Cheese fondue Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Cheese fondue is a dish in which hard Alpine cheeses such as Gruyere are heated with white wine until they emulsify, melted smooth in a single shared pot, and eaten with bread dipped into it. Widely known as a signature Swiss dish, it is a fixture at mountain chalets and in tourist towns.

The ingredients are all obtainable around the Alps—hard cheese, white wine, and wheat bread are enough to make it. The heart of the dish lies in the skill of melting the cheese smoothly in white wine without letting it separate, and setting it out as a shared pot.

Its first appearance in writing is a dish called "cooking cheese in wine," in a cookbook printed in Zurich in 1699. The dish is traced to the French-speaking west, and to lowland city dwellers rather than the mountains. By the nineteenth century a modern recipe had taken shape, and as early as 1875 it was being presented as a "Swiss national dish." What began as a household pot spread in time to restaurants and to tourism.

Fondue carries a beloved image: a humble traditional food that Alpine peasants have eaten for centuries. It is a story bound to mountain life, the flavor of the countryside.

That premise, however, does not hold. Hard cheeses like Gruyere were an expensive export product, slow to reach the rural poor and urban laborers well into the early twentieth century. The 1699 Zurich cookbook in which the dish first appears depicts not a mountain village but the table of lowland city dwellers. The starting point of a humble peasant tradition is itself an image arranged after the fact. The ethnologist Isabelle Raboud-Schule, former director of the Musee gruerien, has said that until around 1930 fondue was known only in the French-speaking region.

Its standing as a "Swiss national dish" is likewise a modern product. From the 1930s onward, the Swiss Cheese Union (Schweizerische Kaseunion) heavily promoted fondue as a national dish in order to move surplus domestic cheese. Through a showing at the 1939 New York World's Fair and distribution to the army, fondue was raised into a symbol of national unity, and plausible-looking country recipes were even devised for it. This course of events is told alike by public records—the official blog of the Swiss National Museum and the Swiss federal foreign ministry's official site (aboutswitzerland)—and by American reporting (NPR's Planet Money, "The Fondue Conspiracy"). The age of the dish as a category is not denied, but the "ancient Swiss national dish fondue" now imagined is a tradition made up after the fact, built by twentieth-century marketing. It was originally a dish of lowland city dwellers, and the picture of an ancient Alpine peasant food is one that twentieth-century promotion spread only later.