CHEESY NEW YEAR!

Communal, convivial and cheese-centric dishes are the ideal way to ring in 2019

In our age of #foodporn saturation, the term has practically lost all meaning. But the seduction of Tia Keenan’s Melt, Stretch, & Sizzle (Rizzoli New York, 2018) is real. Glossy, sexy and beguiling: this cookbook committed to hot cheese is irresistible.

Keenan, a New York-based cook and writer of two other cheese-focused books, has been working in the field since the early 2000s. In the nearly two decades, she estimates that she’s had conversations with tens of thousands of people about cheese.

“There’s a consistency of language that people use when they talk about melted cheese. And it’s very explicit. I just thought it would be fun to approach melted cheese from that devotional point of view,” she says with a laugh. “I really wanted to play with that idea of, ‘Okay, well if I were making actual pornography about cheese, what would that look like?’”

Applying heat to cheese is almost always a win-win, Keenan adds. And in covering foundational techniques through “teaching recipes,” she ensures success for cooks of all comfort levels. From sauces such as rarebit and dips like baked pumpkin fondue to pão de queijo (Brazilian cheese bread) and khachipuri (Georgian cheese-filled bread), Keenan also sought to highlight dishes from cheese-loving countries outside of go-to Western Europe.

“When we’re thinking about cheese we tend to think about Italy, France or Spain,” says Keenan. “A lot of cultures cook with cheese and I wanted to open it up without getting too complicated or going too far off the path to let people know that there are other cultures that cook cheese really beautifully. So I looked to Latin America and I looked to Eastern Europe, which often get overlooked.”

Simply warming up certain cheeses is enough to completely transform them. This fact is deliciously on display in two dishes perfectly suited to holiday dining: fondue and raclette. Keenan appreciates the latter so much she dedicated an entire chapter to it. Raclette is a semifirm to firm Alpine cow’s milk cheese, which is traditionally heated and scraped onto bread, potatoes and other foods, “like a reverse fondue.”

“You can actually accommodate a lot of food preferences by serving that kind of meal. You’re giving them the melted cheese so they’re choosing what they’re going to dip into it or pour onto it,” says Keenan. Beyond the ease of serving fondue or raclette, it’s also a supremely welcoming and convivial way to entertain.

“We don’t have a huge tradition of communal eating (here) and I think cheese is one of those things that actually pushes back against that. It’s almost always a communal experience whether it’s a cheese board that people are taking pieces off of together while they talk to each other and drink wine or beer. Or it’s hot cheese in fondue or in raclette, and I think people crave that.”

NOAH FECKS