Is there a food more delightful, ubiquitous, or accessible than
cheese? This book is a charming and engaging love letter to the
food that Clifton Fadiman once called "milk's leap toward
immortality." Examining some cheeses we know as well as some we
don't; the processes, places, and people who make them; and the way
cheeses taste us as much as we taste them, each chapter takes up a
singular and exciting aspect of cheese: Why do we relish cheese?
What facts does a cheese lover need to know? How did cheese lead to
cheesiness? What's the ideal way to eat cheese--in Paris, Italy,
and Wisconsin? Why does cheese comfort us, even when it reeks?
Finally, what foods pair well with which cheeses?
Eric LeMay brings us cheese from as near as Formaggio Kitchen in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, to as far as the Slow Food International
Cheese Festival in Bra, Italy. In the witty, inventive, and wise
company of his best girl, Chuck, he endures surly "fromagers "in
Paris and dodges pissing goats in Vermont, a hurricane in
Cambridge, and a dispiriting sense of hippie optimism in San
Francisco; looks into curd and up at the cosmos; and even dons
secondhand polyester to fathom America's 1970s fondue fad. The
result is a plucky and pithy tour through everything worth knowing
about cheese.
***
AN EXCERPT FROM THIS BOOK APPEARS IN "BEST AMERICAN FOOD WRITING
2009"
"***
"
It's a challenge to describe the flavor of an excellent French
cheese. Chuck and I were in our tiny rental in the Marais, hovering
over a Langres. We didn't have the funds for Champagne, but we had
managed to get tipsy on a serviceable "vin de pays, "which is also
a pleasant way to eat a Langres.
"It doesn't play well with others," Chuck continued, the thick
smack of "pate "slowing her speech. "It doesn't respect lesser
cheese."
"It's like a road trip through Arizona in an old Buick," I
offered.
"It has a half-life inside your teeth."
"It has ideas."
"It gradually peels off the skin on the roof of your mouth."
"It attains absolute crustiness and absolute creaminess."
Anyone can read that a salt-washed Langres is "salty," then
taste its saltiness, but not everyone will taste in it the
brilliant and irascible character of Proust's Palamede de
Guermantes, Baron de Charlus. Yet these more personal descriptions
capture the experience of a Langres. It sparks associative leaps,
unforeseen flashbacks, inspired flights of poetry and desire. Its
riches reveal your own. W. H. Auden once remarked that when you
read a book, the book also reads you. The same holds true for
cheese: it tastes you.
--From "Immortal Milk
"
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