Fondue Party

Fondue Party

What better way to kick things off than with a Fondue Party? My friend Bryan and I are trying to start a kind of gourmet club, and our first foray was a delicious homage to gourmets past with a fondue party straight out of the seventies, vintage fondue-pots and all. My parents had a long history of Gourmet, with a capital G. Back in the day, they got together with their fellow newly-well-to-do middle class friends and had swinging (not that way) dinner parties with silly themes. One of my first memories is being given the honor of opening the front door to guests and greeting them in my tiny liederhosen for a German food party way back in what must have been 1983 or so.

I've always loved anything themed, and, of course, food, so this Gourmet club has always been something I admired about my parents, and I love the idea of resurrecting it. I feel like every dinner or cocktail party I've ever had has been imagined in the shadow of these early memories of themed food and fellowship. I've had movie themed cocktail parties, and cuisine themed, and season themed, whatever I can find to theme it up, really, and a Fondue Party is just such a classic. I borrowed my parents' supercute mushroom-emblemed and brightly-hued fondue pots and forks and we had a cheese-filled night to remember.

Fondue night is definitely not for the lactose-intolerant. Bryan made some delicious canapés- bruschetta with tender heirloom tomatoes and mushroom quiches, and Monica rounded out the evening with her amazing chocolate fountain accompanied by marshmallows, green apple slices and strawberries. If you haven't expienced the chocolate fountain, you haven't lived. The satiny sheen of creamy chocolate cascading in an endless bounty of indulgence is simply mesmerizing, even to someone who is not a total chocoholic.

But I have to admit, even as I was entranced by the zen of the chocolate fountain, my heart truly lies in a rich bubbly cauldren of cheese. I have tunnel vision where cheese is involved, and it is all I care about. I live in Texas, and even though queso is de rigeur for most occasions, I think of fondue as something different, something special. My family actually has gotten into the habit of having fondue at Christmas, it is our go-to special meal. When I lived in France, I actually only had fondue a couple of times, most memorably on my 21st birthday. My roommate Sarah and I indulged in something entirely different to my American tastebuds- Raclette. They brought out a glistening hunk of it to our table where it was slowly melted by a sort of hot plate, and we sliced off melty slabs of it and layed it on small plates of fingerling potatoes and vegetables.

For the party, I wanted to create the traditional fondue experience and then something a little different, so I made two different pots of goodness- one was sort of Breton inspired, with gruyere melted in cider and a little apple cider vinegar, and the other was pure decadence, but so simple to make.

I bought a generous wedge of a double creme mild brie and two smaller wedges of danish blue that I could tell were very soft and smushy at room temperature, to match the consistency of the brie. I waited until after the first fondue was mostly consumed at the party to make the second, because I knew it would take only moments to melt the second one, and I like bringing out a kind of surprise second course at a cocktail party after everyone has arrived and taken the edge off with a few munchies and drinks. Just heat up some white wine in a deep sauce pan, and stir in hunks of your creamy cheeses while they slowly melt up, and voila, a rich velvety fondue is born. This one goes extremely well with the green apples, since it is so rich it is nice to cut it with the crisp tartness of the fruit. Both fondues are well served with chunks of baguette, steamed asparagus and broccoli, fingerling potatoes, and especially with this amazing dense moist multi-grain bread found at Whole Foods called Seduction Bread. It is full of millet and sunflower and other wonderful seeds and really lives up to its name. It was an all-around favorite at the party.

The night eventually devolved into a compulsion to dip everything in the table in cheese- strawberries, whole bruschetta, marshmallows- but this kind of debauchery is only to be expected. People love cheese.