tartiflette

Tartiflette is a gratin of potatoes, reblochon cheese, lardons, and onions, and it is younger than it looks. The Union Interprofessionnelle du Reblochon created it in the early 1980s as a vehicle for selling more reblochon, the soft washed-rind cheese produced in the Aravis mountains of Haute-Savoie. The strategy worked so thoroughly that within a generation, tartiflette was being called a traditional Savoyard dish, which it is now, functionally if not historically.

The word itself is older than the recipe. Tartiflette comes from tartifla or tartifle, the Savoyard Francoprovençal name for the potato. That word traces to Italian tartufolo, a diminutive of tartufo meaning truffle, because early Italian observers thought the potato, growing underground and covered in bumps, resembled the prized fungus. The potato arrived in Europe from the Andes in the late sixteenth century, and tartufolo was one of its first Italian names before other terms took over.

There are older Savoyard potato gratins that predate the marketing campaign of the 1980s. The péla, cooked in a long-handled pan over an open fire, is one ancestor. Reblochon itself has existed since the thirteenth century, when it was made from a second milking of cows that farmers concealed from landlords who taxed milk by the yield of the first milking. The cheese carried a small history of evasion before the marketing board gave it a new vehicle.

By the 1990s, tartiflette had migrated from ski resort cafeterias into Parisian brasseries, and from there into supermarket freezer cases across France. It had completed the journey from manufactured tradition to actual tradition in less than twenty years. Few dishes have traveled that road so quickly or so convincingly.