CAULDRON OF CHEESE

As long as we are doing cross-cultural comparison, I must mention something that the Dutch do (but the Swiss invented, although the French say they did, kind of like how the Chinese claim that they invented everything). It's called "fondue" - the Swiss call it "raclette". There are basically four types of fondue, but the basic idea is that you dip food items in a hot liquid, thereby making them more desirable.

To make fondue one needs a fondue set, which consists of a pot of some sort, a heat source, and a set of fondue forks. Traditionally the pot is heated on some sort of bunsen burner, which is fueled by a burning liquid, like spirit or alcohol or lighter fluid. You can get an electric one, but that's wussing out and eliminating the possibility of setting the table on fire.

The first and most popular type of fondue involves filling the pot with melted cheese and some cherry brandy (Kirsch). Swiss cheese is commonly used, but any mix that can be melted is possible. Once the cheese is melted - which can take hours seeing as you are heating the pot over a pretty small flame, dinner can get started. Each guest is handed a fondue fork which resembles a small pitchfork. 

Now a piece of bread is speared onto said pitchfork, and immersed in what is now a cauldron of boiling cheese. After a minute or so - when the bread has absorbed some cheese - the fork is cautiously extracted, so as to avoid dripping white-hot molten cheese lava all over your hands, or the table, or your fellow guests. Insert in mouth, wince from burned palate, and repeat.

To avoid extracting someone else's fork-cum-bread-cum-cheese, the forks are color coded. You don't want uncle Bob's piece of bread that's been in there for 10 minutes, do you? Another phenomenon that will occur is that the bread will fall off your pitchfork and sink to the bottom of the cauldron, where it will turn into a petrified cheesy nub that you can't remove without power tools. I just like saying "cauldron". 

The second type of fondue involves thoroughly scrubbing out the cauldron after the cheese fondue (power tools may be needed), and filling it with.. chocolate. The process is the same, but this time you use pieces of fruit instead of bread. You spear a strawberry, dip it in the... melted chocolate (you thought I was going to say "cauldron", didn't you?), and extract for consumption.

On to method number three, which requires that the liquid used is oil, and we insert morsels of meat, or fish, or shrimp. It's basically deep frying in a group setting. It should be obvious that after a while the combination of meat and fishy stuff will influence the way the oil tastes, so that you can have, say, salmon flavored meatballs, or steak flavored shrimp - kinda like surf'n'turf in one bite. But: to remedy that we in the Netherlands always serve this with gallons of mayonnaise-based sauces, so as to make steak taste like garlic sauce and shrimp like curryketchup. Or if you're very brave "patatjejoppie sauce"(Notice that I haven't used the word "cauldron" once in this paragraph?)

For our fourth forage into fondue (say that ten times in a row) we go to the Orient, where people don't do cheese, but they do have cauldrons, which are named "fang ding", and are - as far as I know - not used for fondue. This method uses broth as a liquid, and garlic sauce and mayo are not approved - instead you'll have to make do with soy sauce, chili sauce or oyster sauce.

In Thailand and Vietnam they do this in a device that looks like a bundt cake form named a tom yung kung, which kind of has a chimney in the middle and broth with flotsam and jetsam in the edge around it. Use caution, as this tends to be both hot in temperature and spiciness, and your morning may begin with Bangkok revenge. Nope. Not saying the "C" word.