Half-wheels of Raclette du Valais cheese melted under a heat lamp and scraped onto boiled potatoes with cornichons, pickled onions and dried meats.

Raclette comes from the verb racler, to scrape, and was first recorded as a shepherd's meal in the Valais Alps in the medieval period. The cheese was melted by the fire and scraped onto bread. Zurich's old-town raclette cellars adopted the dish in the twentieth century with the same canonical sides: boiled potatoes, cornichons, pickled silverskin onions, sometimes Buendnerfleisch on the side. The half-wheel under a vertical heat lamp is the classic restaurant service.

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