Sapsago Swiss Fondue
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
½ teaspoon salt
1½ cups milk
2½ cups shredded Swiss cheese
2½ tablespoons grated Sapsago
½ cup dry white wine
Pepper, black and red, freshly ground
Fingers of toast
Over boiling water stir the first four ingredients into a smooth, fairly thick cream sauce. Then stir in Swiss cheese until well melted. After that add the Sapsago, finely grated, and wine in small splashes. Stir steadily, in one direction only, until velvety. Season sharply with the contrasting peppers and serve over fingers of toast.
This is also nice when served bubbling in individual, preheated pastry shells, casseroles or ramekins, although this way most of the fun of the dunking party is left out. To make up for it, however, cooked slices of mushrooms are sometimes added.
At the Cheese Cellar in the New York World's Fair Swiss Pavilion, where a continual dunking party was in progress, thousands of amateurs learned such basic things as not to overcook the Fondue lest it become stringy, and the protocol of dunking in turn and keeping the mass in continual motion until the next on the Fondue line dips in his cube of bread. The success of the dish depends on making it quickly, keeping it gently a-bubble and never letting it stand still for a split second.
The Swiss, who consume three or four times as much cheese per capita as we, and almost twice as much as the French, are willing to share Fondue honors with the French Alpine province of Savoy, a natural cheese cellar with almost two dozen distinctive types of its very own, such as Fat cheese, also called Death's Head; La Grande Bornand, a luscious half-dried sheep's milker; Chevrotins, small, dry goat milk cheeses; and Le Vacherin. The latter, made in both Savoy and Switzerland, boasts two interesting variants:
1. Vacherin Fondue or Spiced Fondue: Made about the same as Emmentaler, ripened to sharp age, and then melted, spices added and the cheese re-formed. It is also called Spiced Fondue and sells for about two dollars a pound. Named Fondue from being melted, though it's really recooked,
2. Vacherin à la Main: This is a curiosity in cheeses, resembling a cold, uncooked Fondue. Made of cow's milk, it is round, a foot in diameter and half a foot high. It is salted and aged until the rind is hard and the inside more runny than the ripest Camembert, so it can be eaten with a spoon (like the cooked Fondue) as well as spread on bread. The local name for it is Tome de Montagne.
Here is a good assortment of Fondues:
