Much has been made of fondue's connection to the 1960s, and with good reason. There's a song from the decade that goes: "I think it's so groovy now that people are finally getting together," and I had these lyrics stuck in my head for most of 2021—a time when our stressed-out society was just starting to tilt back toward groovy gathering. This was also the prevailing vibe in the post-war years, when an Alpine restaurant at the 1964 World's Fair Swiss Pavilion introduced newly swingin' Americans to the time-honored art of communal melted cheese.
People had been liquefying excess Gruyére in a bath of oxidized wine and mopping it up with day-old bread in the Alps for centuries, but the practice had never jumped the pond. When it finally did, the table was set for it: decor was Danish, key parties were a thing, and suddenly you couldn't do anything cooler than dunk cubed food into enamelware pots in creamy shades of butter yellow, milk-chocolate brown, and avocado green.
