Raclette (Melted Cheese Scraped over Potatoes)

Variations

• The tabletop machine: a row of little pans that slide under an element, each person melting their own. The same principle moved, and the usual form at home. The photograph is the half-wheel version.
• The cheese: Raclette du Valais AOP is the original, but Gruyere, Fontina or Morbier — any semi-hard washed-rind cheese of about the same moisture — melt the same way.
• Bread instead of potato: it works, but bread holds far less heat, so the cheese sets sooner.
• With vegetables: mushrooms, courgette or sprouts, roasted. Watery vegetables weep on the plate and the liquid pools under the cheese.
• What is drunk with it: kirsch or herb tea by tradition, and cold water avoided. That is a custom rather than a cooking reason.

Tips

• Nothing is added to the cheese here. No starch, no wine acid, no emulsifying salts. Dairy and heat gives the fix for a clumping cheese as "The fix for a clumping cheese sauce is lower heat plus a little starch, which gets between the casein and stops it knitting.", and then closes the list of places that fix can go — "So there are three distances at which this is done — in the pot (fondue's starch), at the stove to a curd that has already refused (soda and egg), and in the factory, before you buy it. Same problem, one answer, three places to put it." All three are answers that add something.
• What those three share is the assumption that the molten cheese has to survive being held, and here it is not held. A fondue pot keeps several hundred grams hot for an hour. This keeps about forty grams molten for ninety seconds and then takes them away. Casein knitting back together and fat coming out are both temperature multiplied by time, and with the time gone the problem does not arise.
• The temperature is controlled by mass, not by the heat. The heat arrives from one side only and an unmelted block of cold cheese is still attached behind it, so the molten layer is a few millimetres deep and nothing below it gets there. The fix quoted above is lower heat plus a little starch, and this dish does the heat half with geometry. The guide's line about mid-aged cheese — "like cheddar goes oily and clumpy if the heat is too high." — describes exactly the cheese in this recipe, and this is why it does not split at that heat.
• Set it beside cheese fondue and the difference is plain. That page says "Toss the cheese with cornstarch and melt it slowly over low heat, and you get a smooth, shareable pot.". There is a pot to keep. Here there is no pot to keep.
• Aligot already has the pair written down in one line. Against fondue, which holds cheese dispersed in a liquid, aligot "cheese into potato starch and makes a mass. One is dipped into, the other is spooned out." Raclette is neither: not dipped into and not spooned out but scraped — and because it was never mixed with anything, what lands on the plate is still cheese.
• The name is the scraping, not the melting. French racler is to scrape, with a diminutive ending on it. The action that ends the melt is the one the dish is named for, which stops looking like a coincidence once the reason above is clear.
• The potatoes have to be hot. The cheese lands at 60-70C and is eaten inside a minute; a cold potato pulls it below the point where it flows. Quesadilla makes that happen on purpose and writes it down — a minute "takes the temperature back below the point where it flows, and the wedge holds its shape. The rest is not cooling it down, it is setting it." There it is the structure of the dish. Here it is the failure.
• Melt one helping at a time. Serving temperature files fondue and aligot among the dishes with no grace period. Raclette has none either, and answers it differently: it is never made in a batch. A plate is made at the moment it is eaten and the next one starts from a cooled face. So a meal can run an hour without the cheese ever having to last one.
• Choose the cheese for structure rather than flavour. A long-aged hard cheese gives up its fat before it flows, and a young one like mozzarella strings onto the knife. What the scrape needs is between the two: a washed-rind semi-hard cheese in the forties for moisture.