A few years ago, we began celebrating winter solstice regularly with fondue, which seems perfectly appropriate, using fire to celebrate the pivot to re-turning toward the sun. This new solstice tradition was a nice complement to our longstanding tradition of celebrating the arrival of the new year, which we have always done with a passionately debated cutting of the vasilopita.
Fondue dinners are convenient in that they can be easily multiplied to host a large number of guests as well as being portable to ski hills and Christmases far from home. We started with a Grandpa and Grandma C’s 1960’s classic Nordic style fondue pot, then added others as the guest list grew, as well as to be better equipped for chocolate as well as cheese and broth fondues. The core is always a beautiful mix of Emmental, Gruyere and Appenzeller cheeses, for dipping baguette and baby potatoes; accompanied by Oyama sausages (when in Vancouver, and they remain the best of anywhere we’ve been) and German baby pickles (one does need some kind of green vegetable, after all); and followed by chocolate fondue with banana slices and strawberries, the perennial favourites. When we’ve more of a crowd, we add more dippable vegetables, like brocooli, cauliflower and asparagus; and more chocolate dippers like orange slices and wafer biscuits. A highlight was making a vegan fondue, complex with some two dozen ingredients (including the challenging to source sauerkraut juice); a magically similar concoction to cheese fondue. Regardless the fondue details, we aways accompany the meal with the Solstice Cocktail, a vodka/Cointreau/Meyer lemon treat.
The vasilopita is the mainstay of the Greek new year’s tradition, and it is always served with much heated debate of which way to carve and name the pieces of cake. We’ve tried all sorts of recipes, and finally settled with some consistency on a simple orange flavoured white cake, with a coin hidden in the base and the number of the new year decorating the top. The ritual of cutting and naming the pieces of the cake varies year by year, depending on the number of attendees, the desire for fairness in slice size and distribution, and the appetite for adherence to tradition.
[Insert: Year by year vasilopita winners list]
[Insert: Year by year photos]