The French love melted cheese

French version of Welsh rarebitI’ve been in the north of France this week and I’ve noticed something about French food. Yes, it’s acclaimed as carefully crafted cuisine, created by chefs who take great pride in their work, but there is at least one exception and I believe I’ve found it. Melted cheese is, in fact, at the heart of French cuisine! Please hear me out before you protest.

I live in Haute Savoie, and prior to that, Savoie. Fondue Savoyarde is on most, if not all, local menus in both regions. Although the Swiss and the Savoyardes still dispute who has the best fondue and where it originated, I think everyone would agree that Savoie and Haute Savoie are the leading departments for cheese in France.

But wait: what about Nord-Pas-de-Calais? It’s nowhere near any mountains and it’s by the sea. You’d think restaurateurs would scoff at cheese in favour of delicious and abundant seafood. Seafood is indeed always on the menu, but so is cheese — melted. It’s a bowl of warm cheese with some bread swimming in it. You can choose whether or not a slice of ham and an egg is added. This dish is in competition with fondue for several reasons. First of all, it’s melted cheese with bread and meat, except everything has already been dunked into the cheese for you. Secondly, although the French have made it theirs (as the Swiss would also argue about fondue), it was originally a British dish. Which dish? Welsh rarebit!

If you’re not familiar with Welsh rarebit, it’s basically cheese on toast with a few things added to the cheese, like Worcestershire sauce and beer. The French dish, Welsh, is served with Worcestershire sauce, and from what I can tell, the cheese they use (something called ‘Chester’, which tastes a lot like Cheddar to me), beer is also added to the cheese before it’s ladeled onto a lonely slice of baguette sitting at the bottom of a big bowl.

Known by my friends as the Queen of Fondue, I was somewhat surprised when the Welsh beat me. The one pictured was my lunch, and I felt sick for most of the afternoon despite not finishing it off. This is by far the most stodgy meal I’ve eaten. It beats fry-ups and it beats the Austrian kaiserschmarren (huge steamed dumpling covered in custard). After my meal of melted cheese, dinner was a salad, and even that was a struggle. And there I was thinking that French cuisine was renouned for its refined chefs’ attention to detail. No problem for me though: stodge is great!

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About

I'm a technical author, journalist and writer from Australia who has been living in Europe since 2000 and exploring the world from there. My passions are writing, snow sports and travel.

6 Comments on “The French love melted cheese

  1. That looks awesome!! I wonder what cheesy delights the St Malo area has to offer me when I pop over next month…. 😀

  2. Bex, do let me know what sort of melted cheese you get. I reckon each department has its own version.

  3. My wife and I were recently in Etaples, Pas de Calais, where there abundant welsh or welsch dishes on offer. Etaples had 20 army hospitals during the 1914/18 war and there was a training base there containing 100,000 British troops some of whom must have been in welsh regiments. Could this have been the origins of melted cheese dishes in that part of France?

    • Keith, that certainly seems logical. Thanks for the information – I think you’re onto something there!