Having a meltdown

IN Book 11 of the Iliad, Homer describes a brief domestic scene in a battlefield tent where the slave girl Hecamede, 'fair as a goddess', concocts a drink for her master, Nestor, King of Pylos, and the wounded warrior-cum-surgeon, Machaon.

- Pamela Goodman

The drink is kykeon, an ancient brew that could have been made from any number of restorative ingredients added to a base of water and barley. In this instance, Hecamede's mixture combines strong, dry Pramnian wine from the island of Ikaria with grated goat's-milk cheese and a dash of extra barley meal. And so, if such a claim is to be believed, you have the origins of the cheese fondue.

Naysayers will tell you this is nonsense and that cheese fondue has far more recent roots in 18th-century France and Switzerland, broadly in the rural regions around Lake Geneva, where peasant communities would stave off the winter chill and the lack of fresh food by combining aged cheese, wine and herbs in an earthenware pot over an open flame, into which they'd dip hunks of bread. The French claimed ownership of the dish by giving it the name fondue, derived from