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Fondue, Suisse
Heat in a saucepan one gill white wine. Cut into small, thin slices eight ounces very rich Swiss cheese and add it to the pan; season with a saltspoon cayenne pepper and a light saltspoon salt, adding a teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, then briskly stir with a wooden spoon until thoroughly melted. Break in a whole fresh egg, briskly and rapidly stirring for half minute. Have six freshly prepared and lightly buttered toasts ready. Place the toasts on six hot plates, then carefully divide the cheese evenly over the six toasts and serve.
N. B.--Always have the toast prepared before beginning to prepare the cheese and keep hot.
This is closer to Welsh rabbit than to the communal pot of fondue most people picture: a thick cheese sauce spooned over toast, not a dish you dip into. It comes together in about five minutes, so read the note at the end first.
- GillOne gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. Use a dry white with some acidity; a flabby wine gives a greasy, dull sauce.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A full quarter teaspoon of cayenne in 8 oz of cheese is assertive but deliberate; halve it if you want the cheese to lead.
- "Very rich Swiss cheese"Gruyere, or a mix of Gruyere and Emmental. Supermarket "Swiss cheese" sold in slices is too young and too bland to behave; buy a wedge and grate or shave it yourself.
- Heat is the hingeKeep the pan below a simmer throughout. Boiling wine and cheese drives the proteins together and the fat out, and you get a rubbery clot in a pool of oil. Low heat, constant motion with the wooden spoon.
- The eggIt is there as a binder and emulsifier, the job cornstarch does in a Swiss-style fondue. Have the pan off direct heat when it goes in and stir hard so it thickens rather than scrambles. Half a minute of stirring in hot cheese is brief cooking; use a pasteurized egg if you are serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg.
- WorcestershireAn Anglo-American addition rather than anything Swiss, and it brings savoury depth and salt of its own. Taste before adding the extra salt.
- ToastThe note is the most practical line in the recipe. The cheese sets fast and cannot wait; have thick-cut, well-toasted, buttered bread on warmed plates before the wine goes on the stove. Sturdy country bread holds up better than sandwich loaf.
- YieldEight ounces of cheese over six toasts makes a small first course or a savoury at the end of a meal, not a main dish. For supper, count on two or three servings.
"Fondue" is simply the past participle of the French fondre, to melt, and in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the word covered a much wider family of melted-cheese preparations than it does now, including baked cheese puddings and cheese-and-egg mixtures served on toast. What the recipe here describes is essentially that older, broader sense: a skillet of cheese loosened with wine, bound with egg, and portioned out rather than shared from a caquelon. The communal pot with long forks, thickened with cornstarch and scented with kirsch, was promoted heavily as a Swiss national dish from the 1930s onward, and it is that version, not this one, which now owns the name. The cayenne and Worcestershire sauce mark the recipe as belonging to the transatlantic hotel and restaurant kitchen of its day, where French technique met English bottled seasonings; the same seasonings turn up in period recipes for Welsh rabbit, which this dish closely resembles in everything but title.