Monday, April 03, 2006

How to Pass for a Swiss Person, Part IV, Section 1: Swissification; Eating Fondue

Should you eat fondue, here are a few cheats to ensure maximum cheese consumption, thereby avoiding labeling yourself as a foreigner who can't hold his (or her) cheese:

1) Competition is key. Go with enough people that two pots of fondue are necessary, six or more, and you'll feel obligated to do better than the other team. If you're hardcore, you'll also feel obligated to have dessert, to show that you had space.

2) Make sure your potmates are experienced fondue eaters. You're in this together, the fondue pot is communal, and one sub-par eater will increase the amount of cheese the rest of you have to eat in order to finish off the pot.

3) Don't eat any cheese beforehand, don't eat a big lunch, and don't fill up on appetizers. An empty stomach is key, and you don't want to max out your daily cheese quota too early.

4) Break your bread into smaller pieces. Smaller pieces mean more surface area, which means more cheese ingested per cubic centimeter of bread. If you're eating fondue with potatoes (as is done with some kinds of fondue), cut the potatoes into smaller pieces.

5) Dip and stir. Submerge your bread completely in the cheese and stir it around to ensure complete coverage, maximizing the cheese you eat per piece of bread.

6) Cleanse your palate. Feeling overwhelmed by the salty cheese and chewy bread? Is the squishy texture of cheese-soaked bread starting to feel too gooey and heavy? When you start to get cheese-fatigue, have a bite of sweet fruit or a bite of crunchy pickle, and you've bought yourself a little more cheese-eating capacity.

7) Don't give up. Eventually, you'll be eating the whole pot, scraping the burnt cheese off the bottom (the best part of the fondue, according to the Swiss), and waiting impatiently for dessert. And when that time comes, you'll take a quiet sort of pride that you aren't like those other foreigners who can't hold their cheese.

Although native Swiss people probably don't have to use these cheats to ensure their successful consumption of full fondue portions, they have also had a lifetime of training and preparation, so this just levels the playing field to ensure that all people, both Swiss and non-Swiss, can exceed their monthly fat and cholesterol quotas in one sitting.

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