For a stretch of American dinner-party history, the centerpiece was a bubbling pot of cheese and a ring of long-handled forks. Fondue’s popularity in the United States peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, when households across the country bought fondue pots for home, and by the mid-1970s the fondue party was already in decline.
The pots never fully disappeared. They moved to the back of the cupboard, to thrift-store shelves and, for a niche following, to movie nights and holiday tables, where the communal dip still turns up.
How a Swiss Dish Reached American Tables
Fondue is a Swiss dish of melted cheese and wine served in a communal pot and eaten by dipping bread, according to Wikipedia’s fondue entry. An early cheese-and-wine recipe appeared in a 1699 Zurich cookbook, and the first recipe for the modern dish under that name was published in 1875.
Its rise abroad was partly a marketing project. In the 1930s, the Swiss Cheese Union promoted fondue as a national dish to sell more cheese, and the 1939 New York World’s Fair was its first international showcase. Fondue was promoted again at the Swiss Pavilion of the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
In between, Swiss restaurateur Konrad Egli introduced fondue bourguignonne, in which diners cook pieces of meat in hot oil, at his Chalet Suisse restaurant in New York in 1956. In the mid-1960s, Egli also invented chocolate fondue as a promotion for Toblerone, using melted chocolate, heavy cream and brandy. The Swiss origins are part of what made it feel exotic at the time, much like the dishes on this list of foods from the ’60s that boomers loved.
The 1960s and ’70s Fondue Party
By the 1960s, fondue had become a go-to party recipe, helped along by premade mixes, cookbooks and pots sold in stores, Tasting Table reported in May 2026. Hosts added games to the meal. A 1969 Life magazine article described a forfeit system for anyone who dropped bread into the pot, with men expected to buy a round of drinks, while diners who kept every cube on the fork earned the crust at the bottom of the pot. The mix of food and friendly competition is the same spirit that keeps these classic board games families still pull out at the holidays in the closet.
That crust has a name in Switzerland, la religieuse, and it is traditionally lifted out and eaten. Swiss etiquette also calls for stirring in a figure-eight pattern, according to Wikipedia.
The sets themselves were a fixture. Fondue pots were common wedding gifts, and the author of a June 2026 piece in The Takeout wrote that her parents received four. Most were enamel over steel, brightly colored and decorated with the popular patterns of the day, and Sterno was a common fuel, though electric pots were gaining ground. Different-colored forks helped diners keep track of whose was whose. The pots belong alongside the other things that decorated every ’70s home.
Why Fondue Night Faded
The craze cooled quickly. By the mid-1970s, fondue parties had declined, Tasting Table reported, and fondue has largely fallen out of fashion for formal dinners. The Takeout put it plainly: a pot no longer graces every American kitchen, though fondue never fully went out of style and keeps a niche following.
The dish found a second life in restaurants. Tasting Table noted that fondue returned to restaurant menus in the 1990s. The Melting Pot, a fondue chain founded in April 1975 in Maitland, Florida, had 95 U.S. locations as of May 2026, plus one in Edmonton, Canada, according to Wikipedia’s entry on the chain. Its menu covers cheese fondues, meat and seafood entrees with dipping sauces, and chocolate fondues.
At home, the pot joined a long list of once-common kitchen and dining rituals, much like the once-common Thanksgiving traditions from the 1950s that have quietly faded and the forgotten household items from the past that turn up at estate sales.
What Goes in the Pot
A classic cheese fondue is a blend of grated cheeses, wine or sometimes beer, a thickener such as cornstarch or flour, and seasonings, usually at about 2 parts cheese to 1 part wine by weight. The pot is traditionally rubbed with garlic, white wine is heated with cornstarch, and the grated cheese is stirred in. Kirsch is often added, and lemon juice sometimes helps keep the mixture from curdling.
Gruyere, a pungent cheese, and Emmentaler, a mild one, are the traditional pair, though regional versions use Vacherin Fribourgeois, Appenzeller, Fontina or Comte. The traditional pot is called a caquelon, set over a small stove heated by a candle or spirit lamp.
Cornstarch matters more than it looks. It arrived in Switzerland in 1905 and made the cheese-and-wine mixture easier to keep smooth and stable, Wikipedia noted.
The Fondue Pot’s Practical Second Job
A fondue pot sitting in a closet has one more use worth knowing. Ready.gov, the federal preparedness site, lists fondue pots alongside candle warmers, chafing dishes and a fireplace as alternative cooking sources during a power outage, and it notes that charcoal grills and camp stoves are for outdoor use only.
The same guidance says an unopened refrigerator will keep food cold for about four hours, and perishable food that has been above 40 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours or more should be thrown out. That makes a working fondue pot and a supply of fuel a small but useful part of a winter-storm kit.
For a pot that peaked more than 50 years ago, that is a respectable afterlife: a nostalgia piece on the shelf, a holiday-party revival for those who kept the forks, and a backup burner when the lights go out.
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
Image: André Karwath aka Aka – CC BY-SA 2.5/Wikimedia Commons
