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France and the Alps · Volume 16, Altitude, Cheese and a Border the Kitchen Never Drew

Berthoud

Savoie, the Val d'Abondance

Berthoud, an individual dish of molten Abondance cheese baked with wine and pepper: a small individual porcelain dish of molten pale golden cheese with a deeply browned, blistered crust across the top, a faint wine sheen visible at the edge.

Illustration

Time
15 minutes

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. 10 to 15 minutes at 180 to 200°C.

Ingredients

  • a clove garlic, for the dish
  • 180 g Abondance, rind removed
  • 3 to 4 cl Savoie white wine
  • 1 to 2 cl Madeira or Port
  • generously black pepper
  • optional a pinch of nutmeg

To serve

Method

  1. Rub the Berthoud dish with garlic.
  2. Slice the Abondance thinly or grate it, and put it in the dish.
  3. Pour over the wine and the Madeira or Port. Pepper generously, and add nutmeg if you like.
  4. Bake at 180 to 200°C for 10 to 15 minutes, until a well-golden crust forms.
  5. Serve hot with bread, potatoes in their skins, salad and charcuterie.

Notes

The recipe is the Abondance cheese makers' own; the French AOP dairy site (CNAOL) gives the same, with 150 g of cheese.

What a modern chef changes

A layered fortification for depth, and a controlled crust built in two stages

Rung 3

Method

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
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