neverblog.net

* Although it is of Swiss origins. Don’t believe me? Check the Wikipedia. C’mon, the French don’t do anything right.

Last year (or earlier) I bought my parents a fondue set, which they recently dropped off at my house, apparently after giving up (more Frenchiness) on the idea of ever putting it to good use. Since the cooking pot portion of my fondue maker has itself been lost (tres French, again) for over a year, the addition of the new set once again made it possible for me to cook up some tasty melted cheese. Of course, since I’d never used my own set, it was technically the first time I’d made fondue, making me a true novice fonduer.

Fondue? Hellz yeah, I fon-did!

I got some advice on cooking the cheese (which should be a mixture of Gruyere and Emmenthaler) from a local market, but unfortunately, their suggestion was ‘Use a double-boiler, no matter what.’ Now, I don’t so much have a double-boiler, or even any pots that fit nicely into other pots, so I had no choice but to ignore the well-meaning advice of my local gourmand (only the French could translate the word ‘foodie’ into something even more pretentious). Instead, I put the fondue pot right on the burner and fired up the stove.

Your standard fondue recipe calls for about a cup of white wine, brought to a simmering boil, with a bit of garlic in it. I went with a Riesling, which is a nice sweet wine of German origin. I picked the one with the screw top, which is a nice feature to preserve cooking wine, and probably makes the vineyard a ‘maverick’ in rule-worshiping Deutschland.

Once you’ve got the wine boiling, I found the best thing to do is slowly reduce heat in small increments until the wine stops boiling, then bring the heat back up just a smidge. Now here’s the key: you need to shred your cheeses, and you need to add them slowly, in small amounts, allowing each previous amount to melt before adding any more. I spent about 15 minutes in total transferring the cheese into the pot, and the result was a (surprisingly) non-burned and tasty fondue. Stirring constantly is obviously also a big help.

Now, here’s what I learned about what you can’t do with fondue: reheat it. After about half of our bread was gone, there was still plenty of cheese, but the fondue candle wasn’t holding a candle to the frigid temps in our house, so it had solidified but good. I tried putting the mix back on the stove, but all I got was boiling wine and a burned chunk of cheese. So, the lesson to be learned is this: either learn to eat like a ninja, or bite the bullet and spend the 2 bucks for a pack of heating gels. Other than that, though, I have to say it turned out pretty tasty, and actually isn’t too hard or complicated to cook. It requires patience, but chances are almost 100% that you have more of that than me in the kitchen.

fondue, fondue pot, france, french, swiss, cheese, emmenthaler, gruyere, double-boil, double-boiler, kitchen, cooking, cook

Enjoy the hypocritical eye candy.

In an article entitled Bloggers Pounce on Wobbly-Legged Frogs, which appeared yesterday on the Columbia Journalism Review’s Web site, author Gal Beckerman argues that bloggers often impose their own domestic (American) politics on snippets of foreign news, in this case the controversy in France over the recently abandoned labor legislation which would have affected new hires in that country under the age of 26. Beckerman alleges (perhaps quite truthfully) that, for the most part, people posting about the CPE’s demise have either criticised the French as ‘weak’ or politically ineffective, or celebrated the measure’s failure as a victory for the youth of France, in both cases viewing the country itself and the situation within it ‘not [as] an actual location, but rather a reflection of one’s own political beliefs and a way to score a cheap point or two for one’s team, be it left or right.’
Unfortunately, the mistake that Beckerman makes here is conflating the traditionally-motivated postings of America’s political Left vs. Right, which either mock the weak-willed ‘Frogs’ for capitulating to a bunch of ‘punk kids,’ or praise France’s progress away from exploiting its youth, with the article I posted recently. In this way, I believe Beckerman falls victim to the same fallacy the article claims to illustrate: that of misinterpreting a specific point by forcing it into a pre-determined Weltanschauung which alters its meaning.
Despite Beckerman’s implicit claim to the contrary, I do not believe that the failure of the CPE was a victory for French citizens under 26, who still must suffer from France’s over-governed, declining economy and a 22% youth unemployment rate. Thus, I take issue with Beckerman’s claim that I have a ‘positive’ take on the situation. I do, however, believe that any law which unfairly targets a certain socio-economic group is no solution to a problem which spans all socio-economic groups. In other words, if you think France’s problem is an overzealous government hell-bent on protecting the ‘rights’ of its citizens against evil capitalist business owners, and that some of the laws enacted to ‘protect’ workers have backfired and are now preventing qualified workers from getting jobs, logic would dictate you would want to roll back some of the laws protecting incompetent new employees–i.e. something to weed them out once it becomes obvious they can’t do what they were hired to do.
My question remains: Where does that logic begin to include specifically targeting youth? If I am 35 years old, and wish to change careers from a sanitation engineer to a nuclear engineer, should I be protected against my own incompetence in my new position any more so than a recent graduate whose paper credentials say he can do the job, but whose performance evaluation clearly indicates differently?
So, if Beckerman is alleging that my post illustrates an example of a ‘cheap point’ for (I’m assuming) the Left, perhaps the author should examine whether that argument exists only when one pre-supposes that a demand for a cessation of stereotyping and discrimination against the young is in some way an endorsement of stricter, ‘pro-employee’ labor policies. And that pre-supposition, I would argue, is one distinctly rooted in the culture of our nation, where anyone expressing sympathy for the young is assumed to be a naive ‘Liberal,’ an extremist with little real political clout. In France, where socialism is the norm, rather than the extreme, highly restrictive labor laws are a reality and probably will be the future, for better or for worse. Politically, then, it becomes expedient for leaders to shift the blame (to the youth), while maintaining the cushy job security that every voter over 26 has and wants to keep.
What disappoints me about Chirac’s and his party’s decision to try and solve a system-wide problem by targeting a specific group, however, is that it seems to me that, while general political attitudes in France and America are worlds apart, people in both nations share the same willingness to blame youth for the problems of their parents, and to try and ’solve’ the problems by punishing the young who, in a time when most other forms of discrimination have been outlawed in Western nations, have become the outcast class upon whom the failures of a previous generation are heaped.