Melted chocolate is better with company, which is the idea behind National Chocolate Fondue Day. Put a pot in the middle of the table with fruit and pastry to dip, and let the evening run long.
No founder, proclamation or establishing document for National Chocolate Fondue Day was located in the indexes checked. The earliest archived listing of the day dates from January 2010, and its clearest institutional footprint is commercial: The Melting Pot Restaurants built a national press release around the date in 2014.
In January 1937, three California newspapers ran a recipe headed Chocolate Fondue, and nobody dipped anything into it. It began with squares of unsweetened chocolate. National Chocolate Fondue Day belongs to a different dish that borrowed the name.
A Los Angeles paper in 1945 called a chocolate fondue a dessert you could stir up quickly. The phrase appears five times in that newspaper archive before 1964. It appears 118 times between 1960 and 1975.
What changed in between was not the chocolate. It was the pot: one vessel in the middle of the table, kept hot over a small flame, with everyone reaching in at once. That arrangement is what the day is actually about, and it has a sibling on the calendar, because National Cheese Fondue Day falls on April 11.
DEALS & OFFERS
National Chocolate Fondue Day ran on February 5. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
Fondue has changed its meaning before. The earliest known recipe for the modern form comes from a book published in Zurich in 1699. It was called Käss mit Wein zu kochen, cooking cheese with wine, and it told the reader to melt grated cheese into wine and dip bread into the result.
For most of the two centuries that followed, the name meant something else. The word reached print in a culinary context in 1735, in Vincent la Chapelle's Le Cuisinier moderne, attached to a dish of eggs and cheese. Brillat-Savarin settled the matter in 1834: cheese fondue, he wrote, "is nothing other than scrambled eggs with cheese."
Until the Second World War, fondue was unheard of in most of Switzerland. Outside the Romandy and Savoy areas, the Swiss National Museum says, the dish was virtually unknown. The cheese was there; the habit was not.
The Swiss Cheese Union changed that. It was established in late summer 1914 at the urging of the federal authorities, and it survived until 1999. After the Second World War it set out to turn the regional speciality into a "branded product" with a national slant.
What the campaign sold was the pot. Free tastings ran through the 1950s to introduce German-speaking Switzerland to a dish from the far end of the country, and a Swiss newsreel covered them in 1954.
Promoters sent cases of caquelons to ski clubs and to soldiers in the Swiss army. The line many people still remember came out of that push: Fondue isch guet und git e gueti Luune, fondue is good and creates a good mood.
Georges Esenwein created fondue bourguignonne in Lausanne in 1948, cooking beef in oil at the table. Switzerland's own account dates the general widening to the 1950s, when the word began to cover any food dipped into a hot liquid in a shared pot, chocolate included.
The commercial version of that idea landed in Florida. The first Melting Pot opened in Maitland in April 1975 with three things on the menu: Swiss cheese fondue, beef fondue, and a chocolate fondue dessert. The dessert was there from the first service.
The day itself has no such paper trail. No founder, proclamation or establishing document turned up in the indexes checked, and the earliest archived listing of it dates from January 2010.
TIMELINE
GOOD TO KNOW
The long-stemmed forks usually carry a coloured dot on the handle, so that everyone reaching into one pot can tell which fork is theirs.
Fat bloom shows up as cocoa butter's sixth crystal form at the surface, where heat makes the polymorphs separate and recrystallise. Sugar bloom is moisture dissolving sugar and recrystallising there, and a drop of water left on the surface for two minutes tells them apart.
One team produced it by leaving a milk chocolate bar in air of 23 to 29 degrees Celsius for seven days. That sixth crystal form melts at 36 degrees and reads as large and gritty on the tongue.
Held at the right heat to the end, a cheese fondue leaves a thin crust of toasted cheese in the pot. It is called la religieuse, it has the texture of a waxy cracker, and it is lifted out with a spatula and eaten.
Cocoa butter forms the continuous phase in a bar, the network that holds every other ingredient in place. Fat content usually runs between 25 and 35 percent.
What could be more romantic than cozying up to your sweetheart around a fondue pot and feeding each other luscious, chocolate fondue-covered strawberries?
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
Six crystal forms, and chocolate makers chase the fifth.
Cocoa butter has six crystal forms, and the fifth is the one that gives a bar its gloss, its snap and its resistance to bloom. Makers reach it by melting chocolate all the way up to 50 degrees Celsius and then cooling and reheating it through three further stages.
It will not move until a push passes its yield stress, and heat lowers how big that push has to be. A 2021 study measured five kinds, extra dark through ruby, between 36 and 44 degrees Celsius.
The paper trail fondue leaves in the US Federal Register is about hardware rather than any observance. A 1996 scope ruling put a ten-piece porcelain-on-steel fondue set inside an antidumping order on Taiwanese cookware, and a 2019 USDA rule defines a biobased category of heating fuels partly by their use in fondue pots.
GOOD TO KNOW
the half-and-half, made from Gruyere and Vacherin, both carrying the AOP mark, lifted with a pinch of cayenne pepper
losing your bread in the pot carries a forfeit, and it is local rather than fixed: the dishes, a song, or the next bottle of wine
fondue is popular across the border too, though most of the earliest recipes specify Gruyere, which is why the Swiss get the credit
the day's most visible keeper is a restaurant chain built on the format, which lists 96 restaurants in the United States and one in Edmonton, Alberta
GET INVOLVED
EDITOR'S PICK
MARK
AGREE
START
READ
Test your knowledge
No. It is an unofficial observance, so it is a normal working day, and the Federal Register carries no document naming it.
COLOPHON
Get ready to dip, swirl, and savor on National Cheese Fondue Day! Indulge in this delicious treat with your loved ones and create unforgettable memories.
Celebrate National Chocolate Covered Anything Day with your favorite treats - from strawberries to almonds, there's something for everyone!
Indulge in delicious chocolate bliss this National Choose Your Chocolate Day - make it special with unique flavors and treats!
