France and the Alps · Volume 16, Altitude, Cheese and a Border the Kitchen Never Drew
Berthoud
Savoie, the Val d'Abondance
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- Not statedNo source states a time and the atlas has too few comparable dishes to estimate one.
- Researched
- 22 sources cited
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Savoie, the Val d'Abondance. Reported, on a single source needing verification against the EU's own register, as the first French dish to receive Traditional Speciality Guaranteed status.
As tradition built it
Serves 1 as an individual portion.
Ingredients
- 180 g minimum Abondance AOP, rind removed, sliced thin or grated
- 3 to 4 cl Savoie white wine, 1 to 2 cl Madeira or Port Savoie white wine and Madeira or Port
- generously black pepper, generously
Method
- Fill an individual porcelain dish, "l'assiette à Berthoud," with the Abondance.
- Douse with the wine and Madeira or Port.
- Season generously with pepper.
- Bake at 180 to 200°C for 10 to 15 minutes, until a golden crust forms.
What a modern chef changes
A layered fortification for depth, and a controlled crust built in two stages
Rung 3
Method
- Split the fortified-wine addition into two stages: soak the cheese in the Savoie white wine alone for 30 minutes before baking, then add the Madeira or Port only for the final five minutes under the grill. This lets the base wine's acidity do the same protein-dispersing work rung 1 identifies in fondue before the richer fortified wine is added purely for its sweetness and depth at the surface, rather than cooking both together and losing the distinction between them.
- Bake low first, then finish hot. Run the main bake at a gentler 160°C until the cheese is fully molten through, then move to a very hot grill for the final two minutes only, treating the crust exactly as rung 3 treats a raclette or tartiflette rind: an actively built, browned surface, not an incidental result of a single-temperature bake.
- Serve with a single roasted, not boiled, potato, its skin left on and lightly charred, echoing the dish's own founding image of a man melting cheese simply with a potato, while giving the modernist version genuine textural contrast against the molten centre.