Settle in for a night of piping hot potatoes and gooey cheesy goodness with one of Australia’s most revered foodies.
Let’s set the scene: it’s a blustery winter evening, and you’re surrounded by your closest friends – the ones who don’t judge you for wearing trackies to a dinner party. You have a glass of wine in one hand and a biscuit smeared with cheese in the other. But what if we’ve been doing it all wrong? What if the perfect vehicle for cheese wasn’t a cracker but a humble potato?
Enter raclette. Both a cheese and a meal served with cheese, this Swiss dish finds its origins in the Alps, where shepherds would arrive home after a day in the mountains to a mountain of piping hot potatoes and gooey goodness. According to Pat Nourse, the creative director of the brilliant Melbourne Food & Wine Festival and one of Australia's most respected food personalities, a night of alpine joy might be what’s missing from our winter dinner party repertoire.
“Basically, we’re talking melted cheese and potatoes,” Pat says. “This is a dish that has been around for 900 years, but unless you’ve been to the Alps, it’s something most people in Australia are unlikely to have tried before – it’s a hoot!” Pat’s girlfriend, Helena Rosebery, is Swiss-Australian, and her mother Ruth hails from the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Both women rate this meal among their family favourites.
“Back in the day, you’d take a whole wheel of raclette – a cow’s milk alpine cheese – and position the cut side facing an open fire. Once the exposed part of the cheese melted, you’d scrape that melty goodness onto a guest’s plate, and they’d eat it with boiled potatoes and pickles.”
Pat, a former editor and restaurant critic at Gourmet Traveller, has a knack for seeking out good things – food, drinks, places, and people – and sharing them with the world. Even his raclette grill, which he has nicknamed ‘Avec’, comes served with an anecdote. “We found ours on the side of the road in Rae Street, North Fitzroy [Melbourne]. It has a European plug and the 1980s Swiss department store receipt was in the box.”
And while you don’t need expert culinary skills to melt cheese, Pat suggests a raclette night must cook up a communal, cosy and convivial dining experience to succeed. “Any dinner that involves some interaction at the table is a good time,” he says. “With raclette, you can make much of it ahead and then cook together, so you can spend time with your people. Your guests are there to see you, not your food.”
So, grab your spuds and snuggle up with your nearest and dearest as Pat indulges us with some cheesy bliss and invaluable intel on Australia’s hottest wines and spirits.
Let’s plan a cheesy raclette night
- Q.Who’s coming?
“Me, Helena and our new puppy, Raisin, will all be there, and friends – it’s always good to make some converts.”
- Q.The guest brief?
“Eat a breakfast and lunch rich in dietary fibre. Be highly tolerant of lactose.”
- Q.Drink on arrival?
“Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends. I think Egly-Ouriet was the first Champagne I saw in Australia a few years back that opened my eyes to the world of options beyond the big names. The Les Vignes De Vrigny Premier Cru is perfectly delicious, a great aperitif, and the pop of a cork is like a starter’s gun for good times.”
- Q.The pre-dinner mingle?
“Charcuterie and Champagne, plus a bit of local beer action with Sidewinder Hazy Pale Ale if there are any takers for extremely attractive, low-alc cans. And maybe a splash of Marionette’s Bitter Curacao Liqueur on the rocks if we’re feeling fancy. Everything those guys make is delicious.”
- Q.The main event?
“Raclette is cooked and eaten at the table, with some delicious wine, plus hot boiled potatoes, pickles and sausages. Most people these days use a tabletop griller rather than an open fire. Everyone gets a little metal pan about the size of a playing card: you stick the cheese in the pan, slide it under the grill, and scrape it onto your plate when it’s melty goodness. We serve cornichons, the little pickled cucumbers, on the side, plus little franks called cervelat and usually put on a spread of the Swissest cured meats we can find as a sort of entree. Allow me to recommend anything made by Salt Kitchen out near Ballarat.”
- Q.Drinks with dinner?
“If you’re partaking in alcohol, the trad thing is a Swiss white wine called Fendent, made from a grape called chasselas. Like most Swiss wines, it’s close to impossible to get outside Switzerland, so you could look at something from the Savoie in the French Alps, just over the border, or a white Burgundy, a Beaujolais or a Rhône. I’m lucky enough to live in Victoria, where there are locally grown grapes from those regions – chardonnay, gamay, roussanne, marsanne and shiraz make a fine addition to the table. I think the Crawford River Young Vines Riesling is insanely good value and you should order it wherever you see it – see also rieslings by Mac Forbes – and there’s some really exceptional and elegant chardonnay made here, Savaterre Chardonnay being a particularly delicious example.
“There’s a lot of fat on the table, so you don’t want to go super dry or too heavy on the tannin, so a full-bodied white wine or a lighter red is the go. A fun twist might be a yellow wine from, or in the style of, the vin jaune from Jura, another mountainous French region bordering Switzerland. It tastes like a dry sherry, only without as high an ABV.
Schnapps is the other key accompaniment. The Swiss like to drink a shot in the middle of the meal to aid digestion. Again, Swiss fruit schnapps can be hard to find outside of Switzerland, and liqueurs aren’t a substitute here; save the peppermint and caramel numbers for après-ski and grab another good eau de vie instead; Poire Williams, the brandy made from grapes, would be delicious, as would a good Calvados, a slivovitz or maybe even a grappa.
“Don’t drink chilled water. The Swiss think the cheese will set in your stomach if you drink anything cold. This is not to say you need to drink alcohol; black or herbal tea is fine – just make sure it’s hot.”
- Q.The decor?
“We’ve nicknamed our house The Chalet because it’s old, small, made of wood, on a hill – or at least, Clifton Hill – and has a Swiss-ish woman living in it. It’s loaded with books, bottles, records and plants. The raclette grill takes up most of the table and is the centre of the action. We usually put the potatoes in a bowl and cover them with tea towels to keep them warm. My favourite store is hard rubbish day.”
- Q.Any dessert surprises?
“The first time I was invited over for raclette at Helena’s mum and dad’s place, they packed us up little bags of psyllium husk as a takeaway. That was definitely a first. Very practical people, not at all afraid of being frank about the effects of the meal on your digestive system. At our place, we always like to close a meal with new-season Victorian walnuts in the shell. Cracking them and comparing relative hand strength being all part of the fun.”
Notable mentions
- Q.Go-to drink order?
“I like a Martini garnished with a Gilda. Or, failing that, a Gibson, which is basically a gin Martini garnished with two cocktail onions. Mezcal neat is almost always a good idea. If you’re looking for something darker and more wintery, check out The Gospel. Victoria produces truly great Scotch-style whisky, but the rye is a less well-known winner.”
- Q.The drink you should always have in the fridge?
“Champagne. Celebration might strike at any time. It’s also not a bad idea to have some batched-up Martinis (and possibly even Manhattans or Sazeracs made with The Gospel) in the freezer ready to go.”
- Q.What kind of home entertainer are you?
“Enthusiastic. I love cooking for people. I like ‘more is more’, which is somewhat at odds with the modest size of our dining table. Always candles. Good beeswax is a good time.”
- Q.What makes a great event?
“Turn the lights down and the music up. Indirect lighting and a good playlist make it a party, even if you’re just ordering pizza.”
- Q.Set-the-mood music?
“Did you know your favourite restaurant or bar probably has its playlists on Spotify? When in doubt, put on A Night at Gerald’s Bar. If you want some Swiss flavour, check out the Radiooooo app. You choose a place on the map and then dial in your decade of choice, and it gives you the tunes. Swiss hits of the 1970s, here we come.”
- Q.Favourite winter pairing?
“Roast chicken with red wine is an underappreciated art form. As is stout and oysters. Caviar and sake, if someone else is buying. Consommé and Madeira. Peated whisky and washed-rind cheese will ring your bells if you haven’t tried it before. And I love that French country tradition of splashing a little of the wine you’re drinking into the end of your bowl of soup or stew to mop up with bread.”
- Q.Most memorable dining experiences?
“I have had a pretty excellent time at places like El Bulli, Noma, The Fat Duck, Septime, The French Laundry and Momofuku Ssäm Bar in their day. Still, the very best things are almost always unplanned: sharing a bite of lunch with a gaucho in Patagonia, having lunch made by the mayor of a Muslim fishing village in the islands off Phuket, grabbing some ta’ameya down a laneway in Luxor, or suckling pig tacos at 2am in Oaxaca. Eating seafood cooked on a fire near the sea is hard to beat pretty much anywhere in the world. And then there was that time I drank a drink garnished with an amputated human toe in the Yukon.”
