Fondue without wine was what I wanted when I began my fondue recipe hunt in the 1980s.. And I found several, but the one we all decided was the tastiest was from the More With Less Cookbook put out by the Mennonites. It is a wonderful cookbook, and has served us well all these years in China, when we had to do a lot of substitutions or figure out just how we could make it even if we were missing a lot of ingredients. We didn’t have good wine in China in the 1980s. These were a few of the things we didn’t have:
Cola
MacDonalds
butter
good ice cream
good beef
broccoli
One word on the More-With-Less Cookbook – its subtitle is “suggestions by Mennonites on how to eat better and consume less of the world’s limited food resources.
Here is the recipe.
Ingredients
2 Tablespoons butter
3 Tablespoons Flour
2 and 1/2 cups milk
1 pound grated Swiss cheese – we use half Emmenthaler, half “regular” swiss, or if the packages of cheese are only 200 grams, we add 50 grams of something else – last night we used Kerrygold’s Blarney Castle, reminiscent of a muenster cheese in the US.
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon grated nutmeg
Directions:
Put
2 Tablespoons Butter in a big frying pan and melt it. Turn the heat off.
Add 3 Tablespoons flour. If the flour is very dry, add more butter. I think I did this time.
Stir it around for a while and make sure it is very well mixed.
Then add 2 and 1/2 cups milk, but don’t turn the heat on until it is all blended and there are no lumps.
Stir while the white sauce is heating, until it boils and thickens.
Then add
1 pound GRATED cheese
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon grated nutmeg.
and stir well until the cheese is all melted and the sauce is hot.
Pour the sauce into a double boiler with boiling water underneath to keep the fondue hot while it is on the table.
We heat our bowls with boiling water so the fondue doesn’t cool too fast, and put in a few big spoons of fondue into each individual bowl. That way the fondue stays warm in the covered pot, and you can take more spoons as needed. This year we had Rolls from the SS France, 2-3 each, as our bread for the fondue. Yum. It was the perfect amount for 4 people.