defining France, Switzerland and Italy today are relatively modern, 19^th century constructs, and fondue predates them) the geographical heart of cheese fondue lies in this area.

In fact, the only cheese fondue recipe I can find outside this area is the French fondue normande, a 20^th century invention featuring Camembert, Pont l’Evêque and Livarot with the rind off, cream, milk, shallots and Calvados ( recipe from the 1988 US edition of the Larousse Gastronomique). It seems area farmers were trying to promote their dairy industry, et voilà, a fondue recipe.

Fondue goes national in Switzerland

Which is, according to Raboud-Schüle, exactly what happened in Switzerland in the 1930s. This, she says, is where the identity of the ”Swiss fondue” really comes from. The cheese industry came up with it as a way to boost cheese sales, and the publicity campaign not only anchored fondue nationwide but essentially ensured identification of the dish with Switzerland.

As Raboud-Schüle also points out: fondue is not a fixed thing. People can and do come up with new recipes for it all the time. There are many specialty restaurants like Café d’Avusy in Avusy, Geneva, or Hostellerie Caux near Montreux, that serve all sorts of different fondues, the latter’s menu featuring two dozen. A cheese shop on Grenchen, canton Solothurn, offers 30 recipes for fondue on its website.

There is no such thing as ”the” definitive classic cheese fondue

In view of all this, it becomes pretty clear that it is nothing short of ridiculous to make claims for one or another recipe being the definitive Swiss traditional, classic or anything else fondue. But it is also true that Switzerland has developed a set of established basic fondues (with plenty of personal, family, and regional customs, variations and lore surrounding them) and that there is general agreement that the moitié-moitié - half Gruyère and half Vacherin Fribourgeois - is particularly popular.

Here are the most common basic fondues. Attributed to Geneva are cheese fondues with boletus mushrooms or morels. Valaisans like some crushed tomatoes in with their Gruyère and Emmental (sometimes raclette) cheese. In central and eastern Switzerland, recipes using cheeses like Appenzell, Sbrinz, Tilsit and Schabziger are favored. Gruyère and Emmentaler is the preferred cheese mix in Neuchâtel, while Vaud and Fribourg favor ‘single varietals’: in Vaud just Gruyère, in Fribourg just Vacherin Fribourgeois.

You will find people who tell you that adding any binder or thickener like cornstarch to fondue is a sacrilege. Others quibble at the addition of kirsch (cherry brandy), even wine. The list of do’s and don’ts - also as regards utensils, proper fondue manners and more - would probably stretch to the moon and back, and is only interesting for its value as lore but also because it’s fun to try lots of different recipes and versions thereof.

However: there are no absolutes. It’s a question of preferences and relatively recent traditions, not gospel truths, so the best policy with regard to claims about fondue is that they should mostly be taken with a very large grain of salt - just dig in, and enjoy.

The visual by JHG (Julien 29) is in the public domain.

Part II of this blog features an interview with fondue expert Isabelle Raboud-Schüle.