Take as many eggs as you wish to use, according to the number of your guests.  Then take a lump of good Gruyere cheese, weighing about a third of the eggs, and a nut of butter about half the weight of the cheese. (Since today’s eggs in America weigh about 1-1/2 ounces apiece, if you start the Fondue with 8. your lump of good Gruyere would come to 1/4 pound and your butter to 1/8 pound.)

     Break and beat the eggs well in a flat pan, then add the butter
     and the cheese, grated or cut in small pieces.

Place the pan on a good fire and stir with a wooden spoon until the mixture is fairly thick and soft; put in a little or no salt, according to the age of the cheese, and a good deal of pepper, for this is one of the special attributes of this ancient dish.

     Let it be placed on the table in a hot dish, and if some of the
     best wines be produced, and the bottle passed quite freely, a
     marvelous effect will be beheld.

This has long been quoted as the proper way to make the national dish of Switzerland.  Savarin tells of hearing oldsters in his district laugh over the Bishop of Belley eating his Fondue with a spoon instead of the traditional fork, in the first decade of the 1700’s.  He tells, too, of a Fondue party he threw for a couple of his septuagenarian cousins in Paris “about the year 1801.”

The party was the result of much friendly taunting of the master:  “By Jove, Jean, you have been bragging for such a long time about your Fondues, you have continually made our mouths water.  It is high time to put a stop to all this.  We will come and breakfast with you some day and see what sort of thing this dish is.”

Savarin invited them for ten o’clock next day, started them off with the table laid on a “snow white cloth, and in each one’s place two dozen oysters with a bright golden lemon.  At each end of the table stood a bottle of sauterne, carefully wiped, excepting the cork, which showed distinctly that it had been in the cellar for a long while....  After the oysters, which were quite fresh, came some broiled kidneys, a terrine of foie gras, a pie with truffles, and finally the Fondue.  The different ingredients had all been assembled in a stewpan, which was placed on the table over a chafing dish, heated with spirits of wine.

“Then,” Savarin is quoted, “I commenced operations on the field of battle, and my cousins did not lose a single one of my movements.  They were loud in the praise of this preparation, and asked me to let them have the receipt, which I promised them....”

This Fondue breakfast party that gave the nineteenth century such a good start was polished off with “fruits in season and sweets, a cup of genuine mocha, ... and finally two sorts of liqueurs, one a spirit for cleansing, and the other an oil for softening.”

This primitive Swiss Cheese Fondue is now prepared more elaborately in what is called: