When Cowgirl Creamery breaks out the raclette on weekends in San Francisco’s Ferry Building Marketplace, people float into the store almost trancelike.
“They smell that aroma coming down the hall in the ferry building and they’re drawn to it like a cartoon,” Sue Conley, co-founder of the San Francisco-based cheese company, says of raclette — the name of a cheese, as well as a dish and the machine used to make it.
Which is surprisingly unhelpful. What is raclette? Consider it a more sophisticated answer to fondue.
Raclette — which derives from the French word meaning “to scrape” — involves melting the surface of a wheel of semi-soft raclette cheese, then scraping the gooey part onto boiled potatoes and other accompaniments. A tradition of the Swiss Alps, raclette is still little known in the United States. But that may be changing.
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