Watermelon, chevre, piment d’espelette

I spent a little time this summer visiting Institut Henri Poincare for their program on rational points, but this post is not about the math I did there, but about a salad I ate there. Not there at IHP, but at the terrific neighborhood bistro around the corner from where I was staying. I liked it so much I went there three times and I got this salad three times. I have been trying to recreate it at home. It’s good! Not Paris bistro good. But really good. Here is how I make it so I don’t forget.

• Seedless watermelon cut in cubical or oblong chunks, as sweet as possible
• Good chevre (not feta, chevre) ripped up into modest pieces
• Some kind of not-too-bitter greens (I’ve been using arugula, they used some kind of micro watercressy kind of deal) Not a ton; this is a watermelon salad with some greens in it for color and accent, not a green salad.
• Roasted pine nuts (I am thinking this could also be good with roasted pepitas but have not tried it)
• Juice of a lime
• Olive oil, the best you have
• Piment d’espelette

I had never heard of piment d’espelette! It’s from the Basque part of France and is roughly in the paprika family but it’s different. I went to a spice store before I left Paris and bought a jar to bring home. So now I have something I thought my kitchen would never be able to boast: a spice Penzey’s doesn’t sell.

Anyway, the recipe is: put all that stuff in a bowl and mix it up. Or ideally put everything except the chevre in and mix it up and then strew the chevre on the top. Festive!

Of course the concept of watermelon and goat cheese as a summer salad is standard; but this is a lot better than any version of this I’ve had before.

Beef apple, cumin crouton

Just a note to myself to remember two things from tonight’s dinner:

• If you fry apple slices in the greasy pan you cooked the hamburgers in, you get a very good hamburger topping.  They are also good plain.
• In a saucepan fry ripped-up bread in olive oil with a lot of garlic and cumin and some walnuts.  Add to chopped tomato and cucumber and it is salad.

Polarized electorates and McDonald’s salad

Tyler Cowen takes issue with Cass Sunstein’s new book, Going to Extremes, which postulates that American politics is stuck in a polarized posture, with the two antagonistic parties having little incentive or inclination to reach compromise. Cowen lists some reasons to think politics in the U.S. are not getting more polarized, including

6. Obama goes out of his way to adopt a non-polarizing style (no matter what you think of his policies) and it brings him considerable popularity.  That suggests a demand for non-polarization, or at least the perception thereof.  In many countries politicians have an incentive to straddle the median and bring outlying groups closer to the center, for purposes of governance and re-election.

Now let me pretend to be a behavioral economist: the phrase  “or at least the perception thereof” is doing a lot of work here!  What we know is that there’s a demand for the ability to believe about oneself that one is a post-partisan and unpolarized type.  But that’s not to say there’s a demand for actual unpolarized politics.  People tell McDonald’s market researchers they’d like to see more salad on the menu; they’re more likely to go to McDonald’s when there’s salad on the menu; but they don’t eat the salad.  In fact, the presence of the salad option appears to make customers more likely to order a less nutritious meal.  Apparently they feel they’ve done enough for their health by being in the same room with the salad.

If Obama is the salad and nutty partisan views are the fries, Cowen’s argument might actually work in Sunstein’s favor:  we are all in the room with the salad, and thus might feel freer to indulge our cherished political idiosyncracies.

In a different direction, one might set aside the question of what market and structural forces might in theory push politics to be more or less polarized, and ask instead whether one can quantify what’s actually happening.  Cowen says that public opinion polls about polarization point in both directions.  I like the work of McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal on this question;  they have a nice way of modeling the U.S. Congress as a subset of R^2, in which setting you can see the two parties getting further apart and more ideologically disciplined over time.   Here’s what I wrote about their techniques in Slate in 2001.    On their view, at least, it’s not in question that political polarization has been increasing since the 1960s.