by Alec Muffett
How to confuse a European houseguest:
This keeps happening. Four times now. It’s got to the point where I keep two cheese slicers / kaasschaaf / ostehøvel / rabot à fromage handy, for when – cheese in one hand, knife in the other – that blank look of “I have no idea what to do next” dawns.
Poor dears.
I blame Thor Bjørklund.
Funny; when I saw the subject line, I immediately thought “Stinking Bishop” :-).
Never having known any cheesy Eastern Europeans I wouldn’t have known there was any difficulty about the combination of knife and cheese – I had to click on your slicer links to work out what they expect!
Mind you I guess they make their cheese last longer than mine does!
Like Dave’s comment – twasn’t so different to my first thought. And actually that is a point – what would they do if they were given something like an English goats cheese?
Oddly it’s not the Eastern Europeans who have the problems – but I’ve collected Dutch, French and Norwegians so far. The Belgians tend to be more practical.
I grew up in an American household with Norwegian cheese slicers but was somehow under the impression that they were an ancient and venerable tool, brought over by my great-grandparents when they emigrated from Norway in the 1880’s & 1890’s rather than something invented a generation later, well after my grandparents were born in Brooklyn..
Well, I really think that this example applies to northern Europeans only. Cheese slicers weren’t common here along the Mediterranean until Ikea became widespread…
Any Italian (but I guess also Spaniards, Greeks and so on) would most definitely know what to do 🙂
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