Fondue: Wednesday food word
The word fondue comes from the French verb “to melt.” It started to gain popular use in English in the early 1900s — about the same time that a Swiss dairy association started having its way with it.
The dish, of course, is a classic: dunking morsels of food into molten hot cheese, oil or chocolate.
The original cheese fondue was an early 20th-century marketing scheme concocted by a Swiss-cheese trade association who connived to make it a national dish and promoted only a few Swiss cheeses from the hundreds made in the country. It was the same with raclette.
Thanks to the now-defunct Swiss cheese cabal, a regional dish of fondue became a highly marketable, but ultimately contrived, national one.
It’s one reason fondue became extremely popular, but nonetheless delicious, in North America in the 1960s.
For more about a local fondue, please see my Waterloo Chronicle column this Friday.
