As people come in and out of my life there’s always artifacts, rituals left behind: Jim’s tradition of eating potato chips and black coffee for breakfast, my mother’s habit of slathering cinnamon rolls with butter, Ledena’s black bean and sweet potato burritos. Although I inhabit these memories now and then, stepping into a kind of gustatory nostalgia, when I look at my life, I know that cheese, cheese is my soul food.
I’ve worked with cheese since I was twenty-four, cutting, slicing, and wrapping. Counting, weighing and tasting. Selling, selling, selling. I am comfortable in this world. I can now walk into a cheese shop and choose among two hundred different options without breaking a sweat. For a party platter, I can move beyond a simple wedge of Gouda, hunk of cheddar and pile of olives. I posses the proper tools: slicer, knife, cutting board, and wine opener. I possess the knowledge. I have the palette.
There is no food more fabulous than cheese, no food that is as nutritious per ounce, packed with as much flavor, and as durable as cheese. What food, besides cheese, goes so perfectly with vegetables, fruit, meat and nuts? Cheese demands no cooking or preparation. One needs only imaginative combination and an aesthetic display, the majority of the work already having been completed by the animal, bacteria and the cheese-maker. Name the country and animal of origin and a few descriptors and your job as hostess is over.
There is also no food as misunderstood, abused and overlooked. In America most people are only familiar with a few varieties, have never ventured farther than the territory of a cow. Indeed, the cheese that bears our name, American, is not even really cheese, so resistant it is to rot, so devoid of flavor.
And, as far as the human body goes, there is no food as indigestible, no food as disgusting. When I eat cheese, I try not to think about what it is. I try not to think about its first squirt from a chaffed and bloody nipple, its mixing with hundreds of other milk sources, its heating, its cooling, the industrialization of the whole process, how it’s wrapped in plastic, plastic, plastic.
When you work with cheese as I did, as a retail cog, preparing cheese for its ultimate place on the consumer’s plate, you start to accumulate a storehouse of observations. For example: Despite the availability of local, artisan cheeses, cheese making is still largely an industrial process. Yet, many advertisers and designers for cheese companies will have you believe that cherub-cheeked little boys and girls with wooden shoes still milk the cows and make the cheese. Global economies and food safety laws prohibit exporters from actually participating in these pastoral fantasies. There’s nothing romantic and appetizing about a man in a hair net and booties mixing a stainless steel vat of steaming milk.
I also describe cheese as indigestible because it is almost not a food. Having a good palette is another way of saying that I have trained myself to eat things that my body would ordinarily consider rotten. Literally. And it is only recently in our long presence on this planet that humans have even been eating cheese. This is the reason that many people are lactose intolerant- it’s the body’s natural response to eating something that we really shouldn’t be eating.
As with alcohol and pickles, once the basic process of fermentation has been mastered, humans will do an ever-growing variety of things to cheese, to change it, to tweak it, do differentiate it from its neighbors. They will age it for longer and longer periods, they will up its fat content, they will add spices and vegetables, they will restrict the diets of the cows, they will co-op governments and state entities in their ventures, they will hide it in caves, they will hang it from rafters, they will smoke it, they will rub it in lard, they will infest it with maggots, they will bury it in the ground, they will bind it with cloth, with wax, with leather, they will pat it, squeeze it, rotate it. They will control its shape, temperature and consistency.
But the appeal of cheese, is that at some point it is unruly, it is unpredictable. At one tasting, the cheese is spongy, mild and velvety on the tongue. On its next tasting, the same cheese is tangy, stinky, and so runny you have to shovel it off the plate with crackers or a finger. Even the most seasoned aficionado cannot always predict how a cheese will change, given the right circumstances.
This is what makes me keep coming back for more. There will always be another cheese for me to sample, another combination to try out. How do roasted almonds and Idiazabel taste, can I spread this Crescenza on my toast? Will this mozzarella go well with my black coffee and potato chips?
