A Parisian Kitchen: Defrosting my refrigerator like it's 1965

I’ve been bemoaning the increasing visibility of globalization/Americanization in France. People eat lunch on the run in the street and in the metro, and they’re not American, or even millenials. What hits me upon my return this year is that I’m not struck by the petiteness of French women and children. The effects of malbouffe are now visible in the slight paunchiness of the population - men, women and children. Everyone looks like me. That is, like they could do without 5-10 kilos (which just sounds so much friendlier than 10-20 pounds).

But on one level, France remains reassuringly retrograde. I’ve spent the day in the kitchen defrosting my freezer like it’s 1965. My fin de siècle refrigerator, along with most computing machinery, is not designed to function outside of ambient temperature range (68F - 77F or 20C-25C). Since most Parisian apartments are not air-conditioned, during extended heat waves your refrigerator is likely to stop working. Don’t rush off to buy a new one, first wait to see if it is resuscitated when the cool weather returns. Also, many refrigerators in France aren’t equipped with an auto defrost function. Our renters had mentioned ‘there was something wrong’ with the freezer, but I didn’t really pay any attention. 

Until I arrived and peered into a diorama of the Yukon permafrost. 

We haven’t had a major heat wave in a couple of summers, you see, so it had been a while since I had been treated to the spring thaw on the kitchen floor. Since I hadn’t yet stocked the fridge, I thought this would be as good of a time as any to unplug the beast and let the la débâcle begin. Débâcle, by the way, also means breaking up as in the breaking up of ice in the rivers during the spring thaw which can have catastrophic consequences. Everyone knows (or now you do) that you shouldn’t use sharp utensils such as spoons, forks, knives or ladles to break up the ice as you risk puncturing the Freon tube, and according to the online information I found, newspaper placed on the bottom of the freezer is highly absorbent and placing bowls of boiling water in the compartment can help the process along, which should take 20 minutes or so. 

Mid-way: Naturally I didn't think to take a before shot

It has been a strangely contemplative eleven and a half hours, the day punctuated by long moments when I sit on a foot stool in front of the open bottom freezer and while waiting for more water to boil, I pick at ice chunks, and hack and whack as well, using forbidden aids. Freeing a nice chunk of ice from the metal grid is deeply satisfying. As I putter in the kitchen, mopping up the floor and wringing out what has turned into a machine load of wet towels, I listen to the steady drip and hear the occasional clink of ice hitting the freezer floor. I’ve developed some respect for the insulating qualities of my freezer. Eleven hours of towels, boiling water and chipping to defrost less than two cubic feet of space. In the end, I give up and leave a strip of icy permafrost across the front of the freezer to remind me that some things just take time.