Raclette + A Cozy Tablescape
A Twist on the Traditional Holiday Meal With a Swiss Influence
The holidays don’t have to be painful when it comes to menu planning and styling! We’ll be spending the next few weeks sharing inspiration for holiday menus and tablescapes, along with a few unique family traditions from close friends and family.
It’s no secret that Joe loves to do some slow cooking! He is not afraid of multiple days of prep when it comes to his favorite recipes, but come Thanksgiving and Christmas we are absolutely wiped out due to owning and running a small business! I love to style and decorate, but I often find that by the time we’ve launched our holiday collection, decorated the shop, and hosted our holiday events there’s not much left when it comes to hosting a holiday celebration of our own. So we adopted the most lovely tradition of doing a Raclette dinner as a way to celebrate our employees at the end of the year! Below we’ve shared our favorite ingredients, tips, Raclette grills, and of course our favorite pottery for this delicious meal!
What is Raclette? Raclette is traditionally a Swiss dish of melted cheese on potatoes, meats, and vegetables! It’s popular in both the Swiss and French Alps and the words La Raclette mean “to scrape” in French. It’s the perfect cozy meal for the holidays and it keeps things simple in regards to prep!
What inspired this tradition? When we were in Florence, Italy in 2016 we attended a French Market and happened to stumble upon a booth that had a giant bubbling, melty cheese wheel that was heated with an iron. The melty cheese was scraped onto a plate of boiled potatoes, prosciutto, baguette slices, and cornichon pickles. We learned that this dish originated in Switzerland and has a french name Raclette that literally means to scrape!
We were then later re-introduced to this type of dinner by our friends Lindsey and Zach Cunningham. (Lindsey used to work on our team at Campfire.) It quickly become a Campfire tradition to host this type of dinner once a year as a way to celebrate everyone’s hard work at Christmas. Raclette is really fun and easy with a large group of friends! Simply provide a list of ingredients that everyone can pick from to bring and the host/ess supplies the Raclette Cheese and pre-grilled meats! It’s such a lovely process to cook your food as you go, not to mention it’s socially engaging, and makes the meal last longer. It doesn’t require a ton of pre-cooking for the host/ess and allows everyone to take part in the process.
Photos by Angie Elder
Photos by Meredith Brockington
All the bowls
Raclette calls for all the bowls in different shapes and sizes to hold all the ingredients.
Below we’ve listed a few of our favorite bowls and what we like to put in them for our Raclette dinners!
The Raclette Grill
There are a few options when it comes to Raclette Grills. We’ve included links to two of our favorites below.
This is a great option if you have a larger group of guests and you plan to pre-cook everything. This way your guests can pile their plates full of the food they want and then you can just scrape the bubbly cheese right onto their dish.
Photo by Rocky Luten & Ty Mecham via Food52
We prefer the table grill because it’s a little more interactive and draws out the process of cooking and eating with your guests. It also saves you the work of having to pre-cook everything and keep it hot.
Photo by Angie Elder