London’s Borough Market is a heaven for food lovers, but deciding what to eat is hellishly difficult. During my first visit last weekend, I seemed to loop endlessly around the stalls in a bid to make up my mind.

‘If in doubt, Meriadoc, always follow your nose,’ advises Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring. At first this seemed like the worst advice, because my nose wanted to go everywhere at once. Retreating to the free samples of Croatian fig jam and proper virgin olive oil, I realised that one smell had stood out above the rest: the irresistible flame-melted smell of raclette.

Half-wheels of raclette melt away under gas flames.

‘Raclette’ refers to both a cheese and the dish in which it features, hailing from the French and Swiss sides of the Alps – most famously, Switzerland’s Valais region. To make the dish, a wheel of raclette is cut in half, and the flat surface is melted with a fire or grill before being smoothly scraped onto a serving of potatoes, gherkins, and pickled onions. A good sprinkling of black pepper is all that is needed on top before you tuck into a plateful of salty, smoky, gooey goodness.

The melted cheese easily slips onto the plate.

Watching raclette being prepared is utterly mesmerizing. I could have stood for a good while breathing in the atmosphere of melting cheese that surrounded the stall, eyes fixed on the half-wheels as they sizzled away under gas flames. Most satisfying of all is the ease with which the hot cheese slips with the knife onto the plate. ‘Raclette’ comes from the French racler, meaning ‘to scrape’, but this suggests a bit of work is involved. Raclette, on the other hand, is effortless.