The Tastemakers (41 page)

I
had come to Tampa at the end of my journey around North America's food trend landscape for a single reason. It was not the city's famous Cubano sandwiches, a food that actually originated with Cuban immigrants here, or the all-American grills that dominated the landscape (including Hulk Hogan's Beach Club, conveniently located in my hotel). Over the past year I had observed items, people, and phenomena whose trends were at various stages of their evolution: the cupcake trend cresting, a chef whose influence was starting to spread, an apple that was just budding, food trucks on the cusp of great power. All of these trends were relatively recent, some were a few years old, others had begun just over a decade back, but none of them were what I would consider past their prime. I wanted to know what became of a food trend once it had passed to the other side.

All trends have a life cycle. The old ones must inevitably decline to clear space for the new ones. We had to stop worrying about fat so we could start worrying about carbs, had to fall out of love with whole wheat bread to truly embrace multigrain flaxseed chia-infused pasta. Bacon will always be a part of the American diet, but the future of bacon-flavored sexual lubricant is no more assured than the relationships born of its smoky aphrodisiac. In
this way food is no different from other trends, like fashion. I had come to Tampa to see the last stop for one of the most iconic food trends of the past century. This trend had started out with an elite audience of tastemakers, had spread through a media frenzy, grown into a phenomenon that defined that era's culture, and then dropped from fashion. It had enjoyed a brief resurgence, then flamed out once again, and it was now as far from being a current food trend as mutton, Jell-O molds, or hardtack biscuits. I had tracked this trend's history through archived articles, old cookbooks, and interviews with its few surviving, elderly tastemakers. Now I found myself before a half-empty strip mall in the Tampa suburbs, like an anthropologist standing at the foot of a temple in the jungle, ready to encounter the last tribe of American fondue enthusiasts and what they were doing with a food trend that has long since passed.

Ahh
fondue. If there exists a food trend that elicits stronger images and associations, I have yet to encounter it. Fondue—with its whiff of simplicity and exotic continentalism, overtures of romance and sex, and memories of rib-sticking comfort. Fondue brings to mind melted cheese and a basket of cubed bread, cauldrons of molten chocolate waiting for strawberries, the sizzle of hot oil frying a hunk of filet. Fondue is a conjurer of the past, a food trend that exists primarily in memory, often decades removed from the last time you ate it. You hear its name and picture ski lodges, a fog of stinky cheese, crackling fireplaces, shag carpets, and Burt Reynolds lying there, shirtless and with a long-stemmed fork in his hand. It is not only a cultural anachronism, but a symbol of all cultural anachronisms, of the fate of forgotten food trends, now no more relevant than tie-dyed T-shirts or lava lamps. Fondue is a punch line. Fondue is a pet rock.

I was born just as the last blue Sterno flame flickered out on the fondue trend. By the time I first encountered it on ski trips with my parents, it was already cocooned in nostalgia. Once a winter we would be vacationing in a resort like Aspen or Whistler and find ourselves in a restaurant with other families, sitting around a large round table as a giant pot of cheese that smelled like a musty basement bubbled in the center. The parents would eagerly dip their
bread cubes in the cheese, laughing about the fondue set wedding gifts languishing in their garages, of first dates at fondue parties and scrubbing hardened cheese from velour sofa cushions. The kids around the table would try one bite of the pungent fondue, wrinkle their noses, and eat plain bread cubes until our parents relented with an order of chicken fingers. Our reaction to chocolate fondue was another story, however. We would dunk anything we could in there—bananas, strawberries, marshmallows, napkins, sugar packets, spoons—to get at that sweet nectar. When I got a bit older we started a tradition at our weekend house of hosting a Christmas Eve cocktail party for all the other Jewish families we were friends with. We served shrimp cocktails, frozen Swedish meatballs, deli sandwiches, and chocolate fondue. One of my father's clients always sent a huge slab of chocolate as a Christmas gift, and this went into the fondue pot along with a few triangles of the oversized holiday Toblerone bars we bought at the supermarket. We had a small fondue set with a little enamel pot set over a tea light, accompanied by long-handled thin forks. One year my mother bought microwave-ready chocolate fondue, and it was so bad (an oily, runny, god-awful mess) that our Christmas fondue tradition died then and there. We went back to Chinese food after that.

Cheese fondue originated in Switzerland during the late nineteenth century as a simple peasant dish of melted hard cheeses, like emmenthal and gruyere, eaten with hunks of stale bread. Its ingredients were cheap, filling, and could be packed easily into a rucksack. The preparation couldn't have been simpler: all you needed was a pot, a fire, and possibly a dash of wine or brandy to improve the taste. Fondue became a staple of yodeling Swiss cow herders during winter months, though it soon came down from the mountain pastures to inns and taverns. The epicenter of fondue culture is Neuchâtel, a picturesque lakeside town in the hills of the Jura region, bordering France. Here is where the classic recipe of fondue Neuchâteloise emerged, with a mix of shredded emmenthal and gruyere cheeses, garlic, pepper and nutmeg, cornstarch (to keep the texture consistent), dry white wine, and a dash of kirsch, a clear cherry brandy. During my last year of high school I had several
friends who went to Neuchâtel on exchange for a semester. When they returned they all looked like puffed up Butterball versions of themselves. I asked my friend Mike why they had gained so much weight, and he answered with one word: fondue. They had been lured by the delicious siren of Neuchâtel, which cast its pungent spell from every bar, restaurant, and pub. That summer, back in Canada, Mike would go on covert fondue missions to Swiss restaurants around the city. I can still picture him sitting alone in the corner of one of these places, swirling bread around a fondue pot as oompah music played, happy as anything.

In Switzerland fondue eating developed its own subculture, which only increased the food's popularity. “It was mostly a dish served in the wintertime with young people,” recalled Erwin Herger, who grew up in Lucerne, Switzerland, in the 1930s and 1940s. “If you lost your bread in the pot, a girl had to kiss the boy to her left, and if a boy lost his, he had to buy the next bottle of wine. It was timeless. Everyone knew about fondue Neuchâteloise.” I was having lunch with Herger and his wife, Gerda, at a loud dockside fish restaurant in Melbourne, Florida, a seaside community on the Atlantic coast, where they had retired some years back. Herger, now eighty-four years old and somewhat hard of hearing, was one of the instrumental figures of the American fondue trend, thanks to the twenty years he spent at the helm of the Chalet Suisse's kitchen, the New York City restaurant that made fondue trendy. The Chalet Suisse had opened in the 1920s during prohibition on West 52nd Street in a narrow, low-ceilinged room with painted murals of the Alps on the back wall. The restaurant served traditional Swiss food, including cheese fondue, schnitzel, and other specialties. Recipes for fondue had appeared occasionally in American newspapers or cookbooks, often from well-traveled individuals who had been skiing in Switzerland, like Helen Evans Brown, who wrote in her 1950
Chafing Dish Book
(a WASP cookery classic) that “recipes for cheese fondue … are numerous and varied, but none can excel the classic one of Switzerland.”

In 1953 the Chalet Suisse's original owner sold the restaurant to Konrad Egli, a Swiss businessman who would become the patron
saint of fondue. Affectionately known as “The Boss” by his employees, Egli was a fondue purist in some ways. He instructed guests not to consume any cold drinks with their cheese fondue except white wine because it was believed the cheese would harden in the stomach, and he staunchly refused to serve fondue to pregnant women. Herger, who grew up working for his parents at their restaurants and inns in Switzerland, had arrived in New York in 1952 and began working at the Chalet Suisse shortly thereafter. Egli did a lot to promote cheese fondue in New York. In 1954 he arranged for Herger to demonstrate fondue with Steve Allan on the
Tonight Show
. Unfortunately, the power cut out before the segment began, so the cheese didn't melt properly, and Herger was forced to fake it on live TV.

During the summer of 1956 Egli was vacationing in Zurich when he encountered a new type of fondue that didn't involve cheese. It was called fondue Bourguignon, after the French wine region, and it involved cooking raw cubes of meat in a pot of hot oil at the table, then dipping them in sauces. Supposedly this was how French workers ate in the vineyards, and though the legend wasn't necessarily true, the name had a nice ring to it. “Let's try that!” Egli told Herger upon his return, and they quickly placed the item on the menu. They used beef tenderloin and set out small bowls of sauces that included chili, tartar, and béarnaise sauce as well as chopped onions and a mix of capers and chopped egg. “It became an instant success,” recalled Herger, who said the restaurant's business suddenly took off as the smell of smoking hot oil filled the small kitchen. “On a Saturday night seventy-five percent of the dishes going out of the kitchen were fondue Bourguignon,” said Herger, who was soon serving celebrity customers such as Elizabeth Montgomery and Ginger Rogers. The press came calling as well, from
Gourmet
magazine, the
New York Times
, the
Herald Tribune
, and
Time Life Books
, who solicited Herger's fondue recipes for their global cookbook collection. Seeing the Chalet Suisse's success, other restaurants in New York began copying the dish, and the American fondue trend began to bubble.

In 1961 Egli came back from Switzerland again, this time with something called fondue Oriental, a variation on Chinese hot pot
cooking, where thinly sliced meats were poached in broth. Herger created a plate with paper-thin slices of beef tenderloin, pork and veal loin, chicken breast, and even veal kidney. The broth was made from chicken stock, carrots, leeks, shitake mushrooms, and water chestnuts, and the dipping sauces included teriyaki and soy sauce. At the end of the meal the waiter would take the broth back to the kitchen, where noodles, sherry, shredded peapods, mushrooms, and onions were added to make a soup, which was served to guests with great ceremony. A similar seafood fondue, cooked in a fish broth, also appeared, with shrimps, sea scallops, Dover sole, and tuna. As interest in these new fondues spread, first through New York's dining public, then out to the small circle of gourmands, it finally reached the general American public through articles in the press. In 1962 the
New York Times Magazine
published an article on fondue, calling it “one of the most interesting developments in the field of food within recent years.”

For his coup de grâce, Egli turned his attention to dessert in 1964, developing a chocolate fondue at the request of the Swiss chocolate company Toblerone. The brand's American publicist, Beverly Allen, was looking for a way to sell more chocolate bars in America, and she approached Egli and Herger to help them create a recipe for dessert fondue that featured Toblerone as its base. Though there are claims that others invented chocolate fondue decades earlier, the Chalet Suisse version really caught the public's attention and blew the fondue trend through the roof. “We mixed Toblerone with heavy cream, and served it with fruits, ladyfingers, and our own profiteroles” said Herger, who had been astonished by how quickly it took off. Here was a fondue anyone could like. It wasn't complicated (like proper cheese fondue could be) or dangerous (like the Bourguignon or Oriental fondues), and most of the ingredients were readily available. Chocolate fondue became so popular, in fact, people began coming to the Chalet Suisse just for dessert. Toblerone even produced their own fondue kits, with ceramic bowls atop metal stands that held a candle as well as a recipe booklet featuring an adorable drawing of two smiling Toblerone triangles, sharing a chocolate fondue made from their cannibalized brethren.

Slowly fondue began creeping into homes. Select kitchen stores began importing enamel fondue pots and forks from Europe, especially those from modernist European brands like Dansk or Le Creuset, which became staple wedding gifts. Other American companies devised heat 'n' eat cheese fondue kits, with premixed cheese fondue in cans or other processed monstrosities that made fondue more accessible, if less authentic and tasty. Boston's cookware store the Pot Shop was an early importer of Swiss fondue sets and a supplier to noted cooks like Julia Child. In 1962 the Pot Shop's eccentric owner, Vincent Zarrilli, self-published
The Fondue Rule Book
, a fondue entertaining manual that stands as the fondue party's equivalent of the Port Huron Statement. Zarrilli laid out the rules for an evening of fondue, making the key distinction between a fondue dinner party and a fondue party, which is held later in the evening. A fondue party should host six to ten guests, selected for a variety of personalities, and all adults should hire babysitters for the night. Guests should avoid conversation touching on “divorce, domestics, domicile, dependents and disease,” and hosts should keep the wine glasses filled and chilled. Setting the proper mood for a fondue party was essential. “Your light bulbs should not be using all their kilowatts,” Zarrilli wrote, “but should be dimmed to the point where the actual firelight of the alcohol burner augmented by two candles casts only a degree of light sufficient to make friends out of strangers.” Men and women were to be seated alternatively. Fondue games could be played as the evening progressed. One involved transferring orange slices from chin to chin without the use of hands. On the subject of “Fondue Flirtations,” Zarrilli added that “something would be decidedly wrong if no fond glances were exchanged as the evening wore on.” As though to drive the point home, the manual predicted that fondue for two was a perfectly acceptable activity, although what you did after that was not included in the instructions.