No. 2954

Fondue with Piedmontese Truffles

Fondue aux Truffes du Piemont

Take a pound of soft, fresh Swiss cheese and cut it up into quarter-inch squares. Break twelve egg-yolks in a bowl with two tablespoonfuls of flour; mix well together and dilute with a pint of cream, then strain through a sieve. Put the cheese into a saucepan on a slow fire with two tablespoonfuls of milk, stir it about with a spoon until it no longer forms into strings, then pour in the prepared yolks. Heat all on the fire, stirring with a spoon until it assumes the consistency of a cream (but it must not boil), then add a little butter and peeled and finely minced Piedmontese truffles. Pour the whole into a deep dish and dredge the top with finely chopped truffles.

← No. 2953 Fedelini Vermicellini au Cardinal Macaroni, Rice & Farinaceous No. 2955 Gnocquis →

For the Modern Kitchen

A stirred cheese custard rather than a dipping fondue, and it lives or dies on temperature control. Read the two notes on heat before you start.

Never let it boilTwelve yolks in a pint of cream is a custard, and the flour only buys you a little insurance. Work over a bain-marie or the lowest possible flame and pull it off between 170 and 180F, when it coats the spoon; past that the yolks scramble and the cheese weeps fat.
Melt the cheese first, aloneThe instruction to stir "until it no longer forms into strings" is the whole trick. Cheese must be fully broken down and smooth in the two spoonfuls of milk before the egg mixture goes in, because once the yolks are added you no longer have the heat available to fix a stringy pot.
"Soft, fresh Swiss cheese"Not the dry aged Emmental of a supermarket rind. The phrase most likely points to a young, high-moisture mountain cheese; a young Fontina Val d'Aosta, raclette, or a very young Gruyere melts to much the same texture. Grate or dice small either way.
A pintRanhofer was cooking in New York, so a pint is 16 fl oz, 2 cups. Two tablespoons of flour thickens this only slightly.
Piedmontese trufflesMost likely white Alba truffles, Tuber magnatum Pico, in season roughly October to December and priced by the gram today. Their aroma is volatile and heat dulls it, so add them at the very last moment, off or nearly off the heat, as the recipe does. Preserved truffle in a jar or truffle butter is the usual substitute; truffle oil is a different flavor and should be used with restraint.
"Peeled"White truffles are normally brushed clean rather than peeled; peeling was more usually applied to black truffles, and it is not clear which Ranhofer had in hand. Brush clean and leave the skin, which carries much of the aroma.
Yield and serviceA pound of cheese, a pint of cream and a dozen yolks should serve roughly eight to ten as a first course. The recipe says only to pour it into a deep dish and dredge the top with chopped truffle; serve it at once, as it will not hold or reheat.

A Little History

In nineteenth-century French kitchen language a fondue was any preparation of melted cheese, from fondre, to melt, with no implication of a communal pot and long forks; the communal version is often said to be a twentieth-century Swiss promotion, though the record is less than certain. What Charles Ranhofer sets down here in The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of his decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, is much closer to the Piedmontese fonduta, a custard of young mountain cheese bound with egg yolks and finished with shaved white truffle, than to anything Swiss, despite the cheese he calls for. The dish belongs to a class of egg-and-cheese preparations that Brillat-Savarin and his successors also wrote about. Its appearance on a Delmonico's list at least shows that a chef in 1890s Manhattan could build a course around shaved white truffle.