Mont d'Or chaud — France

Mont d'Or chaud, known locally as "boîte chaude", is a baked-cheese dish built around a single wheel of Mont d'Or, a soft, washed-rind cow's-milk cheese banded with a strip of spruce bark and sold only between August and March, the months when milk from the Jura's high pastures gives it its season. This page follows the preparation found in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, in the French Jura, on the side of the border where the cheese takes its name. A closely related page covers the canton of Vaud in Switzerland, since Vacherin Mont-d'Or is made and served in much the same way just across the frontier, and neither region is treated on AllGastronomy as coming before the other. The cheese is baked directly in its wooden box: the rind is scored, garlic is pushed into the openings, a little white wine is poured over the top, and the box, wrapped in foil, goes into the oven until the inside runs soft. It reaches the table still in its box, to be scooped out with a spoon onto boiled potatoes, with slices of Jura charcuterie such as saucisse de Morteau or dried ham alongside. Differences with the Swiss preparation are mostly small: French versions sometimes swap kirsch for a dry white wine from the Jura, and lean more consistently on local charcuterie as a side. Both places share the same cheese, the same wooden box, and the same short season, and the choice of garlic, wine or kirsch is left to the cook rather than fixed by any rule.