Fondue Set
notes: label: Description
content: The fondue pot came from an American History staff member, who told curators of this very distinctly Americanized and democratized communal association with fondue and this pot.
label: Description
content: “Three of my brothers played high school football in Phillipsburg N.J. during the early 70’s and our family would regularly get together with three other families who also had sons playing football. The families (totaling 20 or so) would all get together after the Friday night football games for refreshments. . . fondue being one of the menu items. . . We also used the fondue pot when we got together with our grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.”
label: Description
content: In the mid-1950’s, a Swiss/French dish (known in Switzerland since at least the early 18th century) called “fondue” came to be so popular in the United States that restaurants specializing in fondue opened in New York and other cities. Home fondue sets, with pots for cooking over a flame, and complete with their many forks for the communal dipping into the pots, came to be all the rage in the 1960’s. Kitchenware stores sold “fondue party kits” and commercial manufacturers, such as the American housewares manufacturer Dansk, made popular models like this one. Home cooks expanded on the recipes they had seen on Julia Child’s show, “The French Chef,” and cooked with recipe books that came with their newly acquired pots. What seemed like the end of the fondue fad in the seventies yielded several returns of the fad, in the 1990s and again since 2010.
label: Description
content: In the 1970’s, the chesses common to fondue, such as Neufchatel (for fondue neufchateloise), Gruyere, Appenzeller, and Emmenthaler were more common in American groceries, and the common mix of white wine, cheese, kirsch, and cornstarch into which people dipped their French bread, in the United States, added even more common dipping ingredients of meats (for fondue bourguignonne) and vegetables for the cheese, and fruits to be dipped in chocolate.
setName: label: See more items in
content: Home and Community Life: Domestic Life
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content: Food
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content: FOOD: Transforming the American Table 1950-2000
label: Exhibition
content: Food: Transforming the American Table
label: Exhibition Location
content: National Museum of American History
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 2011.0151.01
label: catalog number
content: 2011.0151.01
label: accession number
content: 2011.0151
objectType: label: Object Name
content: fondue set