Go to Dinner for Guests spin off - Fondue!

Fondue Bacchus - every Christmas. It's SO SO SO easy!!

I get top round or NY Strip (1/2 lb/person) and cut into cubes. Red wine with garlic and onion (both cut - not the spice) in the red wine.

Then you can make the sauces - I make a mustard based one and a ketchup based one. The real ones are so delicious that I am now disgusted by mine. This year I will be alone with my pescatarian so no fondue Bacchus for me (cheese is too heavy on Christmas for me). I make at least 3 different kinds of salads - carrot, endive and green - to go with the meal and freshly baked bread. Since it is my girls' birthday I make them each their kind of cake - usually ice cream and truffle and we collapse from the rich food.

Best day ever!

ETA: I simply cannot think about this year alone with my atheist child who feels that celebrating Christmas is lying and doesn't have a lot of joy in his heart. I hope my girls will be able to be together. One is in Switzerland and there is a lot of family there and the other will be in the UK. She should be able to fly over, I hope. 

I highly recommend an electric fondue pot. Easy to clean and no fuel to deal with or run out of. Just plug in and set your temperature. I got mine from walmart and they are relatively inexpensive. I paid $30 CDN. Goodwill or any store of that type is a great place to get plates, forks etc. Mix n match.

I don't know where the idea came from, but when I think of fondue, I think of Swedish Meatballs served over mashed potatoes and coleslaw. My mom use to serve these when serving cheese fondue. Now I'm going to be craving fondue! Yummy.

We love cheese fondue! We have it every Christmas Eve and we've started having it at the beach (each family takes turns making dinner). We usually have bread (of course), hot dogs and shrimp with it. 


Really Red, I'm curious about why cheese fondue in a metal pot is disgusting. I didn't know it was a no-no. I have 4 pots - a mixture of ceramic and metal - and haven't noticed a difference.

when I was a kid, we used to have (meat) Fondue every NYE.

I haven't eaten meat in over 37 years , but I still love a good cheese fondue.
We use a metal pot, and have never had any issues.

We're happy with just the melted cheese (whatever we have on hand) and baguette bread.

I’ve done fondue dinners a few times. DD even had a fondue birthday party one year.

For the cheese pot, I do:
Sausage slices, browned in a skillet
Beef cubes
Bread
Broccoli florets, steamed

For the chocolate pot:
Pound cake, cubed
Marshmallows
Apple slices
Graham crackers
Strawberries

I can't find my fondue pot (got put in storage when we moved) and we wanted to do fondue this summer so I made the cheese sauce on the stove and then put it in a crock pot water bath.

Put a few inches of water in the bottom of my crock pot and set a ceramic dish with the cheese sauce inside. Most crock pots have very short cords so I had to use a heavy duty extension cord, Hut all in all, it kept the cheese warm without burning.

One of those little Crock Pot dip warmers might work well for cheese or chocolate fondue.

I used to have a set of fondue plates with little divided sections and would make or buy lots of different sauces. Fondue parties were a lot of fun. Sometimes we would play with modified silly rules, like if someone’s meat or bread falls off their fork they have to kiss the person on their left, or whatever goofy thing we came up with. I think the rule from the 70s is the woman has to kiss all the men and the men have to buy a round of drinks...come to think of it, these rules probably started at swingers parties 😄

Because it's what I've been told since I was a kid  But really it is because ceramic distributes heat better and doesn't cause burning or hot spots in the cheese fondue. Metal CAN convey a taste to sensitive people (I have a sensitive palate that way), but not everyone notices. I'd like to think a sensitive Swiss palate does and probably all the people in my Swiss FB group would be as picky as I and agree with me, but most people probably won't notice taste-wise. Hot spots, yes, taste probably no. 

But the pure and exotic beauty of a Swiss fondue belongs in a ceramic pot. 

We've been having dessert fondue, on Christmas Eve, for years. Everyone lives it!

I'm thinking Santa, the most secular icon of all, would disagree. Besides, I think most scholars have come to a consensus that Jesus was more likely born sometime in the spring, so everyone is lying.

My first thought when I saw this thread was, "You'd have to be super insistent that there would be NO double dipping," especially in the age of COVID.  But yes, the etiquette is that you not eat from the actual fondue skewer -- you dip with the skewer and then place the food on your plate and eat it with your own personal utensils.  

You could also get around this by buying a ton of the fondue skewers/fork at Goodwill and asking people to choose a new skewer each time they dip, but that obviously wouldn't work for a large group.  

My ridiculous, germaphobic fear of fondue arises mostly when kids are involved.  Just not worth it to me to have them sharing their little wintertime cooties by double/triple/quadruple dipping.