Why fondue pots are the perfect addition to your family dinner or parties with flatmates

Fondue pots may initially make you think of naff '70s dinner parties and cheesy (sorry) parlour games, but they're making a major come-back.

It's no surprise - with 2020 leaving us having to cook most of our meals at home, and opportunities for fun fewer on the ground, fondue allows the opportunity to make an easily assembled dinner that's delicious - while also enjoying the theatre of dunking and twisting long forks in melted goodness.

For those missing the ski slopes, too, it's a great way of creating the experience of après ski - put the pot on, bubble up some cheese - then just add a glass of chilled wine and a cosy woollen sweater.

The History of Fondue

Think of fondue, and chances are you'll think of it's Swiss heritage: tales of how peasants in the Swiss mountains created it as a means of using up stale cheese and bread and staving off a bitter winter.

However, it has a far more storied (and surprisingly balmy) past than that. First mention of it shows up in Homer's Iliad - in Song XI, he sings of a melted mixture of wine, grated goat's cheese, and flour. That's the rudimentary fondue recipe, simply missing the forks and the pot.

For that, we can credit the Swiss, when modern fondue - melted cheese cooked in a pot over an open flame - was first recorded as being cooked in Switzerland's Canto de Neuchatel. The pot is known as a "caquelon."

It was created out of necessity: stale cheese was too hard to eat, as was bread. But melt the cheese mixed with wine over a fire - edible! and delicious. And the rock-hard bread - suddenly yielding in the cheese. The term 'fondue' is a derivation of the French word fondre - to melt.

From humble beginnings, then, fondue has developed into a culinary triumph. You can indulge in fondue bourguignonne - whereby cubed, raw beef is submerged into a caquelon full of boiling oil (not for kids, this one!), cooking near-instantly.

Or, for the sweet-toothed, a chocolate fondue. Dunking marshmallows or cubed fruit into rich melted chocolate - it's dessert as it should be. We've indulged in a salted caramel fondue ourselves, and this is not recommended for confectionery amateurs - it's a serious sugar load (glorious, though).

Tips for fondue preparation: the fondues and fondont's