CheddarBound

Iberian Tipples & Cheddar

2010-03-23T23:57:00.006-04:00

"cheeses, fruits, matching port wines," by The Gifted Photographer on Flickr.

To be honest, when on my own, I don't give too much thought to pairing drinks with cheese or any other food for that matter. As long as it's on hand and cheap, that's good enough for me.

If, however, I were to follow a rule for selecting a beverage for a particular dish, it would be to stick close to home--the domain of both the food and drink, that is. While enjoying an alpine cheese, for instance, I'd drink a Swiss beer or wine. Same goes for French cheese and wine, etc. I'm even exploring, with cocktail maven Kara Newman, monastic cheeses with monastic spirits for the Manhattan Cocktail Classic in mid-May. Foods and drinks from the same region tend to go well together, and it's what the locals (even monks!) do. For this reason I primarily gravitate toward ale and cider with my favorite cheese (you know which one!).

Why, then, am I suggesting classic drinks from the Iberian peninsula as potable accompaniments to Cheddar? There ain't much Cheddar in Spain or Portugal (and what there is, save what's on offer at the upscale cheese shop Poncelet in Madrid, is pretty crappy). There is, however, a strong English connection with Port from Portugal and with Sherry from southern Spain. Keep in mind that Port is an English innovation, and many Sherry cellars were established by English families.

It shouldn't be too much of a mental stretch to twin Port with Cheddar. After all, Stilton, the king of English cheeses, can hardly be mentioned without this fortified wine. Its sweet richness is a welcome foil to the savory saltiness of the blue cheese. (Just don't pour a perfectly good Port into a hollowed out circle of a perfectly good Stilton--what a waste!). Port and Cheddar can work amicably together, too, bringing out the best in each other. When drunk with a slightly sour domestic cheese, like Mountain Valley Gootessa Sharp Cheddar--as I did a few years back at a class at Murray's Cheese Shop, "Night Cap 'n' Cheddar, Perfect Togeddar: A Port and Cheddar Pairing," led by Sue Sturman of Epicurean--Port becomes increasingly fruity. With a barnyard-y English cheese, like Keen's Farmhouse Cheddar, the Port tames the barnyard and calls forth its richness. Yummy things can happen when they're consumed together.

Manchego, or another aged Spanish sheep's milk cheese, is probably what first comes to mind when pairing Sherry with cheese. It's a classic match. While I've never drunk Sherry with Cheddar in the same studied way that I did with Port at Murray's, just recently I attended an illuminating lecture on authentic Sherry (i.e., only those wines that are produced in the Jerez region in Andalusia), organized by the Culinary Historians of New York, at the International Wine Center, and learned that Sherry pretty much goes with everything. Very food friendly, Sherry boasts more varied flavors and styles than any other wine in the world. You're guaranteed to find a Sherry that goes perfectly with a hunk of Cheddar. How about a rich, dark, and dry Oloroso? Or add a touch of Amontillado to a beer and Cheddar fondue, as Fine Cooking recommends, to contribute a nutty touch and a depth of contrasting flavors?

Another factor in Sherry's favor is its affordability. Not hip and fashionable like other Spanish wines, Sherry has yet to be "discovered" and this keeps its price low, at least in the U.S. Port's another story, but there are still bargains to be had.

Intrigued? Read more about Sherry in my blog for Sickles Market, due out this Friday.

In the meantime,
Buen Provecho!

Chatting about Cheddar

2010-03-11T23:02:00.004-05:00

You know I like to talk about Cheddar.

This blog wouldn't exist if I didn't!

But the on-line world of CheddarBound hasn't been my only platform for spreading the word about this cheese (if you can believe it!). In the past six weeks, I've been out and about, away from desk and computer, getting the message out there.

For two successive nights in early February, I ventured forth from suburban New Jersey, where I've been chilling as a slacker for the past seven months, to lead two cheese and beer tastings. The first was held at Murray's Cheese Shop in Greenwich Village. Twenty or so people attended the class and listened to fermentation guru Chris Munsey and me talk about "English Ales & Cheddar: Best Mates." Chris led the way with his potent selection of English Ales (by the end of the 1.5-hour class I was feeling no pain!), and I followed with information about six different clothbound cheeses (not all Cheddars, and not all from England): Kirkham's Lancashire, Appleby's Cheshire, Sparkenhoe Red Leicester, Blue Mont Cheddar, Quikes Cheddar, and Cabot Clothbound Cheddar. The next night, I was on my own, but was very competently assisted by the staff of Jimmy's No. 43 in the East Village, where the tasting was held, and by my dear friend Rich Pinto, who cut individual portions of five different cheeses, Keen's Cheddar, Isle of Mull, Montgomery's Cheddar, Sparkenhoe Red Leicester, and Stichelton, while I was talking. All five dairies are located in the U.K., and I visited each of them during my 10-month Great Cheddar Adventure. That trip, in fact, was the subject of the evening's gathering. As well as tasting the cheeses (see photo above), the forty people who attended also sampled a cask ale from Somerset, a "hard" cider from New Hampshire, and an apple wine from Enlightenment Wines in the Hudson Valley. It was a lovely and lively evening, and I am so appreciative that Jimmy Carbone gave me a venue to share the stories of my travels with old friends and new.

After a two-week trip to Mexico during the final miserable days of February (I fortuitously missed two snow storms), I'm chatting about Cheddar again, but this time not far from the realm of cyberspace. For my employer, Sickles Market in N.J., I wrote an entry for their blog which is a new feature on their Web site, and this Sunday I'm heading back into New York, to Brooklyn, to be interviewed by the one-and-only Anne Saxelby on her weekly radio program, "Cutting the Curd," on Heritage Radio. You can catch us live from 2:30 to 3:00 p.m. at http://www.heritageradionetwork.com/programs/14 or download the show at a later date.

My next speaking engagement won't be until mid-May, when I'll be teaming up with spicy cocktail expert Kara Newman to lead a seminar on monastic drinks and cheeses at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic. Until then, fair reader, is there anything in particular about Cheddar that you would like to read about in this blog? Do let me know!

The Age of Cheddar

2010-01-10T18:16:00.007-05:00

My lugubrious black pin says it all. I'm forty and over the hill. With nowhere to go but down, I might as well be six feet under.

Nah, I don't really believe that. Even though my life may be more than half over and (to quote Pink Floyd) every day is one day closer to death, I am nevertheless looking forward to--not dreading--the years ahead. There's still a lot of life left to live, and any number of adventures await me on the other side of that proverbial hill.

I'm not sure everyone has a similarly positive view of age. The prevailing social sentiment, at least in the States, is that the older you get, the less you're worth. Youth, which I no longer possess, is where it's at.

The exceptions to this age-ist attitude are wine, Scotch, and cheese. The older they are, the better, and the higher the price that people are willing to pay for them.

Here's an example. The typical price for a block of Cheddar, the kind you buy in the supermarket, is usually somewhere between $5 and $10 a pound. Its age ranges from a few months to a whole year. But keep that cheese around for another fourteen years and the price escalates to $50 a pound.

This is what happened to Hook's Cheese of Wisconsin. A month ago, in early December 2009, Tony and Julie Hook released a fifteen-year-old Cheddar, the oldest available on the market. A cheese as old--and as expensive--as this captured people's attention and the headlines. It also opened people's purses. An apologetic notice on Hook's Cheese's Web site reports that the first batch of their super-aged Cheddar (about 1,200 pounds) has sold out and that the next batch won't be released until March 2010. No doubt it will get quickly gobbled up, too.

If I could buy just a quarter or a half pound of this cheese (a posting on roadfood.com says that there's a four-pound minimum!), I would, even on my part-time cheesemonger salary. But it would be curiosity driving me, not the belief that a fifteen-year-old cheese is ten-times better than a one-year-old one.

In my amateur opinion, I doubt it is that much better. In a case like this, age serves more as a marketing tool than as a catalyst for bringing out the best in a fermented dairy product. For fifteen years, over a ton of this particular batch of cheese has been stored at a very cool temperature in plastic bags, leaching whey and minerals. This maturing method doesn't really do all that much to enhance the flavors of a cheese. Certainly, they become more concentrated after all that time, but they don't achieve much depth. All it really succeeds in doing is impressing consumers with the cheese's age and proving that a perishable product can be successfully matured for that long, provided that the cheesemaker has a high level of skill and a sufficient cash flow to hold onto inventory for that long.

Before you get too blown away by a fifteen-year-old, fifty-dollar-a-pound Wisconsin block Cheddar and clamber to get on a waiting list for its re-release in March, remember that only twelve to eighteen months are required for a bandaged Cheddar, stored almost at room temperature, to reach its peak. I'll wager $50 that a morsel of a traditional Cheddar will be much more nuanced and flavorful than a block of Cheddar that has been recently released from a plastic bag full of murky whey after fifteen years of captivity.

Does anyone want to buy $200 worth of Hook's Cheddar and do a taste comparison with an American or British clothbound one?

In this post, I seem to be positing two conflicting arguments about age, that it isn't necessarily better (when it comes to cheese) and that it isn't necessarily bad (when it comes to turning forty). What I'm ultimately trying to say is, age isn't everything. What matters in the end is how good the cheese tastes and how fully you live your life, even after the age of fifteen or forty.

The Skinny on Cheddar

2009-12-05T17:15:00.007-05:00

Sorry to break it to you. Cheddar isn't the magic food that will make you effortlessly skinny. But you probably already know that. It's common wisdom these days that cheese is a high-fat, high-calorie food that should be rigorously avoided, unless it's a pale cube of low-fat cheese. It's treated as if it were in the same forbidden food group as deep-fried Mars bars. Not that there's anything wrong with deep-fried Mars bars.... All around me, people (just women, in fact, from my carb-avoiding Mum to my food-loving and food-phobic girlfriends alike to my enviably skinny and toned customers at the cheese shop in N.J.) announce that are trying to eat less cheese.

Now, why would you want to do that? Yes, cheese won't make you skinny, but it won't make you fat either. You might glance at the picture above and point out my double chin to prove your point about the hazards of cheese consumption. In its defense, which I come to often, cheese alone didn't make me lose my chin (or my eyes). That was the result of living every day like it was Friday night when I was traveling for 10 months. (The eyes have to do with unfortunate genetics.) Now, to lose that weight, I'm living every day like it's Tuesday evening. But I haven't given up the cheese!

What you should be focusing on in the photo above, taken on a boat trip from the Isle of Mull in Scotland to a nearby uninhabited island where I got up close and personal with puffins, is my smile. Cheese makes you happy! As do wee puffins. It's my belief, probably unfounded by scientific, nutritional studies, that it is the satisfaction that comes from eating good cheese that prevents you from getting fat from it.

To illustrate my point, I'll share a conversation I had with one of my customers recently, a regular at the cheese counter who has a real love for cheese and who, I have to admit, has a more developed palate than I. She's probably around my age, maybe younger, and of a normal weight, and she doesn't voice any guilt about buying cheese for her and her family.

"Thanks for the cheese."

"No worries. I hope you enjoy them."

"You know, I just don't understand why we're all being told to avoid eating cheese because of the fat. I mean, look at us--you guys behind the cheese counter and me. We're not fat."

"Yeah, I know. I think that if you eat good cheese in moderation, you'll be fine."

"Well, that's it. If you eat good cheese, you're satisfied and you don't need to eat a whole lot of it. Also, I don't think that the fat in cheese is all that bad for you. See you next time."

She's onto something. Without a doubt, cheese is a nutritionally dense food, meaning that it's packed with nutrients, including fat and calories--which Americans abhor--but also protein, vitamins, and minerals--which Americans need more of (well, maybe not protein). Contrast this with nutrient-empty foods, like deep-fried Mars Bars, for which we seem to share the same level of pleasure and guilt as a schmear of a lush double-cream cheese.

So, go ahead; eat cheese! Just enjoy it, in moderation, and don't feel guilty about it. On top of that, pick something that you genuinely like. This means no virtuous, low-fat rubbery stuff. What joy is there in eating that lab concoction? This also means that you don't need to pass over the double- and triple-cream cheeses. Yes, they seem decadently rich, but ounce for ounce, they have less fat or about the same amount as sober hard cheeses. Depending on the cheese and your nutritional sources, brie has 6 grams of fat per ounce and Cheddar has 9 grams. Gasp!

How can that be? It has to do with water content. Younger cheeses, like St. Andre, have more water than the harder cheeses which lose liquid during cheese-making and aging. Think of the difference between a fresh apricot and a dried one. How many dried apricots does it take to equal the weight of a fresh one? Maybe two or three. If you eat the same amount of dried and fresh apricots in weight, you'd be getting twice or thrice the calories from the dried ones, just because you're eating more of them.

I can't help pointing this out to super-skinny customers when they moan about the amount of fat there must be in the buttery, double-cream Fromager d'Affinois, one of our best-selling cheeses. These real housewives of New Jersey are so fit and muscular that they look like world-class athletes. I refuse to fuel their masochistic guilt, and I won't be complicit in bad-mouthing cheese. On top of that, maybe these women are in need of a smile and a Friday night. Cheese can help with that!

What's Wrong with Cheddar?

2009-11-10T17:28:00.005-05:00

(Photo taken from npr.org)

I agree with Steve Inskeep. "What's wrong with Cheddar?"

This plaintive and totally apt question (in my mind) was how Inskeep, cohost of National Public Radio's Morning Edition, concluded a story by Ketzel Levine, back in August 2007. (It's taken me a wee while to write about this radio piece. In the intervening two years--well, just now--I've learned that there's more to like about Inskeep than just his views on Cheddar and his good humor in the morning. What a dapper radio personality!)

Ketzel's story, part of the ongoing series (at the time) "Climate Connections," with National Geographic, explored how global warming might affect the taste of Europe's traditional cheeses and America's new, farmstead ones. Well-crafted cheeses should taste of the grasses and flowers that the lactating animals were grazing upon at the time of milking. If the variety of flora changes, so will the final flavor. This happens naturally with seasons; a cheese made in May will taste different from one made in August because of what's growing at that time of year.

With global warming, this change in flora is happening geographically as well. An alpine cheesemaker interviewed for the story, Alex Pelletier, has noticed that plants native to the south of France are migrating into the mountains as the country's average temperature increases. One of the factors which make alpine cheeses (e.g., Beaufort, Gruyere, Emmental) distinct are the flavors that come from the plants that grow at high altitude. Dilute this mix with newcomers from the south and you might end up with a different cheese.

Of more immediate concern is the increase in water consumption by thirsty cows, unused to the higher temperatures. This dilutes the proteins and fats in the cows' milk, which means that the cheesemakers must use more milk to create the same amount of cheese, an unwanted extra cost.

So, how does this all relate to Cheddar?

Most of Ketzel's piece focused not on the traditional mountain cheeses of France and Switzerland, but on one from Vermont, Thistle Hill Farm's award-winning Tarentaise. Why an alpine-style cheese in a state that Ketzel calls "Cheddar country"? It has to do with climate, not history or culture. Recognizing that their local climate was more similar to the Alps than to damp England, John and Janine Putnam, owners of Thistle Hill, turned to Beaufort and Abondance, not Cheddar, for inspiration.

But I think it wasn't just the climate that steered the Putnams away from Cheddar. I detected a whiff of snobbery, as well as continued misunderstanding about this English cheese, which many folks, even cheesemakers, believe comes only from big factories. For the Putnams, it's only good enough to store in the freezer and serve as a snack for their kids. In addition, what they fear most about climatic change is that in the near future they might have to change their style of cheese and "succumb to Cheddar." But they hope that day of making Cheddar "never" comes. For them, it would mean the end of a nuanced cheese that tastes of grass and the seasons.

Global warming is a real concern, and until I listened to this evocative piece on the radio two years ago I never really thought how it might affect the future of traditional and artisanal cheeses. (Inskeep introduces Ketzel's story by reminding listeners that climate change can affect almost anything in our lives.) But is the worst thing about accelerated climatic change that some cheesemakers might have to switch to making Cheddar with the milk from their organic Jersey cows? There's plenty of room with this style of cheese to express your farm's sense of place and your cows' healthy and changing grass diet. Just taste a handmade Cheddar from Britain, like Hafod, Keen's, Montgomery's, or Isle of Mull. Or even from Modesto, California! These cheeses give any French or Swiss cheese a run for its money and should not be confused with factory-made Cheddar that works as hard as it can not to show seasonal variations.

So, if were not talking about a mass-produced Cheddar, what's wrong with it? And even if we were, I still ask, as does Inskeep, What's wrong with Cheddar? It's a bloody good cheese! Remember, the Putnams aren't keeping Gouda or Harvati in the freezer for their kids!

A Pint for Cheddar

2009-10-21T18:54:00.003-04:00

What comes to mind when I say, "pint and Cheddar"?

No doubt a pint of amber ale. It is, after all, an excellent, potable accompaniment to a hunk of farmhouse Cheddar.

But there's another kind of pint that a traditional, British cheesemaker might think of, a pint starter.

Typically--and hopefully--pints close, not start, a day in the dairy. A drink in the pub after a day of full-on, physical cheesemaking (or even cheesemongering) is just what you need.

For some cheesemakers, however, usually the farmstead ones in the U.K., pints also start the day. In this case, I'm talking about pints of starter cultures.

Starter cultures are one of the very few ingredients that go into making cheese. The others, besides milk, are salt and rennet. Each of these basic components play an integral role in turning perishable liquid milk into a solid food substance that can potentially keep for years and still taste like something would want to eat and pay good money for.

Starter cultures are harmless bacteria that are added to the milk to convert lactose, the sugar in milk, into lactic acid. Unpasteurized milk can do this on its own, without the addition of starter cultures, but results are unpredictable. By using specific lactic acid bacteria that have a proven track record of producing good-quality cheese and that behave in predictable ways (e.g., how quickly they will acidify the milk, how they will fare at particular temperatures, how they will tolerate salt, and how they will influence the final taste & texture of the cheese), cheesemakers can maintain more control of their craft.

Control, however, isn't always a good thing. Nuance, depth, and terroir can be lost when cheesemakers rely on freeze-dried packet starters, usually made in laboratories in the Netherlands or Denmark. As mentioned above, their use increases the chance of a well-made cheese, but these bacteria, isolated in a lab, have very little to do with the area in which the cheese originated.

To get a cheese to speak of place and tradition rather than of a modern, controlled factory, some daring folks in the cheese world continue to use pint starters. They look like old-fashioned, home-delivered pints of milk (see the photo above), but inside them, along with the pasteurized, semi-skim milk, are active strains of bacteria that are native to the place in which the cheese is made, or that have been used for generations in that area.

It takes skill, faith, and commitment to use pint starters. First, you have to hunt down a source for them. As far as I know, there's only one supplier in the U.K, Barber's. It's thanks to this cheese-making family in Somerset that pint starters continue to exist at all. Once the frozen pints have been ordered and safely shipped to your farm (not always a guarantee, especially if you live far away from Somerset, say on an island in Scotland) you must store them properly, i.e., frozen, until you are ready to use them. This takes planning. Whereas users of freeze-dried starter cultures can just tear open a foil packet at the moment they are ready to add the starter to a vat of warm milk, the folks who use pint starters have to thaw the pint the day before making a batch of cheese. When thawed, the contents are poured into a specific amount of pasteurized milk (to have a neutral environment for the bacteria to grow). Then the cheesemaker has to incubate the stew of bacteria overnight at a controlled temperature (see photo above for the space age-looking container in which Westcombe Dairy in Somerset incubate the starter). The next morning the right amount of the frothy starter has to be added to the vat of milk for cheesemaking to begin. The stuff that's added looks and tastes like yogurt. I've tried it before and have had it with my cereal for breakfast, as Mary Quicke does every morning. Yum!

But the resulting cheese tastes even better.

Taking Care of Cheddar

2009-10-20T13:28:00.008-04:00

If the season for Cheddar is now upon us, then it's also time to take proper care of that hunk of semi-hard cheese you've just bought and brought home with you. (If you haven't done that yet, then go do it now, and buy some Honeycrisp apples, while you're at it!)

And how does one take care of Cheddar, you may wonder.

You're not alone in asking this question. I get it frequently--about cheese in general, not just Cheddar--when working behind the cheese counter.

My typical advice to customers, especially the ones at Neal's Yard Dairy, is to store their precious parcels of cheese in a cool, damp spot (not hard to come by in England!), e.g., in a garage, by a window, or in a wine cellar. These areas are preferable to the refrigerator because cheese prefers temperatures that range from 45 to 60 degrees F and a relative humidity of 80 percent or more. The fridge can't offer that. It's too cold and dry.

Keeping cheese in your basement or garage isn't always feasible or practical. In that case, the fridge will have to do. To my customers who shake their heads when asked if they've got a consistently cool or damp place at home, I tell them to keep their cheeses in the veggie drawer of their fridge, nicely wrapped in the special cheese paper I've given them. This is the most humid spot in the ice box.

I dispensed this advice numerous times throughout the working day at Neal's Yard Dairy, but I didn't know what happened to my customers' purchases once they got home at put them in the garage or fridge. Was one environment all that much better than the other?

I set up an experiment to find out. While at work late last November, I sliced three 250-gram (about half a pound) wedges of my favorite Cheddar, Montgomery's. I wrapped each one up in Neal's Yard Dairy's special cheese paper, a lightly waxed French paper, specifically designed for cheese, and then took them home with me. I put one wedge on the top shelf of the fridge, one in the veggie drawer, and one in a shoebox, which I placed atop a suitcase in the garage of the flat where I was staying, south of the Thames.

Once a week for four weeks, I examined the cheeses to see how they were faring in their respective spots. I did a visual inspection and then tasted them. I then dutifully took pictures of them together to document their progress (all of which were lost when my camera was stolen last December). After the first week, there wasn't much of a noticeable difference among them, but by the second week, the hunk in the veggie drawer had picked up off flavors. The veggie drawer next to it was storing some very ripe bananas, and the cheese absorbed the tropical odor. By the third week, the cheese in the garage had developed pin-dot circles of blue mold around the rind. By the third week, the cheeses had a new home in a flat north of the river, where the garage was replaced by a dank closet under the stairs, where my friends kept their wine and brooms.

By the fourth week, it was time to bring the cheeses to the shop and to have the experts taste the results of my experiment. The hands-down winner was the wedge kept in the garage and then the "cellar." A gifted American cheesemaker, who was helping during the busy Christmas season, remarked that it tasted as though it had just been cut from a wheel in the shop (once the superficial mold had been scraped off). The losers were the ones from the fridge. They had become unpleasantly waxy and dry. Surprisingly, the one from the veggie drawer was more dried out than the one from the top shelf. Both had stale, nasty flavors.

I learned from my experiment that the a cool, damp spot is infinitely preferable to the harsh environment of the fridge, provided that you can keep the cheese away from pets and pests. If you have to store your Cheddar in the fridge, keep it away from other food items that have strong smells and eat it quickly. In short, buy just the right amount of cheese so that you don't have to keep your cheese in the fridge for four weeks!

The Cheddar Season

2009-10-15T09:56:00.005-04:00

All of a sudden it happens. On an undetermined day in late September, rosy Jersey tomatoes, bouquets of basil, and plump balls of fresh mozzarella part ways. For the summer months they keep each other company on central display tables in specialty food markets. Their pert freshness speaks cool words to shoppers, "What could be more simple and satisfying on this hot and humid night than we three in an insalata caprese or in a bowl of spaghetti tossed with cubes of uncooked tomatoes and mozzarella and torn leaves of basil?" Not much, and off the trio fly from the display table, quickly replaced by workers in the produce and cheese departments.

As much as we want to prolong the carefree days of summer in the northeast, we must admit at some point that it's over. The crickets may still be chirping, the days warm and humid, and the garden still abundant with herbs and vegetables, but something has changed. The sun is no longer mercilessly hot. Instead it casts a warm glow, making everything look as attractive as a couple in love, sitting by an open fire. Its golden light catches very busy squirrels, scuttling about the leaves which are slowly changing color, collecting nuts. They can't deny it and nor can we. Summer's over and winter's coming.

Market managers break the news to us by changing the products on the display tables. "Autumn is here," they say, and they say it with apples and Cheddar cheese.

I've written before that I associate Cheddar with autumn, and I'm not alone. In the company of apples, the fruit inexplicably linked with the start of fall in the northeast, Cheddar signifies the end of light, summer cooking. Dishes take on toastier notes and a deep sweetness--think apple pie, roasted squash, beet salads, and stews with root vegetables. This hard cheese, which was traditionally made with the surplus of milk from spring and summer and was ready to eat in lean cold, months, fits perfectly with this flavor profile.

When will the apples and Cheddar disappear? Perhaps when we, at Sickles Market, run out of precious and delicious Cabot Clothbound Cheddar from the Cellars at Jasper Hill. Or perhaps after Thanksgiving, when we'll have to admit that winter has arrived.

Which cheese will help us make that chilly transition?

Not Cheddar

2009-08-22T09:10:00.008-04:00

(Sorry again about the sideways picture. My camera is now being repaired at the Canon Service Center, so I hope to avoid these wonky pictures in the future.)

You would have thought that by now, after thinking of nothing much else but Cheddar for ten months, I would have figured it out: what's Cheddar and what's not. But I haven't.

Or maybe I have. After seeing the hard work and passion that cheesemakers all over the world put into making this popular cheese, in small dairies and in huge creameries (factories), I am tempted to cast my net wide and accept all Cheddars as Cheddars. Who am I to decide which cheeses get to go by the name Cheddar and which ones shouldn't? After all, I'm just a woman of leisure who gobbles cheese all around the world.

But I can definitely tell you what's not Cheddar. It's Stichelton. And I can say something else it's not, Stilton. Sure, the name is similar, as are its appearance and recipe, but the name is different. It has to be. Since Stichelton is made with unpasteurized milk, it can't be called Stilton. Less than twenty years ago, the Stilton Cheesemakers' Association mandated that to be called Stilton, Britain's historic blue cheese must be made with pasteurized milk. Before that, traditional--and tasty--Stilton was made with raw milk.

Stichelton, a cheese I wrote about in a typo-ridden entry last Christmas, was the only non-Cheddar dairy that I visited during my travels where I spent more than an hour or two. And it was the last dairy where I actually helped out a wee bit before ending my cheese-focused trip. Spending two full days at the Welbeck Estate in Nottinghamshire was an excellent way to end my Great Cheddar Adventure even though I wasn't making Cheddar. It reminded me, after months of focusing on one type of cheese, that there is more than one way to turn milk into something you can slice and put on top of bread. Whereas Cheddar's "make" (the time from when rennet is added to milk to the time salt is mixed into the curd) is about five hours, Stichelton's is about twenty-two hours. Cheddar is a humming bird compared with the starfish pace of Stilton.

My visit to Stichelton also confirmed what I had already learned during my time at dairies: cheesemakers are wonderfully generous, patient, and giving people. Even though I was just "helping" for a day or two at the farm, I was welcomed warmly by the four other workers, and they patiently explained procedures to me and put up with my inexperience. One even laughed when I exhibited my usual lack of control with a hose and blasted her, instead of a cheese-encrusted spruce plank, with water. The head cheesemaker, Joe Schneider, invited me to stay at his house for two nights, and his wife Audre cooked veggie dinners for me, baked scones for breakfast, and made gin and tonics with fancy Fever Tree tonic water. At the end of my stay, everyone thanked me for my "help," but it should have been me thanking them for their generosity.

Making an unpasteurized blue cheese that is Stilton in everything but name also forced me to revisit the politics and difficulties in protecting the identity of a regional food. The use of the name Stilton, unlike Cheddar, is strictly enforced by the European Union. This is good and bad, and I am not sure how I weigh in. The good: a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) ensures that the integrity of a special, regional food can't be compromised by one that's been inferiorly made outside a designated geographical area. There will never be a Stilton produced in Wisconsin or Denmark; when you buy Stilton, you know you are buying a traditional cheese that was made in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire, with locally sourced milk. The PDO not only protects the food product's name but also its history. The bad: something can be lost with rigid definitions. In this case, it's the very traditional way that this blue cheese was made, viz. with unpasteurized milk. As a result, Stichelton can't be called Stilton even though this is the way this cheese was historically made. The flip side of this is that Cheddar cheeses that are made with unpasteurized milk with pint starters and aged in muslin aren't distinguished from cheeses made in dairies that produce more in a day than what small farms make in a year. And the other side of this is that the widespread use of the name Cheddar has ensured its worldwide success. Everyone knows about Cheddar cheese.

What to do? Let everyone into the party or just a selected few?

Great Cheddar Moments, New Zealand, Part 2

2009-08-19T15:09:00.011-04:00

The South Island of New Zealand is like one big U.S. National Park, but with world-class vineyards, friendly and generous folks who live there year round, and an abundant amount of Cheddar. With so many stunning outdoor spots, a visit to New Zealand tends to be full of activity: hiking, climbing, surfing, kayaking, fishing, cycling, glacier walking, camping, and beer guzzling. What better way to restore yourself after all this exertion in the fresh air than a wee hunk of Cheddar cheese? I can't, and that's why my great Cheddar moments in New Zealand came in tandem with enjoying the great outdoors.

1. In part 1 of this post, I described my first full day in New Zealand, when I spent the morning hiking up the grassy headlands along the coast, south of Christchurch, without any coffee or breakfast, and came back down to the town of Sumner three hours later, where I gobbled a cheese and herb muffin, my first in New Zealand. With this hike and muffin, my Kiwi adventures had began.

2. It wasn't just Cheddar that brought me to New Zealand. It was also its wine. A fan of the crisp and fruity sauvignon blancs from Marlborough, I dreamed of exploring this wine region. When I learned from a friend of a friend in Melbourne that you could bike from vineyard to vineyard, I realized that this trip could become a reality. Anxious about driving, especially when there's wine tasting involved, I couldn't explore the area by car. Public transport wasn't an option either. There wasn't any. A bike was perfect--safer than driving, it provided me with much-needed exercise and a chance to sober up between vineyards. And such a lovely way to get around the dry and breezy valley and enjoy the stunning scenery! I spent two full days biking to almost every vineyard in the region. On the second day I splurged on a multi-course lunch at one of the few estates that offer meals. I arrived hot and sweaty from biking full speed in the heat and wind to arrive on time. The long, delicious meal provided plenty of time recover. Key to this was a slice of very young Cheddar (perhaps too young, even by the cheesemaker's own admission), from local Sherrington Grange, that had been aged in bee's wax, from the cheesemaker's very own hives. It lacked the complex flavors of an aged Cheddar, but it was yummy and milky and I appreciated that it was made locally by the Harper women and that you could eat the wax. After polishing off everything on my plate(s), I staggered back to my bike and hopped on. By the next vineyard, my bulging stomach was less full and I was ready for another tasting of wine.

3. In between my two days of biking around the Marlborough wine region, I went out for a boat ride on the Marlborough Sounds. My hosts were an extended Kiwi family, whom I had met just the night before at a local English-style pub, the Cork and Keg. Two English couples came along as well to fish. The day out on the sounds was great for a number of reasons. First, it got me to the sounds. Until David offered to take me out in his boat, I was stressing about how I was going to get there on my own. If time weren't an issue, I would have taken a few days to hike the Queen Charlotte Track, but time was an issue; I didn't have enough of it in New Zealand. How could I go to Marlborough and not go to the Marlborough Sounds, I fretted. Another bonus was that I got to meet a real, live local family, who took me on board, so to speak. Our time together wasn't limited to the trip on the water; the next morning, I toured the bountiful farmer's market in Blenheim with them and then went over to their house that evening for dinner. To top it all off, I got to eat Cheddar sandwiches, Kiwi style, on the boat. There was the pineapple and cheese sandwich that I had bought that morning at the local dairy, i.e., the convenience store, and then there were all the sandwich fixings that the Bryces generously shared with me: New Zealand block Cheddar that one sliced with a wee nifty wire cutter available at supermarkets (which I forgot to buy to bring back to the U.S.), lettuce and tomato, tamari roasted seeds, hummus, and an assortment of chutneys and thick, flavorful spreads. I made more than one sandwich so I could try as many combinations as possible, all washed down with cans of beer while sitting on the deck in the sun, gazing out at the wooded hills sloping steeply down to the water. A great day out, even if no fish were caught.

4. Can beer drinking be considered an energetic outdoor activity? How about walking to the Montieth's Brewery in Greymouth, instead of taking the van from the hostel? Well, Eowyn, Brian, and I certainly got a workout from drinking numerous glasses of beer at the end of the corporate-feeling tour of the South Island brewery. Having gone for the gold, we needed food. Instead of joining the tour group at an all-you-can-eat barbecue, which didn't tempt us non-meat eaters, we went to a local chippie, as recommended by the tour guide. We each ordered the veggie burger and fries with garlic sauce. Only after I had ordered another burger the next day, before my train to the Southern Alps, did I realize that there was no veggie patty on this sandwich of grilled goodness; it was just a thick square of processed cheese, onions, a slice of pineapple and beetroot, and a fried egg on a hamburger roll. No matter: it was a satisfyingly sloppy, oozing mess of a sandwich that vegetarians rarely get to enjoy. We had the "Cheddar" to thank for cementing most of the fillings together. And we had the beer and the Central Otago Chardonnay to thank for keeping us smiling as we struggled to get everything into our mouths.

5. If I could fool myself into believing that biking to vineyards, sitting on a boat, and walking to a brewery tour were action-packed pursuits, I was certainly in need of some real exercise by the end of my trip to New Zealand. It came in the daring form of hiking up Avalanche Peak, in visibility that was so poor that I actually turned around, before reaching the summit. I turned around again when I came across another solo female hiker. We had met before, a few hours earlier, when we were registering at the Department of Conservation before doing the physically challenging climb. We teamed up and reached the summit together. It was a stunning view from the top. The clouds finally lifted to show the whole range of the Southern Alps and a glacier glowing blue on a mountain to the southwest. After waiting for some more clouds to clear, it was time to head back down. The sign at the base of Scotts Track, one of the two ways to reach the 1,833-meter peak, says that it takes 3 to 4 hours to reach the top. I did the whole climb, up and down, in 4 hours. I had to. I was catching a train later that afternoon to head back to Christchurch. This meant that I had to boogie. It also meant that by the time I made it back down to my hostel in the quaint village of Arthur's Pass, I was knackered and my legs were jelly. Guess what I had to restore my energy. Cheddar cheese, of course, but on a veggie pizza, left over from a rather lonely dinner the night before. It was tremendously satisfying, especially since I had a cold Monteith's Dark Beer with it. That was New Zealand: a tramp (a hike), Cheddar, and a beer...and a two-hour-late train. But it's all good.

Masala Cheddar

2009-08-04T08:12:00.003-04:00

If you are looking for great Indian food outside the subcontinent, look no farther than. . . . Well, actually, you have to look pretty far. Not as far as India, but to a place that's nevertheless remote, in the northernmost part of Britain. I am not talking about John o' Groats in Scotland (which isn't, by the way, the most northerly spot on mainland Britain; it's nearby Dunnet Head), but Shetland, a group of islands over a hundred miles away. Traveling by ferry to Lerwick, the island's administrative center, from Aberdeen in Scotland or Kirkwall on Orkney takes almost as long as flying to India, about twelve hours.

The meals that Deidre and I shared (on the same evening) at Ghurka Kitchen and Raba, both in Lerwick, were some of the best South Asian dishes we've eaten. The veggies were fresh, not frozen; the spices, too, were fresh and well-balanced. Each bite was delightful and delicious, as well as surprising. Who would have thought that Asian food could be this good on an island in Scotland?

We started off the evening at Ghurka Kitchen, after a long day of taking three buses and two ferries to reach a nature reserve and its charming puffins on the island of Unst, nearly the northernmost point in Britain. Our plan was to share one dish there and another at Raba so that we could sample the food of both restaurants on our last night on Shetland. After a steady diet of oatcakes and Scottish cheddar for breakfast and lunch and chips, with fish or in a white roll (hmmmm...chip butty), for dinner, we needed variation and vegetables. Ghurka Kitchen, as its name suggests, specializes in Nepali cuisine. There we shared a thick curry of lamb and turnips, scooped up with nan bread and washed down with Old Scatness, a bitter made with an ancient type of barley, bere. It's from the island's brewery, Valhalla, located in Unst, making it Britain's most northerly brewery.

From there we returned to our hostel to plan the next leg of our trip, touring the distilleries on Islay, and then went out again, to Raba, where we greedily ordered an appetizer (chickpeas with puri, a combo I used to eat for breakfast in Varanasi) and two main dishes with chili nan (saag paneer and a mixed vegetable curry). As at Ghurka Kitchen, the food was delicious, but we couldn't finish it. Our young waiter, whose family is from Asaam and who had a charming Shetland accent, obligingly packed up the leftovers for us. The next night Deidre and I ate them on the overnight ferry to Aberdeen (see photo above). We savored the dishes almost as much as at the restaurant, proving that the food was indeed good and that our appreciation for it wasn't influenced by its novelty.

Two nights later we were on Islay. In Port Ellen was another Indian restaurant. Could it be as exceptional as the ones on Shetland? The answer is no. The food was oily; the vegetables frozen; the spices rough. On top of that, the kitchen lacked authentic ingredients. Instead of real paneer, which is difficult to get on Islay (but it was available on Shetland), it had to resort to Cheddar. As curious as I was to try this, we steered clear of the saag paneer, with the waiter's guidance, and ordered saag aloo instead.

So, what does this all have to do with Cheddar? Just a wee bit. It shows that woman can't live by Cheddar alone and that Cheddar can be, in a pinch, Indian.

Cheddarnaut

2009-08-02T08:06:00.007-04:00

If you thought it crazy of me to give up my job and apartment in New York City to chase Cheddar around the globe for ten months, what about launching a 300-gram hunk of it into space?

What lengths--and heights--people will go to to promote farmhouse Cheddar!

(Thanks to Cailin and Ben for sharing this high-flying news item with me.)

Tales of a Curd Addict

2009-07-10T17:29:00.005-04:00

(Sorry to be sideways again; the camera I bought in Dubai Duty Free to replace the one that was stolen from a pub in London in December is crashing and burning and doing strange things, like making pictures turn sideways.)

I'll finish my reflective blog posting about New Zealand soon. But first I want to talk about cheese curds.

I'm addicted to them.

Luckily, they aren't illicit, and my addiction won't send me to a rat-infested cell in Bangkok or force me to get pregnant in a Lao prison to avoid a death sentence for drug smuggling. But they will keep me hanging around a cheesemaking room longer than is healthy or helpful.

While working at Isle of Mull Cheese this past June, I timed my second and final break of the day to guarantee that I would be around the cooling table to score some loose curds before they were scooped into molds or cleaned away with a very hot water jet. Once I came over to the cooling table too early for my score and nearly caught my hand in one of the blades that turns the curds to mix in the salt evenly. My alarmed coworker told me I should wear a bell so that he would know when I was approaching.

Munching salty and squeaky curd that was still gently oozing warm whey was the highlight of my day and I allowed myself to think (probably erroneously) that doing so was my right--the payoff for working in the dairy.

A week ago today was the last time on my Great Cheddar Adventure that I got to eat cheese curds straight from the cooling table (see sideways photo above). Almost more than I'll miss an unlimited supply of fresh, unpasteurized milk and merry beers with my coworkers in Mull, I am going to miss those cheese curds.

My addiction for the freshest curds (not the ones sold in plastic bags in Canada) might send me back to work in a dairy. In the meantime, I'll dilute my dairy desires by drinking whisky with Deidre in Scotland. (We're on Shetland right now).

Great Cheddar Moments, New Zealand, Part 1

2009-06-28T12:40:00.006-04:00

This is the first of two posts reflecting on my great Cheddar moments in New Zealand.

When I first arrived in New Zealand in early February, I felt out of sorts. I was alone, whereas in Australia, where I had just flown from, I was always in the company of friends. I was chilled; the temperature in Christchurch was half of what it had been in Melbourne (21 C vs 42 C). I had no agenda; in Australia I had people to see, places to be.

Aimless, I spent my first evening in New Zealand gazing at the gentle waves of Sumner beach and the surfers in full wet suits riding them. The rest of the long evening stretched ahead of me, and I had no idea what to do with it. When you travel alone it can be a problem figuring out how to spend your evenings. Dinner normally fills a good chunk of the time, but I had ruined the chance of that by anxiously gobbling a variety of roasted nuts as I watched the surfers and let my mind whirl. Some of the nuts--the salty mixed ones--had come from Andrea, some--the over-roasted pistachios--from a bar in Brighton, near Melbourne, that I went to with Andrea and Claire the night before, and some--the raw almonds--from a farmers' market in Melbourne. I wasn't even hungry (I had eaten two cheese sandwiches on the plane, made from the 5-kilo stash that Will Studd had given me a few days earlier); I was unsettled.

To do something, I drank a cocktail at a restaurant that overlooked the chilly beach and then went on the Internet at my backpackers in Sumner. I checked a few e-mails and the bus times to the Marlborough wine region and then confirmed that the exchange rate was as good as I thought it was, 1 USD = 2 NZD. It was the first favorable exchange rate of my trip; everywhere else had been bruisers. And then I made a plan for the next day. I was going to go for a run along the beach. The exercise would settle my nerves and help me lose some the weight I had gained.

Without coffee or the complimentary white toast with butter and Marmite, I headed out from the backpackers to the esplanade along the beach and started to run. It was slow going and frustrating. I felt stiff and was in a bit of pain from the tightness of my muscles and the lack of support from my worn sneakers. I ran the long curve of the esplanade until it ended at Scarborough beach, where it became a sidewalk that climbed steeply into the headlands. I alternated running and walking up the hill. At the top, which has stunning views of the small, exclusive town of Sumner, the water, and the headlands, I had planned to run back down, but I decided to carry on. I abandoned running and walked briskly along the trail that brought me down to secluded Taylors Mistake Bay and then back up again into the grassy headlands that rose above the sea. I was worried about becoming cranky from lack of coffee and food, but I encouraged myself to be in the moment and carry on.

The scenery was stunning, and my heart lightened. It was good to be in New Zealand.

Back at Scarborough beach about three hours later, I stopped at a cafe, wittily called Scarborough Fare. My flat white couldn't come fast enough. I also eagerly awaited a cheese muffin with herbs. I was so fatigued from the extended walk that I didn't savor the taste of the muffin, but it was good. Yes, I thought to myself, not only was New Zealand as beautiful as I had heard, but it had Cheddar cheese like I had hoped.

It was my first cheese muffin, but by no means was it my last. No matter what town I was in I could find a bakery or a cafe that sold cheese muffins or scones. The muffins in the photo to the left are from the farmer's market in Dunedin. This meant that all my days in New Zealand started with Cheddar cheese; all in all, twenty-three great Cheddar moments.

Great Cheddar Moments, U.K.

2009-06-21T10:23:00.001-04:00

Only six weeks of my Great Cheddar Adventure remain. For many, a six-week holiday is a lovely, extended period of time, but for me, who's been away for thirty-eight weeks now, it seems woefully short. The time will disappear too quickly. That's the nature of time, isn't it? Things--life--start off slowly and then, at a certain point, race to the end.

As my adventure draws to a close, I've been reflecting on my most memorable Cheddar moments. Most of them have been either in the U.K. or New Zealand. I'll share them with you, but in two separate posts so that I don't overwhelm you, dear reader. (As a reminder, I've already written about unexpected meals with Cheddar in Germany, Poland and Spain, all the way back in October.)

1. The hands-down highlight was working at Neal's Yard Dairy in London for two months. There are six reasons why: Montgomery's, Keen's, Lincolnshire Poacher, Hafod, Westcombe, and Isle of Mull. These are the names of six of the best Cheddar cheeses in the U.K. (and many would say the world; see photo of three of them on display at Neal's Yard Dairy), and I could taste them each and every day. Not only could I eat them, but I could also handle them, care for them, make customers and friends happy with them, and make lunch with them. A particularly yummy lunch involved Montgomery's, North Staffs oatcakes, Rosebud Preserve's Old Yorkshire Chutney, and a George Foreman grill. The oatcakes from North Staffordshire aren't the hard, cracker-like ones from Scotland; they're more like spongy pancakes made with a combination of of wheat flour and oatmeal. For my lunch break, I put one onto the grill, spread it with chutney, added sliced Cheddar, rolled it up like an enchilada, and then closed the grill. And waited. After a few minutes, the outside of the oatcake got crispy and the Montgomery's Cheddar melted, becoming sweeter and richer. The warm chutney had acidity to balance the sweetness of the cheese and raisins to complement it. If I wasn't going to be eating cheese for the rest of the afternoon, I would have made another one. (Other memorable lunches at work: North Staff oatcakes with melted Sparkenhoe Leicester and fresh sage leaves; toasted English stick [like a French baguette] with pungent and smoky Ardrahan from West Cork.) Limitless access (well, within reason) to these Cheddars is one of the many things I will miss about working at Neal's Yard Dairy. I hope that one day I'll be able to work there again.

2. Porridge probably doesn't get too many people exicited, but how about a bowl of it made with Scottish oatmeal that has been soaked overnight in unpasteurized whole milk, cooked with more milk and young, tangy Cheddar (only about a week old, also made with unpasteurized milk), and finished with black pepper? Let me tell you that this was so satisfying that I kept thinking about the bowl I had enjoyed at lunch, while I was walking the length of Loch Frisa (about 10 km) later that afternoon. I've made it twice since, including this morning before going to the local producers' market in Dervaig and then for another walk, this one through Glen Gorm to Loch Tor and then onto standing stones (very appropriate today, the solstice). The dish is like a rough but very rich polenta, and I can imagine warring highlanders or miserably cold Roman soliders fortifying themselves with it. That's what I am going to miss about working at Isle of Mull Cheese--easy access to unpasteurized milk (when the tanks are full) and their Cheddar(-like) cheese. With walks and dairy products as good as these, I might never leave!

3. Cheddar is the traditional cheese of Somerset. The traditional drink is (hard) cider. Put the two of them together and you've got a very happy Diana. One of the best afternoons I've had in the U.K. was spent with my friend Stony at Land's End Farm in Mudgley (what a name for a village!), site of Wilkins Farmhouse Cider, after spending the late morning hiking the rim of Cheddar Gorge. When we first arrived at the farm, we were the only two people there, besides Mr. Wilkins himself, an older gentleman with ruddy cheeks and a blue jumpsuit, and a quiet man sitting in a dark corner of the barn, drinking cider from a glass mug. Soon, Stony and I were sitting with Dave, who poured me half pints of medium cider (six in total for me that afternoon!), by mixing sweet and dry cider directly from the large upright barrels. It was a Friday afternoon, and locals starting arriving, either to stick around for a few half pints and stories in the barn's makeshift lounge or to fill up plastic containers with cider to bring home. When I told Mr. Wilkins that I was researching Cheddar cheese, he brought Stony and me a complimentary plate of Westcombe and Green's Cheddar with crackers and a bowl of bracing pickled onions (see photo). It was the taste of Somerset. And how good it was! The cheese is probably what saved me that afternooon; I was sober enough to end the day by walking around a stone circle in the Mendip Hills. That's one of the many things about England that I'll miss, real cider and the real Cheddar to go with it.

4. I'm a woman who likes to eat. And to drink. And I believe that the two of them are best done together, especially when one part of the equation comes for free. The country which does this best is Spain. This past October I finally made it there (what took me so long?), and what I thoroughly appreciated was that when you ordered a drink at a bar, you also got an extraordinarily tasty treat (pinxo, tapa), for free. Why don't other countries do this? The closest you come to this in the States is free tortilla chips with your margarita or pretzles with your beer. In England, not much comes for free (except for healthcare). To satisfy my need to eat something when I drink a pint, I usually buy dry roasted peanuts or a packet of crisps. These options don't sound enticing (especially when compared to the Iberian gourmet tidbits given for free), but sometimes after a long day of work or even a long walk, nothing is more satisfying than a pint and a packet of crisps. I often opt for the flavor of cheese and onion. Need I mention that the "cheese" in "cheese and onion" is based on Cheddar? It ain't manchego, cabrales, or tetilla, that's for sure. But Cheddar is the cheese of England, and of the world, and it's a great flavor for crisps. That's what I'm going to miss about my time in England, going for a pint with coworkers or friends and getting a packet of cheese and onion crips to share.

The Cheddaring Workout

2009-06-17T16:23:00.005-04:00

Cheddaring is hard work. I've seen men with biceps as large as Rafael Nadal's sweat doing it. I myself become exhausted and cranky, especially if I've gotten up at 4:30 in the morning to be at the dairy by 5:45 a.m. What pulls me through is the payoff of a stray tidbit of tangy and salty fresh cheese curd, as well as the need to save face. I may be a woman, with scrawny biceps, but I can still cheddar!

After months of overindulgence (I know, I go on and on about this), I was looking forward to four full weeks of cheddaring at Isle of Mull Cheese in Scotland. It was going to be my workout, one to tone my arms and burn off excess calories, or at least the ones from eating fresh cheese curd.

But it wasn't to be. Isle of Mull Cheese doesn't cheddar their Cheddar. They stir it. And they do it with a machine. Mechanically stirring the curd doesn't develop anyone's biceps.

Instead of letting the curd particles knit together after the whey has been drained off and then cutting the curd into thick slabs and flipping and stacking these slabs every fifteen minutes or so (see photo above from Westcombe Dairy), the cheesemaker on Mull lets the curd particles rest in a big heap in the center of the cooling table and then periodically mixes it with rotating paddles. All he does is push a button.

This was a real surprise to me. I assumed that they cheddared their cheese, as most farmhouse producers do. It's usually just in the large-scale production of Cheddar that the curd gets stirred. There goes that workout I was hoping for.

I am not the only one who's surprised. One of the guys in the dairy, a young Aussie from Perth who ultimately wants to make cheese from the milk of merino sheep, told me, "Everyone's spun out when they find out that we don't cheddar our cheese." I love that Aussie expression.

Even Will Studd, the master of cheese in Australia who came to the farm on Sunday with a camera crew to film a segment for his great travel series about cheese, Cheese Slices, was "spun out." He didn't say this in so many words, but he called me over to the cooling table, where he was standing with the head cheesemaker, watching the blades spin around, stirring up the mass of curd particles. I was at the other side of the dairy, larding truckles and dressing them in wee strips of muslin.

"Di, you're the Cheddar expert. What makes a cheese a Cheddar?"

I was in a tricky position here. Do I give Will the answer that he was looking for, viz. that a true Cheddar should be hand-cheddared. Or should my answer be more diplomatic in front of the head cheesemaker?

"Well, I think a Cheddar should be cheddared, but Chris just told me yesterday that stirring the curd has the same effect as cheddaring. By the time the curds are milled, they have the same cooked chicken breast texture that cheddared curd does. Also, Mull doesn't call their cheese a Cheddar."

"No, we would never call our cheese a Cheddar. Other people do, but we don't." There was a hint of frustration and defensiveness in Chris's voice. I am sure she has to explain her stirred-curd method more often than she would like.

"It's good that you don't. I wouldn't want you to. Cheddar's made in Somerset, in England, and you're up here on an island in Scotland. You've got something completely different and unique going on."

Ah, so Will was giving his definition of Cheddar.

"So, Will, can Cheddar only be made in Somerset?"

"That's for you to figure out and write in your book," Will winked.

My book. Since my body's not getting a work out, my mind might as well. I'll have plenty of time to do that while my thoughts drift as I lard truckles and wax 200-gram wheels of flavored Cheddar. What is Cheddar cheese?

But maybe they'll let me scoop the chipped curd out of the cooling table and into the hoops. That's a workout, too. And they do that by hand.

Blessed are the Cheesemakers

2009-06-10T03:51:00.001-04:00

“Have you ever thought about becoming a cheesemaker?”

It was Sam Holden of Hafod Cheese who asked me this question. When he did, I was leaning over into the dairy's small, circular wooden vat--about the size of a hot tub--which Sam and his wife Rachel had picked up with their car in Holland and took back to Wales on the Eurostar. We were in the middle of cheddaring, or flipping and stacking blocks of curd, heavy with whey.

I was slightly taken aback. Never had the question been posed to me in this way. Usually people ask me, "So do you want to become a cheesemaker?" when they are trying to figure out why I am visiting Cheddar dairies all over the world. They assume it’s because I want to make my own cheese. I tell them no; I am trying to write a travel book about Cheddar, with a good dose of history about the world's most popular cheese type. Sam’s phrasing was different and I couldn’t give my typical response. He almost seemed to be suggesting that I give it a go.

I finished flipping and stacking the last block of cheese curd and then stood upright in my white wellington boots and answered Sam.

“Ah, no. I mean, what cheese would I make?”

That’s the only answer I could come up with. It was an honest response. For someone who is a poor decision maker and who loves all kinds of cheese, how could I select just one cheese to make? Would it be a hard, aged cheese or a soft, young one? Would it be made with cow’s, sheep’s, goat’s, or buffalo’s milk or a combination of them? Would it be a blue cheese, an orange washed rind, or one with a white bloomy rind? Believe it or not, it wouldn’t be a Cheddar cheese. I could never improve on what’s already out there.

Another reason it was difficult to answer Sam was because it was a genuine query and I was tempted by what he was proposing. Why don’t I become a cheesemaker? Sam and Rachel’s life in central Wales is one that I respect and greatly admire. Still quite young (around thirty years old), they gave up London, where they had studied and lived for almost 10 years, as well as their office jobs there, which paid them well, to live in the Welsh countryside. They were done with city life, and they wanted to help make Sam's father's farm economically viable. Bwlchwernen Fawr, which began as commune in the 1970s, as things did back then, is the longest standing registered organic dairy farm in Wales. Sam and Rachel have a good quality of life on the farm and they are doing good things by showing how to farm sustainably. And they make a damn good cheese, Hafod, a buttery and rich Cheddar-like cheese, made with raw, organic milk from the farm's herd of Ayrshire cows.

Could I do it? Would I do it? Because of Sam I am now indeed thinking about becoming a cheesemaker. But for now I am spending my days waxing hockey puck-sized rounds of shredded and flavored cheese on the Isle of Mull in Scotland.

Orange Cheddar

2009-06-02T09:47:00.001-04:00

If you hail from Vermont, you probably like your Cheddar milky white in color. If you’re from the South, you’ve preferred orange-colored Cheddar since the 1700s. And if you live in New York State or Wisconsin, you’ve got your pick, white or orange. Same choice goes for the rest of the U.S. and even the rest of the world.

Why the choice? Why does Cheddar cheese come in these two colors?

No one really knows. But there are theories.

It’s pretty easy to explain white Cheddar. Since milk is white, uncolored Cheddar gives the impression that it’s the most natural.

But this isn’t totally true. If cows feed on grass, they ingest and metabolize beta-Carotene which gives their milk a slight golden hue. Instead of invoking cows in a field, white Cheddar can signify that cows are eating silage and not grass, their preferred food source. Most dairy cows these days don't eat grass, but in the past, cows used to eat silage only during the winter months and grass the rest of the year. Cheddar cheese, or any cheese, made from winter milk doesn't have the pleasing light yellow color that summer milk does. To make it seem as though their cheeses were made with summer milk, cheesemakers used the natural food color annatto, the seed of the achiote plant from South America, to impart an orange color. This is one of the theories about why Cheddar was dyed orange, and it’s the one you most frequently come across.

Another theory about orange Cheddar is one that I heard during a group training session for new cheesemongers working the busy Christmas season at Neal's Yard Dairy. By coloring their cheeses orange, small cheesemakers of yore hoped to make their products stand out among all the other traditional hard English cheeses in a local shop or market. Orange is certainly eye catching.

While I tend to subscribe to the former theory, this other hypothesis could be onto something. Orange is used in England like in no other country, as far as I can tell. While orange in the States is associated with outdated kitchens of the 1970s, fast food restaurants until recently, and Home Depot today, you come across it quite frequently in England, especially in uniforms, train tickets, promotional posters, and logos (think easyJet). There's even a mobile phone company called Orange. For the English, maybe orange is both distinctive and familiar. Orange-colored cheese may be good marketing.

Traditional Cheddar makers today don't color their cheeses, so if you see an orange block of Cheddar, it was most likely manufactured on an industrial scale. A white Cheddar, however, is no indication that it wasn’t. It was probably made the same way the orange block next to it in the supermarket was, but just not dyed. A light yellow Cheddar with a rind is the one to go for if you are looking for a cheese with complex flavor.

Don’t be wary of all orange cheeses. Some British territorial cheeses, e.g. Cheshire, Double Gloucester, and Red Leicester (see photo above), still come in varying shades of orange even when they are made laboriously by hand using unpasteurized milk and cloth bandaging. And why’s that? It’s just the color that these cheeses have become associated with. They probably wouldn’t taste the same if they didn’t appear orange even though the coloring agent, annatto, doesn’t impart any flavor. Why's this? Visual clues inform taste sensations. For instance, if I gave you a lollipop that was apple flavored but colored purple, chances are you wouldn’t be able to identify the fruit. You’d be thinking grape or raspberry, but not apple. I remember when I was in 8th grade, a friend dyed my milk green on St. Patrick's Day. I couldn’t drink it. Even though it couldn't have tasted any different from white milk, it tasted wrong. I kept expecting a different taste that didn't come.

Yellowish handmade Cheddars are the ones for me, but if I had to chose a white or yellow slice of American cheese for a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, I’m going with orange. It’s what tastes right to me, no matter how wrong that may be.

Cheddar, Cider, Circles, and a Cathedral

2009-05-24T15:25:00.003-04:00

“Go on. Giver her a bit. She’s got to learn to like Cheddar. She’s from Somerset.”

The woman working at the Saturday market in Wells, England's smallest cathedral city, obliged. She speared a small cube of cheese with a toothpick and gave it to the father who was holding his young blond-haired daughter, probably three of four years old, in his arms.

The girl didn’t do Somerset proud, as her father had hoped. She grimaced and then rubbed her head into her father’s shoulder.

“Ah! See, she doesn’t like it,” smiled the woman behind her covered stall.

The father looked as his daughter, who had lifted her head up and was eyeing the pies and sponge cakes next to the different types of Cheddar at the stall.

“Ah. That’s all right. She’ll learn.”

Cheddar may be the world’s most popular cheese type, but it is essentially the cheese of Somerset. Before being produced all around the globe, Cheddar was made only on small farms in the southwest of England. It is in this county where Cheddar got its name. There’s a small but very touristy village in Somerset called Cheddar. For centuries people have gone on holiday there, not to eat the cheese but to explore the area’s dramatic limestone gorge and caves. The theory is that people would visit the village, eat the local hard cheese after a strenuous hike in the gorge, and then return home, telling people that they had eaten some delicious cheese while in Cheddar. The regional cheese got associated with the specific location.

A Great Cheddar Adventure, such as the one that I’m on, necessitated a pilgrimage to Cheddar Gorge. After spending a week at the three uber-traditional dairies that make Cheddar in Somerset (Westcombe, Keen’s, and Montgomery’s) and days on the Internet at my mother’s cousin’s place in Bath, I took myself off to Wells (probably to my cousin’s great relief!) to meet my friend Stony Grunow, who, like me, grew up in New Jersey with an English mum and has now moved to London.

In one day, driving around in a car that Stony rented in London (despite a driving lesson, I am still too nervous to drive in the U.K.), we “did” quintessential Somerset. We hiked the rim of Cheddar Gorge in the spring sunshine (but didn’t go into the caves; we were unwilling to pay 16 pounds sterling and we were put off by how touristy and tacky the village was), ate Cheddar made in Cheddar (though it wasn’t particularly good), drank real cider (a drink specially linked with Somerset) at a ramshackle but very popular cider mill, and explored two stone circles (see photo above) in the glow of the early evening sun. Back in Wells, we raced off to a pub before it stopped serving meals at 9 p.m. and then walked around the medieval cathedral, spectacularly illuminated at night.

There you have it--Cheddar, cider, (stone) circles, and a cathedral--the enduring tastes and history of Somerset.

For pictures and more descriptions of the village of Cheddar and the cider mill (and the problem we had with the rental car), visit Stony’s Web site.

Flipping Cheddar

2009-05-21T15:48:00.005-04:00

This is not a good look for me--the jumpsuit stained with mold and mites, the mask so I don't breathe in any molds and mites that aren’t already rubbed thoroughly into my jumpsuit, and the blue hairnet (to protect the cheese from my hair, not my hair from the mites.)

But what could be more beautiful than a store filled with 225 or so wheels of Quickes Cheddar made with unpasteurized milk?

I spent a happy but tiring afternoon on my first day at Quickes Traditional in Devon, not far from Exeter, turning 185 25-kilo (over 50 lb) wheels of maturing Cheddar. Until they are stripped of their cloth rinds and cut with a cheese wire into manageable pieces, the wheels need to be turned regularly so that they don’t stick to the wooden shelving and so the moisture that remains inside of the hardening cheese gets evenly distributed.

You may wonder what happened to the other 40 wheels and why I didn’t turn them. I hate to admit it, but I just wasn’t strong enough for the task that I had volunteered for. On top of that, I was knackered. Up at 5 a.m. to report to the dairy by 5:45, I spent the morning larding and dressing truckles, helping with the cheddaring, and dipping the truckles that had been made and pressed that same morning into brine and then putting them back into their wee molds for another pressing.

The neglected wheels were up on the top shelves. There wasn’t enough space between them and the ceiling to flip them 180 degrees by tipping them gently over onto their sides. This method would have involved the least amount of wrestling with gravity. The only way to do the job was a risky one. Standing on the top of a wooden step ladder, I’d have to lift up each cheese, bring it toward me, flip it over while getting more mites and mold on me, and then heave it back onto the top shelf. I might have been able to do it if I could have rested the cheese on a shelf below in between the lifting, turning, and heaving, but there wasn’t. I successfully managed to turn three or four in this way, but then I conceded that it wasn’t worth the risk. I was going to either drop a cheese or I was going to fall off the ladder. Not worth it.

It was good for me to get the exercise (I lifted almost a total of 10,000 pounds in less than two hours! Is that right?) since I am still flabby and untoned, but what was more important is that it helped me see why some small cheesemakers (e.g., Montgomery’s and Westcombe) are thinking of following the Swiss, French, and Americans in getting robots to vacuum and flip their artisanal cheeses. The vacuuming sucks up the mites. The custom-made robots, made by a quiet and thoughtful Swiss man, are expensive but in the long run they’ll save the cheesemakers money and will save the backs of their employees. And they won’t have to wear those jump suits.

Mighty, Mite-y Cheddar

2009-05-17T17:32:00.000-04:00

Did you have bad dreams about cheese mites after my last post?

If you didn't, you might after looking at this photo!

I'm surprised that I myself haven't had nightmares about cheese mites, especially after seeing them up close and too personal on the cloth rind of a large wheel of Keen's Cheddar. While visiting Moorhayes Farm in Somerset for a day in late April, I followed around George Keen in his enormous cheese store (that's where cheese is matured, not sold--that's a shop), while he ironed maturing Cheddars to get samples for a food lab. If I was lucky, he gave me some of his cheese, considered one of the best Cheddars in the world, to taste. What I wasn't expecting was a close encounter with cheese mites. It was clear that they were around. You could see brownish clumps of them on the exterior of the cheeses and also their dander, which looked like small piles of grayish dust, on the wooden shelves supporting the heavy wheels of cheese. In between ironing cheeses and putting the cheese plugs into sterile clear plastic bags, George spoke about how hard it is to get rid of cheese mites. So that I would know exactly what he and his cheeses were up against, George got a magnifying glass and put it up close to a cluster of them right on the moldy cloth rind. "Here, take a look." George held the magnifying glass as I moved in. I could see them clearly, like the picture above (taken from Wikipedia), but unlike the picture above, they were moving around, probably feasting on the molds. Frankly, it was gross seeing them squirm around. But I took another look. How could I not? It's like having to smell milk that's gone off after someone has told you it has.

Cheese mites aren't particular to Keen's cheese store. They're pretty much anywhere there are cheeses, especially hard ones, and molds. Wherever they are, they are a nuisance to cheesemakers and cheesemongers alike. In a cheese shop they don't look very good, making it seems as though the cheesemongers hadn't dusted in a while. Worse than that, cheese mites aggravate allergies, making skin and eyes itchy and even making it hard to breathe. Cheese-turning day, when the mites become airborne, isn't a popular day to work in a shop. In a cheese store, they can cause greater headaches, both physically and mentally. As mentioned in my earlier post, cheese mites can ruin an otherwise delicious cheese by making small portions of it turn blue (which is fine to eat--even good to eat--but supermarkets don't want blue Cheddar) or brown (which is not fine to eat, not one bit). Cheesemakers have to devote a lot of energy to getting rid of them.

So, how does one get rid of them? Until recently, cheesemakers successfully used a gas to thwart the attack of cheese mites on their cheeses, but it was banned by the E.U. for environmental reasons. Some tried using Diatomaceous earth since the ban, but it isn't totally effective at controlling the mites and it could, as I mentioned in the earlier posting, make the protective cloths come off the rinds, leaving the cheeses exposed to other problems. The only course of action for now is to vacuum the cheeses regularly to suck up the cheese mites and their dander and to petition the E.U. to let cheesemakers use that gas in their stores.

Why all this information about unsavory mites? I don't want to give you bad dreams or the creepy-crawlies. And I certainly don't want you to stop eating traditional cheeses. Keep in mind that by the time you buy your beautiful wedge of handmade Cheddar, wrapped up neatly in white cheese paper, the mighty threat of mites is over.

What I want you to know about is the huge amount of effort that goes into getting you a complex tasting Cheddar. Cheesemakers have to fight many battles before you, the cheese eater, win. They have to wage war against microscopic bugs, do battle with people trying to ban unpasteurized cheeses, and struggle against supermarkets who want their nonconformist cheeses to conform. If they give up the fight, the only cheeses you will be buying are ones that have been aged in plastic or wax, ones that Johnno at Keen's inimitably calls "crappy, tasteless stuff that people call cheese."

You don't want that do you? If you don't, then you will have to put up with some cheese mites, both on your cheese and in your dreams.

The Cheddar Blues

2009-05-14T12:55:00.001-04:00

When it comes to buying a block of Cheddar cheese from the supermarket, you’ve got a choice of two colors, white or orange. Pale buttercup yellow is also an option if you’re patronizing a speciality cheese shop and are splurging on a wedge of artisanal Cheddar.

But what about blue?

Chances are you’ve never seen a cut portion of Cheddar with streaks of blue, like spider veins, unless you’ve done something dreadful and bought a cheese flavored with blueberries. I wouldn’t be surprised if such a variety exists. At the Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company, the only folks, according to them, that still make a traditional Cheddar in the actual village of Cheddar in Somerset, they offer horrendous flavors like Marmite. Blueberry has to be part of someone's line of flavored Cheddars.

The “blueing” that you might find in a traditional, clothbound Cheddar is no gimmick. It’s the mark of a true Cheddar.

When traditionally made, each handmade wheel of Cheddar is wrapped in muslin cloth one or two days after it's been made. Before it's applied, the cloth is dipped in softened or melted lard; the sticky fat helps the cloth adhere to the rubbery exterior of the unripened cheese. This protective covering is permeable, allowing moisture to escape from the wheel of cheese while at the same time retaining enough moisture so that it doesn't completely dry out. People say that the cloth allows the cheese to breath; this is in stark contrast to how most Cheddar is aged--in plastic, which suffocates the cheese. If a cheese can breathe, good things happen. Provided it's been made and stored properly, Cheddar becomes less acidic and more complex-tasting.

Muslin, however, is not a perfect seal. As a 25-kilo wheel matures for twelve months or so, small fissures can develop inside the cheese, behind the cloth. This can happen because too much moisture has escaped and the natural rind cracks as it dries out. Another way that the cracks can happen is less savory. Nasty cheese mites, microscopic bugs that look like fine dust on the exterior of a cheese and on the shelves supporting the heavy cheeses, feast on the molds that naturally develop on the muslin. The tiny bugs don't stop their feasting with the superficial molds. They can carrying on eating the lard and then the cloth itself. Soon they find their way into the body of the cheese. Their munching attack can create unwanted paths into the body of the cheese. To keep the mites away, some traditional Cheddar makers have used diatomaceous earth, which only compounded the problem. Somehow this pesticide causes the muslin coverings to sag and pull away from the cheeses, thereby making them as vulnerable to cracks as the blasted mites did.

What does all this have to do with making a Cheddar cheese blue? If the surface of a cheese is exposed and it has thin fissures, oxygen can find its way into the cheese. This is what leads to the blueing in a clothbound Cheddar. Naturally present in the air are molds like Penicillium roqueforti. When they get into milk during cheesemaking, either intentionally, as happens with the make for Roquefort or Stilton, or unintentionally, these molds turn blueish-green when they come in contact with oxygen. This is why blue cheeses are pierced with needles as they age. This allows the oxygen to get in and create the desired blue color and taste.

Even though blueing isn't wanted in Cheddar cheeses, there is no way to avoid it, save "aging" the cheese in plastic, which is anything but traditional. Nevertheless, cheesemakers try all they can to limit the extent of blueing.

Why is blueing a problem if it can't be helped? The simple reason is that supermarkets don’t want blue Cheddar cheese, in the same way that they don’t want misshapen apples or less than orange oranges. Everything must be uniform and predictable.

Blueing is currently the the bane of cheddarmakers' existence, except for Jamie Montgomery’s because he doesn’t sell much of his prized cheeses to supermarkets. Extensive blueing can mean extensive financial loss since the supermarkets will reject cuts with traces of blue. The cheesemakers understandably go to great lengths to avoid it. At Keen’s, for example, they went through a period of wrapping their cheeses with several layers of cloth and lots of lard, effectively sealing the cheese, almost as if it were in plastic. This led to other problems. If the moisture can’t escape, the cheese can be too moist and acidic, and this is not the flavor Keen's is after in their cheeses. They are now trying new tactics.

It’s such a shame. It doesn’t have to be this way, all this worry about blueing. For example, Neal’s Yard Dairy, where I worked for a while, has the luxury of dealing directly with their customers. Unlike what happens at a supermarket, we cheesemongers can explain that blueing is a mark of a real farmstead Cheddar; it proves that the cheese wasn't aged in plastic. After the explanation, we urge our customers to taste the cheese to make sure it's to their liking. Usually it is. If it isn't, we find another section of the wheel without any blueing or we suggest another Cheddar. We sometimes carry up to five different Cheddars: Montgomery's, Keen's, Lincolnshire Poacher, Hafod, Westcombe, and Isle of Mull.

It would be great if supermarkets embarked on a similar consumer education plan. If they did, traditional cheesemakers could worry less about blueing and focus more on making their cheeses taste as exceptional as possible. It could help them get rid of their Cheddar blues.

The Flavors of Cheddar

2009-05-12T11:16:00.003-04:00

“Do you taste the dark notes?”

I wasn’t sure I did. But I had better try. I concentrated on the flavors that lingered in my mouth from a small piece of Cheddar--about the size of the tip of my pinky--that I had pinched from Jamie Montgomery’s cheese iron (see photo above for an example of a cheese iron, used by Tom Calver of Westcombe Dairy), pushed into a paste on the top of my mouth with my tongue, and swallowed.

I still couldn't tell. What were dark flavors supposed to taste like? They sounded like something Darth Vader would want in a cheese. They couldn’t be good. I understood that much from Jamie, who had told me that he assures Randolph Hodgson, when he's down from Neal’s Yard Dairy in London for a business visit, that he’s allowed to smell the core samples of these cheeses instead of tasting them because their flavors are so unpleasant. But what I was tasting didn’t seem all that bad to me. I was tempted to lie to Jamie, the man behind one of the best Cheddars in the world, and say, “Oh yes, I do. This cheese is awful!” When you don’t have a developed sense of taste, it’s easy to go along with whatever the professional taste makers say and not express your own judgment. I often take that path, but today I decided to be brave and honest. “Actually, it’s not that bad.”

Jamie, who was looking at handwritten tasting notes for a year’s worth of his Cheddars, deciding which wheel he should iron next to pull out a core sample for me to try, whipped his head around toward me and smiled, “I knew that you would say that!”

I was relieved. There was no look of disdain from Jamie. My admission probably confirmed what he probably had figured out about me and my poor palate. It also let him know that I wasn’t going to pretend to taste something I didn’t.

Jamie dashed off to another row in his massive cheese store, which holds 5,000 25-kg wheels of Cheddar, and ironed a second cheese. He pulled out the yellowish cylinder of cheese and moved energetically toward me. “Try this one.”

If the other cheese I had sampled was dark, this was one was bright. Before I could express this to Jamie, he coached me in what I was tasting. “Do you taste the difference in this one? It doesn’t have those dark flavors. It’s much brighter.”

“That’s what I was going to say!”

“This is a Cheddar that Randolph has selected for the American market. They like bright, acidic flavors.”

Randolph Hodgson, the managing director of Neal's Yard Dairy, travels down to Somerset regularly, as he's done since the mid 1980s, to visit Jamie’s store in North Cadbury. While there at Manor Farm, he samples a cheese from every batch made since his last visit and decides during the tastings which wheels he wants for retail, which ones he wants for wholesale, and which ones he wants for the American market. Each destination has a different flavor profile. The ones selected for his two shops in London, one near Borough Market and the other in Covent Garden, tend to have a sweet and nutty taste or hints of roast beef, and the ones for America are sharp and acidic.

Flavor is a difficult thing to quantify and agree upon. Different folks like different things. In many ways, there are no wrong flavors and no right ones. As James Keen, the cheesemaker at Keen’s Cheddar in Somerset, said to me the day before, “What I taste might not be what you are tasting.” Even if James and I were picking up the same flavors, we might not be able to express this to one another. Language could fail us. Articulating the complexities of flavors and textures is difficult and takes practice.

Flavor is everything when it comes to farmstead Cheddar cheeses. It’s what informs the ethos and, on a more practical level, the way Cheddar is made at the few remaining traditional dairies in the West Country. George Keen, James’ father, and Jamie Montgomery want their Cheddars to recall the taste of real Cheddar, that is, the cheeses of their grandparents, who lived in a time before bulk cheeses, or, what Johno, James’ young assistant, colorfully calls mass-produced rubber rubbish.

There is no way for them to know whether their cheeses hold the flavors of the past. The only thing they can go by is the reaction of people who try their handmade Cheddars. George Keen told me about two people he met at a local farmer’s market in Somerset. First, there was an older gentleman who relived a taste experience long forgotten when he sampled Keen’s Cheddar. “I remember that flavor,” he said appreciatively to George. The other was a woman whose eyes lit up and exclaimed, “Angels are dancing on my tongue!” after George gave her some of his Cheddar cheese. Jamie has his own story about a stooped older man who passed by him and his Cheddars at Neal’s Yard Dairy in Covent Garden. Jamie tried to get him to sample his cheese, but the gentleman retorted, “I gave up Cheddar thirty years ago.” Nobody gets by Jamie and his cheese, so, with a good deal of persistence, he got the grumpy man to try some. Jamie looked into his eyes as he ate it and saw a flicker of a memory lost. The man nodded and knowingly said, “Yeah. Yeah, that’s how Cheddar used to be.” Recalling that episode still gives Jamie the shivers. It confirms all his efforts.

Mary Quicke in Devon has a very specific flavor that she’s going for in her pasteurized, but handmade Cheddars. She’s very good at articulating it. "I want a Cheddar that’s creamy with a long-lasting finish." Everything that Mary does at her dairy is done to get her cheeses to realize this ideal flavor that's in her head.

Without flavor, Keen’s, Montgomery’s Quicke’s, and Westcombe would be just another Cheddar on the enormous worldwide market. Without flavor, they wouldn’t be able to command high prices for their handmade cheeses. And if they couldn’t do that, they wouldn’t be able to compete with the bigger, more industrial makers of Cheddar cheese. They are just too small. Flavor, then, is also about economics.

Jamie wasn’t done. He ran off energetically to the far wall of the store and hopped onto the second row of wooden shelves. From there he could iron a wheel on the third shelf above. He jumped down and returned to me. “This is probably the taste you are more familiar with.” He was referring to the clothbound wheels of Montgomery’s Cheddar that I used to sell at Neal’s Yard Dairy.

I was a bit nervous that I would miss what Jamie wanted me to enjoy in this particular cheese, but then the flavor hit me. It filled my whole mouth in the most satisfying way. It didn’t have the brightness of the earlier cheese, but it had a wide range of delicious flavors. After I swallowed it, the flavor kept going and going. The finish was long and complex, like a fine wine. I didn’t want to say anything. I didn’t want Jamie to say anything. I just wanted to enjoy the lingering flavor of this exceptional farmhouse Cheddar. With no sign that the sensation in my mouth would come to an end, I realized that this must be what Randolph calls a 12-mile cheese. That’s one that he can still taste and enjoy even after he’s driven 12 miles away from Manor Farm on his way back to London.

“Yeah,” I said to Jamie. “Yeah. That’s it!”

First Aged Cheddar in Ages

2009-05-05T06:33:00.005-04:00

Unlike my fellow Western travelers in Southeast Asia, I didn't miss cheese during my six weeks there in March & April. Hard to believe, I know, given my passion for fermented dairy products and how frequently other travelers say that they miss the stuff. It doesn't take much time away from home for them to start longing for cheese. As I might have mentioned in an earlier blog, Misty, a massage therapist from Toronto, craved cheese so much during her first week in Chiang Mai, where we were both taking an introductory course in the northern style of traditional Thai massage, that she took herself out alone to a Mexican meal in the vain hope of scoring a dairy fix. It didn't work. She got more beans than cheese. Kathy, a friend whom I had met last year in northeast Thailand who was now back at the same time as I was, told me that she would kill for some real cheese. She and her daughter Tulli had to settle for slices of processed cheese in their sandwiches. To be fair, they had been away from Australia for a long time, about four months. On the other side of the Mekong, in Laos, it was a bit easier to find dishes made with cheese, thanks to the lingering culinary legacy of French colonization. Fancy French restaurants in Louang Phabang, a charming UNESCO World Heritage city in Laos, promoted their cheese selections on large signs at their entrances, along with their offerings of French wines, to tempt visitors who were longing for their fromage. Those restaurants were out of my price range and beyond my own cravings. I didn't want cheese. Why would I want it when there were baskets of sticky rice, piles of salty fried seaweed, and bowls of spicy curries to eat? (But I confess that I had a crepe for breakfast that was filled with melted Cheddar. I had to, for research, of course. The other mornings I ate soup with rice noodles and leafy vegetables, fresh herbs, and lots of spicy heat and drank viscous coffee Lao sweetened with condescend milk.)

And there was probably the issue of my having overdosed on cheese for five months straight. My body couldn't handle it anymore. Goodness knows my burly thighs couldn't! I was on a dairy strike and even dreaded the thought of eating cheese. What was I going to do when I returned to England, the land of dairy delights?

I was going to take it slowly. This was easy to do at my mother's cousin's house in Surrey, not far from London. Diana and her husband were extremely generous in welcoming me into their home in the days before I left for Australia, New Zealand, and Asia, and in the days after. Diana has quite strict dietary requirements and doesn't have much dairy products in the house. In her fridge are goat's milk milk, yogurt, and butter, but no cheese or anything made with cow's milk. Or so I thought. This suited me just fine. I ate organic pumpkin butter and free range eggs (not at the same time) to get protein and only once craved a wee bit of cheese instead of another egg to go with the veggies that were right out of Diana and David's kitchen garden.

One afternoon Diana made a quiche, with leeks, eggs, and goat's milk yogurt in a nutty buckwheat flour crust. To my surprise she pulled out a knob of Cheddar from the fridge (where had it been hiding?) and grated it over one half of the quiche, for David and me. I had mixed feelings about the appearance of this cheese. On the one hand, I was happy to see Cheddar again and wished that I had had discovered the precious chunk earlier. And on the other hand, I feared I wasn't quite ready for it. It turned out I wasn't. Not even realizing it, when I cut myself a slice of quiche, as we sat at their outdoor table, soaking up the friendly spring sun, I took a portion from the non-cheese side. Diana had to point this out to me. With no cheese on my plate, I felt a bit deprived, and so took a very thin slice from the cheese side. It was good. Ah, the magic of cheese. It can make anything taste better!

But even that little bit was a bit too much for me. The Cheddar, which Diana proudly proclaimed had some real flavor, unlike most in the supermarket, had a richness that weighed down my taste buds and overpowered my mouth. It was going to take some time to reincorporate cheese into my diet. I really wanted to...and needed to. Not only was it going to be a bit awkward spending two months visiting Cheddar cheese makers in the Britain if I wasn't keen to eat cheese, but also it would be beneficial for me to eat more dairy. Diana showed me one of her books about eating for the right foods for one's blood type that she thought would help me lose weight. According to the book, my blood type should eat dairy products and avoid beans and nuts, staples of my current diet, to lose weight. And there was some weight to lose!

A visit to Neal's Yard Dairy helped, of course. Back in the shop that has ignited and satisfied my dairy cravings for the past eight years, I sampled a number of my favorite cheeses and bought some Sparkenhoe Leicester which is satisfying and easy to eat. It's the cheesemonger's cheese of choice for lunch. It's the one that you always find down in the lunch room at Neal's Yard Dairy. For breakfast I ate the deep orange cheese melted on pancake-like North Staffordshire oatcakes and then sliced on dry, crumbly oatcakes for lunch (my blood type is supposed to avoid wheat, too, as well as corn, buckwheat, sesame seeds, and chickpeas. No more falafel sandwiches!). Both ways were yummy. I was making progress.

And then I took a step a bit too quickly in my reclamation of aged dairy products. On a Saturday morning, after I had left Diana and David's and was back in London for a week, I battled my way through the maddening crowds at Borough Market to buy a grilled sandwich from William Oglethorpe's stall (see photo above). It was a pilgrimage. These are world famous sandwiches prepared with a mixture of shredded cheese--mostly of Montgomery's Cheddar--diced raw onions, and Poilane bread. Wow! The taste was really full on, sweet, unctuous, and rich. It was almost too much for me. But I happily and greedily ate it all as I rushed to the tube at London Bridge to meet Erica in Islington for our sunny walk along the Regent Canal to Limehouse Basin.

Baptism by panini press. My taste buds are born again. Welcome back, Cheddar!

Where's Weginald?

2009-05-02T17:18:00.001-04:00

Perhaps the more immediate question is, Who is Weginald?

You may remember Weginald from a year and a half ago when "he" hit the big time and made all the major news outlets (and my blog), but I can't expect you to be as Cheddar obsessed as I am and recall this story.

To refresh your memory, Weginald is a wheel of traditional English Cheddar, dressed in muslin cloth and weighing in at approximately 50 pounds. Its place of birth was Westcombe Dairy in Somerset. That's England's West Country and Cheddar's true home. What made Weginald stand out from the other 100 wheels or so of Cheddar made by hand at Westcombe in the same week was a video camera. Weginald's maker had the novel idea of showing him mature in real time on his own Internet site and then posting a time-lapse video of Weginald's maturation on youtube. It takes at least a year for a traditionally made Cheddar to come of age. The video takes less than a minute.

Weginald generated so much publicity that Westcombe decided to make good of the situation and auction the celebrity Cheddar for charity. From youtube, Weginald rolled to eBay. The money raised from the on-line auction went to Children First, and Weginald traveled by first class, as a celebrity should, to the winners of the auction, Mud House Winery in New Zealand. And he wasn't heard from again.

I frequently wondered what had happened to Weginald after the publicity died down. He was like an Oscar winner who made the headlines for days and then slipped out of public consciousness. I made it my mission to hunt down Weginald.

It wasn't easy to track down New Zealand's most famous wheel of Cheddar. The obvious place to start looking was Mud House Winery's Where's WeginaldWeb site, but it wasn't any help at all. When I first checked it, the site was under construction. A few months later it reported that Weginald had gone on walkabout. Just where was Weginald? Was he in dairy rehab?

And just where was Mud House Winery? Its Web site lists two locations, one in Marlborough, world renown for Sauvignon Blanc, and the other in Waipara, just an hour north of Christchurch, the South Island's biggest city. I emailed Mud House in the summer (Northern Hemisphere) via its confusing Web site to see whether I could meet Weginald's current owners. No response. I tried again in the autumn. Again, no response. Finally I found actual e-mail addresses, and I received an immediate response from Mud House's PR person. We set up a meeting at the winery during my second week in New Zealand.

The meeting was in Waipara, not Marlborough. It turns out that Mud House grows the majority of its grapes in Marlborough, but doesn't have a cellar door there. The group directors chose the lesser known wine region of Waipara Hills for the cellar door because of its location on Route 1, the major road that goes up and down the east coast of the South Island. They hope that a cellar door on a highly used road will attract tour busses and travelers and their New Zealand dollars.

The bus I traveled from Nelson down to Waipara dropped me off right at the cellar door. The building was grand and struck me as more slick and corporate than the wineries I had biked around the week before in Marlborough. Waipara itself, however, was a lot less inspiring. Perhaps it was the rain that dampened my view. The region also seemed economically depressed. Later that day, after my meeting at Mud House, I rode a rickety bike to an olive farm only to discover that it was up for a quick and desperate sale. No doubt it wasn't doing well. Not helping my opinion of the area was my backpacker accommodation. It consisted of disused railway cars, a concept that might seem romantic on paper, but in actuality, in the rain, the site felt like a ghost station on the U-Bahn in Berlin.

I arrived at Mud House's cellar door in a disheveled state, wet and shabbily dressed and with my backpack. I hadn't brought many nice clothes with me to New Zealand, and even if I had, I wouldn't have been able to fit into them after months of heavy cheese eating. Despite my unprofessional appearance, the manager of Mud House's dining and tasting room, a tall thin young woman of Irish extraction, treated me well, bringing me a bottle of fizzy water while I waited for my meeting with Mud House's director, Neil Charles-Jones. Still having time to kill after I drank the water, I left my backpack by a table in the cafe and went over to the tasting room, located in a lofty dining room with a grand fire place. As I went up to the bar I looked around for Weginald in the spacious room. Was he here? I had expected him to be prominently on display. Had he already been eaten?

As the young guy at the bar poured my first glass of wine to sample, a Sauvignon Blanc, of course, I asked him about the absent wheel of cheese.

"Oh, you're here for the cheese. We heard something about it a while ago. There was all this fuss and then it was gone. What was it for?"

I explained about the auction and how Mud House was the one to win the bid.

"Do you know how much they paid for it?" I should have, but didn't.

Before we got much farther talking about Weginald or making our way through the range of Mud House wines, Charles-Jones came to get me for our meeting. He apologized for being a bit late. He had flown in from Auckland that morning and had driven up from Christchurch. Transportation wasn't going his way and it had made him fall behind schedule. I told him that it wasn't a problem (where did I need to be?), and I noted to myself that his accent was English. He also struck me as a decadent man, as someone who liked his job for all the wine drinking that went with it. He led me outside through French doors, in spite of the rain, and we sat at a table on a covered terrace, so he could smoke. I looked out to the brown hills beyond the vineyard, now obscured by rain clouds, and then turned my attention back to Charles-Jones, who had already lit a cigarette. I asked him to tell me about Weginald.

"Such a bloody good story. I heard about it and thought that it was bloody good publicity. So I decided we should try it ourselves, set up cameras and show wine grow in real time. Then the auction happened and I bid and I bloody won." He let out a gravely laugh as he stubbed out his cigarette.

He lit and put out many cigarettes during our meeting and drank several cups of double or triple espresso. There wasn't anyone else around, but the staff, when not bringing Neil-Jones coffee, was getting ready for a large tour group of Germans who were coming for a tasting.

Neil-Jones still has Weginald, but he's stored in a partially opened box in Mud House's pantry (see photo above). The arrival of the famous wheel of cheese was intended to spark publicity for Mud House and its new Web cam. But the plan went, as the English say, pear shaped. The initial publicity was good. Weginald flew first class from England courtesy of Air New Zealand, and there was a photo shoot on the plane of this wheel of cheese living the high life. Weginald ran into problems with the law shortly after arriving in New Zealand. He didn't have the right papers. It wasn't that Weginald was made with unpasteurized milk (he already got clearance for that) but that he was in an unmarked box. To get the right papers, Weginald had to be flown all the way back to England and then returned, months later, in a properly marked box. He didn't even make it to economy class for these trips.

This all took time, too much time, so Weginald has to lie low until the PR machine can resurrect him like a forgotten actor. Let's hope he's not too much beyond his prime by then.

Stay tuned.

The Land of Cheddar

2009-04-16T21:01:00.001-04:00

Homer Simpson always has food on his mind. And in his fantasies. When Homer learns that the power plant where he works might be taken over by Germans, he doesn't fear for his job. Instead his mind drifts to the Land of Chocolate (a.k.a. Germany), where everything is made of chocolate, including cute barking dogs that he pets, picks up, and then eats. To Homer, this is heaven.

I, too, have food on my one-track mind (or three-track mind if you count tennis and travel). I, however, fantasize about the Land of Cheddar, not Chocolate. Unlike Homer, I've succeeded in finding this yummy place in the real world. It's not England or Wisconsin; it's New Zealand.

I had a sense that New Zealand might be the promise land when I took my first Cheddar trip abroad, to Australia. That was back in winter 2006/7. For New Year's Eve, my friend Lucy and I drove down from her farm in the bush in New South Wales to the King Valley, a wine region in Victoria, with her husband and infant son. There we celebrated the new year at a vineyard with her friends Peter and Pieta from Melbourne. The trip was a dream come true: I finally got to visit the nearby Milawa Cheese Factory and Cafe and the Milawa Mustard Condiment Centre. Cheese and condiments--that's my heaven! And throw in reserve wine from the young Aussie vintner and you have the perfect new year's eve celebration!

I had wanted to stop by those savory places ever since Lucy and I drove from Melbourne to New South Wales in her van three years earlier. Before we left Melbourne, she gave me the choice of the inland route that went by the mustard factory or the coastal route. The ocean won out over the condiments and I was forced to leave the food destinations for another time. (But I did get to visit the Bega Cheese Factory on our road trip.)

The time had finally come. During the day on New Year's Eve, Peter and Pieta, real foodies who have become good friends of mine, kindly drove me to a number of food destinations in the area, while Lucy stayed behind at the vineyard with her infant son and husband to rest. The three of us went to the cheese factory and the mustard place, as well as to honey, berry, and olive farms that sold sun-kissed prepared foods like chutneys, tapenade, and mead. At the cheese factory, I had to try, of course, Milawa's Cheddar. When I asked the young woman behind the counter to tell me more about the cheese, which didn't have Milawa's distinctive navy blue label, she told me that their Cheddar actually came from New Zealand, but they aged it on the premises. I was really surprised. All their other cheeses, mainly goats' and cows' milk cheeses, were made locally on a small scale and that's what they're known for. It was the first I had heard of New Zealand Cheddar, but it wasn't the last.

A few weeks later I was on my own in Tasmania, to visit two traditional Cheddar-making places, Ashgrove and Pyengana. One night, while in Launceston, I splurged and had a fancy and solo dinner at Fee & Me. The folks at Ashgrove had told me that Fiona, the chef, had won an award for a souflee made of Cheddar cheese. I had to try it, as well as the cheese course which included Cheddar. Again to my surprise, Fiona didn't select one of the farmstead Tasmanian Cheddars. Instead she looked eastward to New Zealand. This was at least my second Cheddar from New Zealand, and it now meant that I was going to have to visit.

Visit New Zealand I finally did, just this past February, and my suspicions were confirmed. New Zealand is indeed the Land of Cheddar. Their Cheddar isn't particularly good, but it's everywhere, like misplaced apostrophes. Almost everyday during my three weeks on the South Island, I started the day with a savory scone or muffin (see the photo above from the Dunedin farmer's market), made with Cheddar and sauteed veggies, such as tomato, spinach, and onion, and sometimes herbs. Cheddar was the cheese of choice for sandwiches, like the strange one I had with pineapple (see the previous posting) and the delicious ones I made for myself while out on the stunning Marlborough Sounds with a kind Kiwi family who had adopted me at the Cork & Keg, the local pub in Renwick. To accompany the cheese in the sandwiches were thick chutneys, roasted seeds, and slices of beetroot. Cheddar even appears on pizzas, like the incredibly satisfying veggie one I scarfed after hiking up Avalanche Peak at Arthur's Pass.

Why is Cheddar much more pervasive in New Zealand than in Australia, two distinct countries that we in other hemispheres unfairly clump together? The reason, I think, is that Australia's cuisine has changed over the years by adopting the food of its Mediterranean immigrants, which is more suited to Australia's hot and sunny climate. New Zealand, on the other hand, hasn't had that same sort of immigration pattern, and its climate is more similar to England--cool and rainy. There hasn't been as much reason to move away from Anglo cuisine, which, of course, features Cheddar cheese.

Perhaps I am unfair in saying that Kiwi Cheddar isn't very good. After all, a good deal of the cheese sold in Asia (and Australia) is from New Zealand. How bad can it be? But, for the most part, their cheeses are bulk cheeses, not farmstead ones, which means that they lack subtle and seasonal flavors. Why this is the case will be covered in an upcoming post, whenever that may be. Probably not for another month at this rate!

Until the next post, know that I am forever changed from my visit to the Land of Cheddar. I am probably 7 kgs heavier and I haven't touched much cheese since, and I'm not even eager to resume my cheese eating. What happened to me Down Under in the Land of Cheese?

Cheddar and Kiwis

2009-03-18T23:51:00.004-04:00

I've never eaten Cheddar cheese with kiwi fruit, and I don't think I ever will. Kiwis are the only other thing besides meat that I don't eat; they leave an unpleasant metallic taste in my mouth. But here in New Zealand, the home of Kiwis, I tried another unusual fruit and cheese combo: Cheddar and pineapple!

As much as I enjoy pairing Cheddar with fruit chutneys, this particular combo would never have come to me. It's not, however, an unusual one in New Zealand. Pineapple shows up in all sorts of places where you wouldn't expect it, like cheese sandwiches on white bread (see photo). And so does beetroot. Meals and sandwiches aren't complete for Kiwis unless they've eaten some sliced beetroot with it. When I went over to a Kiwi's house for dinner, the family passed around the beets in a plastic container that seemed specially designed for this sweet vegetable--kind of like the pineapple of the vegetable world. Everyone at the dinner, including the young niece and nephew and the college-age son and his girlfriend who's still in high school, reached for it. At the dinner, I mentioned to the mother of the young children, that I had eaten a cheese and pineapple sandwich. She replied, "Oh, isn't that combo gorgeous?"

Actually, it was disappointing. I was ready for a full-on, strange taste of bulk cheese and sweet and tangy pineapple. Instead, it tasted like any other pre-made sandwich. The bread was white and spongy, the grated cheese insipid. The pineapple, which was finely minced, was barely a presence. There was no other sign of fruit of vegetables in the sandwich. In fact, you couldn't even detect the pineapple. The minced fruit was the same color as the cheese.

Despite its plain nature, I was thankful for the sandwich. It was about the only vegetarian thing I could find at the local dairy in Renwick, the very small town that I camped in to explore the famous Marlborough wine region. I should clarify what a dairy is. In New Zealand it is the corner store, not the place where Cheddar cheese might be made. There were plenty of meat options at the dairy, mainly in the form of New Zealand's national food, the pie. A pie for Kiwis is not a big fruit-filled one, sold by the slice, as in the State, but a little personal-size pie, almost like a pot pie, that is filled with some sort of meat stuff and usually accompanied by a squirt of ketchup and a beer.

I'm not sure whether I'd go for a pineapple and cheese sandwich again, but I'd certainly have one with sliced beetroot and the other fillings that this New Zealand family provided for lunch when they took me out on their boat on the Marlborough sounds: tamari-roasted nuts, fig & onion chutney, corn relish, a more spicy relish, fresh tomatoes, and hummus. The more on my Cheddar sandwich the better. But please make my bread whole wheat and not white!

Zen of Cheddar

2009-03-14T23:41:00.011-04:00

While I was lying on my back, with both legs stretched straight over my head, my billowy, two-toned pink drawstring trousers, which I call my jam band pants because they remind me of something a groovy girl would wear to a Grateful Dead or Phish concert, slipped down my calves and knees and exposed most of my thighs. In this position, called the plough, I couldn't avoid looking at the backs of them. Usually, they are safely out of sight (my sight, not others'!), but holding this position for a few seconds, I can no longer ignore them or the fact that they aren't looking good. All along the back of my big, pale thighs are--horrible visu--the dreaded bumps and pockets of cellulite. My legs are fat.

My legs have always been burly, as well as out of proportion with the rest of my body. An ex-boyfriend memorably remarked that I am like a Brazilian soccer player on the bottom and a supermodel on top (except for the face, of course!). I myself think that I missed my calling as a speed skater. Or I should have been studded out to an Aussie Rules player or a Brazilian soccer player so that we could breed super children with unusually muscular legs. Our children would kick ass.

Sitting back upright, I was thinking about my own ass, which has grown over sized like my legs. Together, my thighs and butt have advanced forward and have startrd a campaign against the boundaries of my clothes. They are making contact with areas on my shorts and capri pants that have remained unexplored for years. The seams of my clothes cannot handle the strain of their relentless attack. A week ago, on the ferry from Georgetown in Penang back to Butterworth on the mainland of Malaysia, I bent down to take a picture of Penang Hill, which had been obscured in pre-dawn darkness on my way over to Penang much earlier that day. My lime green shorts, which I bought eight years ago at Meg, one of my favorite boutiques in the East Village in New York City, finally let down their defensive walls and split, right along the crack of my ass, now exposed to modest Malaysians and snickering teenagers. Luckily I had a sarong with me, courtesy of Andrea in Melbourne, and wrapped it around my waist to cover my shame. My ass had won the battle, and I shuffled off the ferry in defeat toward my third night train in four days.

How did my backside get into this position? My legs ended up behind my head because I was doing the group-led hour-long Thai yoga and Qi Gong exercises before the first lesson of the day in Nuad Bo-Rarn, or the ancient massage of Thailand, northern style. I am enrolled in a two-week course at the International Training Massage School (ITM) in Chiang Mai, Thailand's second largest city. For someone who isn't involved in the healing arts, either in receiving or giving them (I don't even do yoga or get massages regularly and I once cried doing Tai Chi!), it's a stretch for me, both literally and figuratively, to learn and perform the intimate and contortionist postures of Thai yoga. I don't have a knack for it, and probably have no business learning it, but I am giving it a go. Last year, during my first visit to Thailand, I received a full body massage in almost every city I visited, and I became quite intrigued by this active style of massage, which is likened to performing yoga on the receiver. After a very good massage at Wat Pho in Bangkok, the first training school for massage in Thailand, I got it into my head that it might be an interesting thing to learn. On top of that, knowing how to give massages is a great skill that you can bring anywhere, provided you are licensed. Furthermore, it probably does me, who's so rigid in both temperament and body, a lot of good to push myself into new and uncomfortable territory. But I must say that thus far it's been a trying and frustrating experience, and not a few tears have been shed this past week.

And then there's the ugly sight of my legs. And how did they get like that? I don't think I need to tell you. It's the Cheddar of course! And the beer, and wine, and nuts, and general gustatory overindulgence over the past five months since the Berlin Marathon at the end of September. I should be fair and not blame cheese, but my own lack of restraint. I wouldn't say, however, that I have eaten with abandon, but I have consumed more than someone should at my age who is also not exercising regularly and vigorously. But maybe I have to admit that I have drunk with some abandon. And then there were the buffets on Lady Elliot Island on the Great Barrier Reef, which never do anyone any good. And eating cheese for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and most moments in between for two months in London couldn't have helped. In short, it's no surprise that my body has taken a beating and that it in turn is taking it out on my clothes.

But it still comes as a shock to see the unappealing changes in my hips, thighs, butt, and stomach. Only five months ago, my muscles were so defined that people would comment on them. It's embarrassing to be in this current physical state, especially in front of my classmates at ITM, many of whom do a lot of yoga and other meditative exercises. They are trim and toned and comfortable with their bodies. To add insult to injury, the women aren't "subtle" on top; their boobs are big and round, like the bare-chested dancers carved onto Hindu temples. And if they are subtle on top, so, too, is the rest of their bodies.

At ITM, I hide my legs in my jam band trousers, of which I now own three pairs and plan to buy a fourth tonight at the Sunday Walking Market in the walled old town of Chiang Mai. I also keep quiet about my Great Cheddar Adventure. My quest for cheese seems out of place in the company of this international lot who are looking for physical and mental harmony, for themselves and for their future clients. (Some of them do need to find balance, as some are quite out of whack!). Furthermore, I feel that if I mention my unchecked love of cheese, my fellow students will remark to themselves that it's no wonder--and all my own doing--that I am so flabby.

It is interesting to note that without my even mentioning it, the topic of cheese comes up. Westerners love their cheese and find themselves missing it while in Asia. One of the young Canadian women in my class went out to a Mexican restaurant in Chiang Mai the night before our exam in the desperate search for cheese. She didn't come away satisfied. She got way more beans than cheese. Another Canadian said that she was really missing cheese and wine, and a fellow New Yorker from Astoria, a petite yoga instructor who is originally from Turkey, stocke the fridge in her hotel room with Gouda. I spied it when I came over to practise the sixty-three postures of Level 1 on her the night before our exam on Friday. Believe it or not, I can't relate to their needing cheese while away from home for a brief time. There is just so much good and cheap food in Southeast Asia, everywhere, all the time, that I don't feel the absence of Western food. But maybe it's because I've eaten more than enough cheese in the last few months!

I passed the exam, with a high mark, but with many, many mistakes. I don't feel comfortable at all learning and performing these moves. In fact, I'm in a great deal of discomfort these days. My stomach is in knots because I am so anxious--anxious because I am having difficulties learning the moves; anxious because my trip is halfway over and I am not sure whether I have done what I needed to do to write a book about it (e.g., taking notes, doing research, updating my blog, etc.); anxious because I've got to do a lot of planning for the remaining five months of my trip (e.g., seeing if I can change my flight back to the U.K., setting up dates to work on dairy farms in Wales and England, making a dentist appointment, visiting relatives, possibly renting a car in the U.K., which is a big stretch for me because I have become phobic about driving, especially on the other side of the road); anxious because in five months I'll be back in the U.S. and there's a lot I want/need to accomplish upon my return (e.g, continue learning how to surf and give Thai massages, getting back into shape and losing this unwanted fat, going to the beach, reconnecting with friends, organizing my pictures, starting to write a book proposal, replenishing my bank account with some part time work, taking out accident insurance, etc.). So much is whirling in my mind, that when I am doing the supposedly calming exercises before class, I am far from centered; I keep thinking of what I need to do.

I'd rather not have a knot in my stomach and a mind that can't stop processing a long list of regrets and things to do, but this discomfort is all part of the journey I am on. I've given up my comfortable job and apartment to go on an adventure, and an adventure isn't an adventure without a good measure of anxiety about traveling unexplored places, in the world and in yourself. By the trip's end, which will come too soon, I will have grown, not only in my body that is expanding outwards and downwards, but also in my mental outlook about myself and the world. It is this mental growth, which is painful right now, that I am after. I'm like a big wheel of aging Cheddar that is being flipped daily and getting a bit banged up and bruised in the process. By the end of twelve months, the bruises around the rind will still be there, but the rest of the cheese is complex, yummy, and satisfying.

Ode to Corrugated Iron & Camembert

2009-01-22T23:48:00.005-05:00

Cheddar cheese brought me to Australia (well, that and tennis tournaments, wonderful friends, warm weather, and great food & wine), but I want to put it aside for this blog entry, and this one only, to pay homage to something truly Australian: corrugated iron.

In case you are not familiar with corrugated galvanized iron, it's a lightweight but durable building material that can be used cheaply by semi-skilled workers in rural and developing areas. Its uses are numerous, and it's the Australians, since the 1840s, who have coaxed the most out of it. Corrugated iron is such a part of the fabric of Australian living, even in urban areas where sheets of it are laid as roofing, that the cartoonist Michael Leunig suggested that it be adopted as the flag of Australia (see above).

On my visits to Australia I've seen corrugated iron function as the structure of whole buildings, including fancy & innovative cellar doors (the tasting rooms of vineyards) and Italian restaurants. Wille, Lucy's husband, has fabricated auxiliary housing units on his farm in the Southern Highlands (New South Wales) with it, one for his daughter and one for guests. It's also good for hen houses and dog houses and potting sheds and tool sheds. Willie uses upright circular containers made of corrugated iron to store rainwater. On their side these containers shield firewood from the occasional rain. Needless to say, every building on Willie and Lucy's property has roofing made from corrugated iron.

It might not be the classiest of building materials, but it's one of the most functional and it underscores the pioneering self-sufficiency of Australians, at least the ones who don't live in cities. And in this sparsely populated country it doesn't take long to get out of the cities! Australians know how to make and fix things, a skill I don't come across as frequently in the U.S., and one I wish I had. While visiting Nina on the South Coast of New South Wales, Neville, the elderly Australian who owns the property on which she lives, busies himself all day with projects. He builds and fixes furniture, and in the past built a mediation hut in the bush for his now-deceased wife and the tree-house like building in which Nina lives. He originally designed it for his daughter so that she would have a quiet place of her own while she was at university. His latest project was building a whole pizza oven from scratch! Someone he knows in Adelaide is handmaking tools for his oven so he can pull out pizzas without burning his arms. So cool and impressive (even if it hasn't been made with any corrugated iron)!

Lucy, who herself is quite skilled at making things (she was a prop designer), is gunning for self-sufficiency in the Australian bush. With Willie's skillful help and with the monetary donations from her wedding over two years ago, she has made an enormous kitchen garden, with beetroot, celery root, lettuces, beans, fruit trees, squashes, etc. She was recently given a calf, which, although it's a breed for beef, she hopes, she hopes will supply milk for cheese and butter. While I was visiting, Lucy devoted a whole day to making two Camembert cheeses with unhomogenized milk bought from the supermarket, so she can prefect her cheesemaking skills by the time her calf provides milk. She is even hoping one day to make Cheddar, but this is more complicated because you need a cheese press and a cool place to store the cheese--not easy to come by in Australia. But knowing how innovative Aussies are, even ones who, like Lucy, immigrated there not so long ago, I bet she'll find a way.

Cheddar Down Under

2009-01-13T20:13:00.003-05:00

There it was, in the place I least suspected it, a big block of tasty cheese in Nina's mom's fridge.

Just as Foster's is Australian for beer (or so their adverts tell us; you don't see Foster's anywhere in Australia, mate), tasty is Australian for Cheddar. I have no idea how this name came about, but English friends in Australia joke that tasty is anything but.

I'll give you two reasons why I was surprised to see an unopened hunk of Cheddar in Mrs. Kourea's fridge. First, I had pretty much abandoned my hunt for Cheddar on this trip to Australia. The sun and surf have seduced me off its trail, and on top of that, I was beginning to accept that Cheddar isn't the cheese of Australia, like I had thought it was; feta, halloumi, and ricotta are. As a result, I wasn't looking out much for it anymore. Second, Nina's family is Cypriot. As I opened the fridge in their newly remodeled kitchen in residential Sydney, I wasn't thinking Cheddar. I was just looking for a spot to put the bottle of juice I had taken with me from my flight from Brisbane that morning. If I was thinking cheese at all, it was the Greek cheeses listed above.

What was it doing in her fridge, front and center? I had to ask Mrs. Kourea. She laughed, not at my question, but at my calling her block of tasty big. "You call that big?" You should have seen the kilo package I had at the holidays!" Tasty is no stranger to her Greek fridge.

"Greek cheeses are strong, so tasty is good when you want something else. It's good with fruit, or with marmelade on toast or with whatever. Also, my granddaughter is on a special diet and needs to eat lots of dairy, so we grate it into as many dishes as possible.

"When I make anything savory with cheese, I usually use it, like in quiches. When I make a spinach quiche, I always use Cheddar. And I use it in Greek dishes, too, along with halloumi. I grate a whole lot of it at once and store it in the freezer so it doesn't go moldy."

There were several other cheeses in the fridge, mostly Greek. On a saucer with three cheeses, covered with a paper towel and saran wrap: Bega's Strong and Bitey, a Camembert-style cheese from Tasmania, and halloumi. To me, that's Australia on a plate: the English cheese pointing to its colonial origins; the Greek cheese highlighting the strong culinary influence of its immigrants; and the Camembert showing that most countries think French when they think cheese.

That block of tasty has put me back on track. Well, not completely. I did go to the beach today, at Austinmer on the South Coast of New South Wales, to escape the heat and then had a surfing lesson at Thirroul, two beaches to the south. At least I'm closer to it than I was two weeks ago!

Cheddar for Christmas

2008-12-22T17:58:00.002-05:00

The traditonal cheese for Christmas in England isn't Cheddar; it's Stilton, a creamy, savory, and syrupy blue cheese made in three counties in the midlands. Stilton is my Christmas cheese of choice as well, but I also add Parmesan to my holiday shopping list. On Christmas Eve, I make a celery bisque with Stilton toasts, and before Christmas dinner, we start off with cocktails and snack on the Stilton left over from the previous evening's soup. My main dish for the holiday meal, a vegetarian one, I use Parmesan in a visually impressive green and red polenta torte. A hearty sauce of mushrooms and Parmesan separates the two layers of polenta, which has been enriched with Parmesan. If Christmas is about celebrating the king of kings, you might as well eat the king of cheeses, too.

Stilton is the right cheese for Christmas. The batches that are ready for eating in December have been made with summer milk, when cows are eating lush pasture. This milk is rich and full-flavored and is the best for making Stilton. This cheese's buttery texture and complex flavors are ideally suited for the winter; in the warmer months it would feel too heavy and warming. In the cold months, however, this is just what you are looking for.

And boy are people looking for it! The lines, or queues, are forming outside the cheese shop, and Stilton, or Stichelton, is on the top of our customers' list. But I would say that the next popular cheese is Cheddar, and amoung the five we sell in the shop, Montgomery's is number one. In fact, it's our best selling cheese.

New Yorkers wouldn't wait in line, like Londoners, for cheese at Christmas. They might queque up for a Barney's warehoue sale or a Vera Wang one, or brunch anywhere, but not cheese. In the U.S. there is no iconic cheese for Christmas, and cheese isn't considered one of the necessary courses for the holiday meal. In England it is, where they eat it after dessert. Very strange. But I fully support bringing out thePort to to drink with Stilton after dinner, provided I'm offered some. Years ago I went to a dinner party in Scotland and after the meal, the men got to enjoy Port at the table, while the women were segregated in the drawing room, with no booze in sight. The injustice!

This Christmas, there's another blue cheese in town that has positioned itself to be an alternative to Stilton. It's called Stichelton, the original Saxon name for the town of Stilton. It's just like Stilton (though by law I shouldn't say this) except for the fact that it's made with raw milk, as Stilton used to be. Up until 1989 Colston Bassett Stilton, the one we sell in the shop, was made with unpasteurized milk, but then in 1990 the Stilton Makers Association required that a cheese wanting to be called Stilton had to be made with pasteurized milk. This was the result of a food scare, even though raw-milk Stilton was determined not to be the culprit of the food-borne illness.

Randloph Hodgson, the owner of Neal's Yard Dairy, missed the depth of flavor that raw milk Colston Bassett had, so he convinced an American cheesemaker in Britain, Joe Schneider, to make a raw milk Stilton. This was dreamed up and agreed upon over many pints at the Wheatsheaf, a pub near Borough Market (where my camera was stolen). The Stilton Makers Association wouldn't accept their cheese as Stilton, so, in a cheeky move, they named in Stilchelton and created packaging very similar to Colston Bassett. It's a great cheese, that's been around for only two years, and still has a way to go. It's savory and almost has a baked-Cheddar taste, and the flavor lingers much longer that the Colston Bassett which slips off your tounge too soon.

For Christmas this year, I think I am going to have Stilton for Christmas Eve and Stiltchelton for Christmas dinner and see which ones my cousins prefer. I'll also have some English goats' and sheep's cheese, but no Cheddar if you can believe it! There are still plenty of other folks buying it for Christmas, but I am going to focus on the blue.

I'll get my Cheddar sooon enough; I'm bringing a modest--but ample--hunk of it on the plane with me to Australia on Boxing Day. It should sustain me over the three days of travel. And my mind will feast on memories of Stichelton.

Hand-on Cheddar

2008-12-17T20:55:00.001-05:00

According to the ground-breaking work of Howard Gardner, professor of cognition and education at Harvard, there are seven types of intelligence, not just one: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. His theory, put forth in the early 1980s, challenged traditional notions of human intelligence as a single entity, given to us at birth, and recognized that each person has a unique blend of intelligences. This paradigm shift (though not accepted in all academic circles) encourages a more complete picture of a person's cognitive strengths and weaknesses.

I wonder what Gardner would make of me. I have a unique blend of deficiencies.

This personal mix of shortcomings complicates my work at the cheese shop, especially when I have to do a task with my hands, which is pretty much all day long. Cutting a wedge of cheese from its pointy nose with a wire, wrapping it neatly in butcher paper with a crisp French pleat, and covering the exposed sides of working pieces of Cheddar are no-brainer jobs which should be easy, but are tremendously difficult for me. My hands refuse to cooperate even though the mind is willing. This shouldn't be. According to Loe, a fellow American in the shop who trained as a bio-engineer, electronics companies intentionally select women for small, detailed work. They have better fine motor skills than men. My clumsy work puts a wrinkle in this stereotype. Those companies surely wouldn't want me and my dopey hands. I feel thankful that Neal's Yard Dairy does.

My chief goal for the past two months at Neal's Yard Dairy was to get to know Cheddar better. What better way to familiarize yourself with an object than to put your hands directing on it. I find myself, however, avoiding the tasks of wrapping quarter-wheels and hefty working pieces of Cheddar in cling film because of the certain frustration--on my part and my fellow mongers'-- and the imperfect job that would ensue. There can be no flaws; the cling film should look like glass when finished and be hard to detect. That's not the case when I try. I spend far too long trying to get the cling film and tape to cooperate, and the end result looks like crap. For the sake of the shop, I concede the Cheddars to someone else.

My daft hands make me a weak link in the shop. When a socially awkward guy, but surprisingly big spender, came in on the first morning that we were open on a Sunday for the Christmas season, before my coffee had kicked in, and ordered 12 gift boxes of six different cheeses, I had to rope in the support of my fellow mongers because I knew that I wouldn't wrap the cheeses well enough to merit his paying 908 pounds sterling in one shot. I won't go far in the cheese world with this lack of manual dexterity and high level of caffeine dependency.

I don't mind grunt work with my hands, like cleaning cheese crates and knives. The severely chapped condition of the skin on my wrists and fingers prove that I am doing my job, or at least part of it. (I'd take a picture of my hands to show the hard work they've been subjected to, but my computer is so old that I can't upload photos to flickr and now my camera has now been stolen, so I don't even have the pictures any more. I should have kept my hands on my camera!) The satisfyingly tactile nature of the job--patting and rubbing and squishing rounds, wheels, and slices of cheese--has kept me from wearing protective blue plastic gloves. I'd lose the hands-on pleasure of my job if I did.

Taking a cue from the educators who have embraced Gardner's work, I shouldn't give up hope just yet. Since we aren't necessarily born intelligent, we do have the chance to hone the areas in which we shine and develop those which cast a dull light. With practice, I should be able to wrap cheese expertly, either in butcher paper or cling film. In the words of the U.S.'s new leader and my upbeat manager who admirably focuses on the positive, Yes, we can!

Progress has already been made. Yesterday I had a full-on hands-on training in wrapping cheeses. Instead of working at the retail shop near Borough Market as I was scheduled to do, I was sent--or perhaps banished--to "packing," the wholesale and mail order division of Neal's Yard Dairy at its Arches location in Bermondsey. The ostensible reason for shifting me there there was that the shop was overstaffed due to a slow Christmas thus far. I fear, of course, that I was sent there because I've been deemed the weak link on the Borough team, as I surely was this past Saturday when there were, at times, more mongers in the shop than customers. For hours on end yesterday I wrapped cheeses.

Despite being stressed with the number of orders he and his team had to complete that day, the packing manager Flynn patiently gave me some tips on how to wrap cheeses in wax paper. I really appreciated him. He was personable and sweet in a time of high stress, and put his hand on my shoulder whenever he wanted me to do something or to express appreciation for something that I had already done. But I spent the last two hours of my shift washing cheese crates. Was I banished again from wrapping cheese? I'd like to think I wasn't. After all, my coworkers that day were temporary employees, two quiet and young ginger-haired North Americans, a seventeen-year-old drop-out musician from Lewisham, and a privileged twentysomething with a terribly posh accent who had played golf at a small college in the North Carolina and dropped out. I could fold wax paper just as well as they could!

I've been highlighting my deficiencies, but in an attempt to be positive, like my mangers, I will say that I have gotten much better at visual recognition of cheeses. Eight years ago I would have been hard-pressed to pick out a slab of one type of Cheddar (e.g., Montgomery's) that had been misplaced on a tower of another Cheddar (e.g., Keen's). Now I can. I can even distinguish them in blind tastings. And I've finally learned which cheeses go where at the end of the day when we clean the cheese slate. When I last worked at the dairy, I had to ask my manager every night which cheeses went into the cold room and which stayed out on the shop floor or went into the "cellar." Now that I know more about the different classes of cheese I can figure out what goes where, unless Martin, my manger, throws me a whammy and sends, for example, the Gorwydd Caerphilly to the cold room instead of the cellar to control its quick break down.

My time at Neal's Yard Diary is quickly come to an end. Eight more days in a row there and then it's all over. But the other manager Michael thinks I'll be back, and Martin has already invited me back for next Christmas. With a bit more time (and a few days off first), I am sure my hands, which are kinesthetic learners, would gain the intelligence they need to become expert mongers. Until then, I'll try to get my hands--and mouth--onto as many bits of Cheddar that I can.

Cheddar & the Black Dog

2008-12-09T19:32:00.001-05:00

I won't beat around the bush. When I arrived in London in October 2000 to work at Neal's Yard Dairy for their busy Christmas season, I was coming out of a dark depression. By the time I had left New York--and my boyfriend and my job as a high school Latin teacher--the black dog was mercifully back in its dog house after attacking me ferociously for at least half a year. But I could still hear it barking. It's never far away.

Most of that previous year, I had grown so despondent that I wished I could make myself small enough to disappear, like a dust bunny under the sofa. In more dramatically hopeless moments, I begged my boyfriend at the time to kill me off. We were like Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, but without the bleached hair, heroin, grungy room at the Chelsea Hotel (though we did have a rather grotty apartment in Hells' Kitchen), punk rock, fame, cool clothes, Malcolm McLaren, and youth. Other than those things, we were exactly the same.

Travelling for a year to London, India, and Rome was just the ticket to make a decisive break from a life that had gotten me down and become almost unbearable. It forced me into new situations. But, as one is slow to learn, you don't leave yourself behind when you go off somewhere new. To quote the cult move The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Wherever you go, there you are. If the black dog was by your side in New York, it will find its way to you in London, even in a stinky cheese shop.

And it did. Most of the time, I was so unsure of myself at the Dairy that one day, close to Christmas, I ended up crying in the bathroom of the Dairy--the cleanest in London, mind you--because I had almost charged someone for a quarter of Stilton instead of half of one, or vice versa. My manager caught me in time and stared at me incredulously. I felt utterly useless and couldn't contain my wretched despondency.

On this current trip, I think I've managed to outwit the black dog and leave it on the other side of the pond. Most days, I am cheerful in the cheese shop, rubbing and flipping Cheddars, giving customer the cheeses they want, making my managers and coworkers laugh, and eating delicious and variable farmstead cheese all day long. Outside the dairy, I am reliably upbeat, so much so that Inkeri told me that her friend John likes hanging out with me because I am always cheerful. It's a dramatic and welcome change to be thought of in this way.

But I know that this might not last. The black dog is a wily one. At this particular moment, it might be quarantined in a kennel in the U.S., but it will eventually find a way to loose itself and track me down in London or somewhere else in my travels, where it will sic itself upon me. Once the black dog has come into your life, it's hard to shake its scent.

For now, however, you can find me smiling in the cheese shop among two tonnes of Cheddar wheels, keeping my fingers crossed that this won't be the day that I see the black dog slinking around in the long afternoon shadows of winter.

In London for Cheddar

2008-12-06T16:00:00.005-05:00

I feel neutral about London.

According to a young Spanish woman at a wildly entertaining party near Manor House last Saturday that Jonathan Czar invited me to and I didn't leave until after 5 a.m., this isn't possible. Either you love London or you hate it. She loves London and has adopted it as her home.

That morning, on my walk to work, I was just thinking about how I didn't feel particularly connected to London, despite how much visual joy my walk to Covent Garden from Vauxhall brings me. Even though I have spent quite a bit of time in the city over the years, there isn't a part of London that I claim as my own and want to share with visiting friends. If they asked me what they should see, I'd tell them to go to Neal's Yard Dairy in Covent Garden, of course, and its other shop near Borough Market, as well as to the market itself and nearby Southwark Cathedral, but what else, I don't know. For the cities that I get excited about (e.g., New York, Providence, Rome, Berlin, Sydney & Melbourne), I have a mental list of must-see places. I don't for London.

If pressed, I'd suggest exploring the edgy East End and Brick Lane, which I got to know eight years ago and very much wanted to share with Deidre when she came to visit me then for New Year's (but have since forgotten), walking along the stunning south side of the Thames between Lambeth and Tower Bridges, finding a cheap but excellent play, visiting shops on Portobello Road and then having old-school cocktails at either Trailer Happiness or Montgomery's Place (or both), appreciating the clever inscriptions for Sir Hans Sloane in his eponymous square and for Sir Thomas More outside Chelsea Old Church, following the remains of the Roman wall, climbing the Monument to the Great Fire and appreciating all that was lost and subsequently rebuilt, glimpsing the opulence of Knightsbridge and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, touring the British Museum for the Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles, and the Lewis Chessmen, and strolling in as many of the beautifully manicured parks as possible.

These are all wonderful and important places, but none of them grab hold of me. I am not sure why they, or the city, don't. The reasons I can come up with are that I am put off by how needlessly expensive London is and how everything shuts early. There's also no medieval section of the city, thanks to the Great Fire, that I could easily connect with. And the churches, which I relish touring on my travels in other countries, are too cool and cerebral. Since I don't know much about English history, the existing monuments don't mean a lot to me.

If I don't love London, you may wonder why I quit my job in New York, my city, to live here for two months. It was for Cheddar, of course! Eight years ago, after working at Neal's Yard Dairy for three or four months, I vowed to work another Christmas there. It took me a while, but I finally came back.

So far, it's all been worth it, and I am actually sad that I have less than three weeks left in London. A two-month stay isn't enough time. I may not have fully connected with the city, but I've had a rich social life here, become a known regular at several pubs, started to establish myself at Neal’s Yard Dairy, and have settled into a fulfilling routine. And there's so much more I want to do and see!

The wheels of Cheddar will still be here after I've left, and I can always return to them. London is worth it just for them.

Wet Wheels of Cheddar

2008-12-03T18:45:00.001-05:00

If you travel to Europe in the autumn, you expect to get wet. It's the rainy season, even in typically warm and dry places like central Italy and Spain. The rain came down so hard in Avila on a Saturday evening in October that it kept Spaniards at home until it let up. Not much can keep them from going out and enjoying the night. Needless to say, almost half of my days in Basel and Warsaw were wet ones, but I was lucky that Berlin stayed dry, especially on the day of the marathon.

London has been particularly wet this past month, with more overcast days than sunny ones. We've even had two snow showers. I know that this isn't groundbreaking news for a country known for its abysmally rainy weather, but it does seem more than usual. Even on days that start off with the sun shining, like this morning when I went for a run in Battersea Park before work, by the afternoon, the brilliant glow of the sun all too willingly yields to the gloom of grey clouds and drizzle.

What doesn't expect to get wet in London are five 25-kg. wheels of Montgomery's Cheddar, which would retail for about 500 pounds sterling each at Neal's Yard Dairy. It was my fault they got wet. While closing the cheese shop with the assistant manager Martin, I did a little dance to the deafening but motivating music of Justice, a French electronic duo. It's hard not too. The eclectic songs are really upbeat; that's why Martin blares their album Cross at each close. But even when you are bopping to the sounds of Justice, you have to keep your wits about you during a close, especially when you are wielding a hose to clean the floors. I didn't and I end up dangling the hose over several Cheddars which were on floorboards at the far end of the shop. Hard farmstead cheeses favor humid conditions--85 to 90 percent, in fact--but not a water bath. Momentarily, entranced by the music, I was oblivious to the potential damage I was causing, but Martin luckily noticed and calmly but sternly told me to stop what I was doing and I did. Fortunately I didn't completely drench them. We put the heavy wheels up on the slate counter, rubbed their wet muslin covering with blue paper towels, and left them there to dry overnight.

I feel awful about it, and stupid. As David Miller, my long-ago colleague and friend at Choate remarked, when you fuck up at a "no-brain" job, you feel like you've really fucked up. He came to this realization while working as a carpenter soon after graduating from college. I know all too well what he means. Even if, or especially because, you have an undergraduate degree from Harvard, as Dave did, you can't help but feel bad about yourself when you fail to hit a nail properly. If you can't hit a nail on the head, or show a hose who's boss, you doubt that you are capable of doing anything at all. I feel this way often. New at the job. I feared that I would be known as the slow-witted, Justice-dancing cheesemonger who gets Cheddars wet instead of the floor during a close.

Two weeks on, my psyche and the Cheddars seem to have recovered, along with my reputation. Key to their recovery was the quick attention Martin paid me and the Cheddars. He quietly let me know that I was okay, and did what he could to make sure the valuable cheese was too. On top of that, I now have enough positive work experience under my belt to know that I am not a total disaster in the workplace, even if I can't be trusted with a hose. Like wheels of Cheddar, with time I've developed a harder exterior and a more nuanced interior.

But the following night, to add injury to insult, the hose uncoiled from its holder on the wall and bumped me so hard on the nose that I thought it drew blood. Damn that hose! And a few days later I left my umbrella at my local pub and am now exposed to the rain. Damn this cold, rainy weather! But not too much. The cheese likes it even if I don't.

A Cheddar in Time

2008-12-01T18:48:00.002-05:00

Time works magic on artisanal Cheddars. With its passage, young, milky cheeses mature and become multi-dimensional; complex, lingering flavors that weren't there at inception come into being. In time, large wheels of Cheddar become something much more than what they were when they left their molds twelve months earlier.

Like children, Cheddars depend on grown-ups for their successful maturation and aren't responsible for much on their own. For a year, 25-kg wheels of Cheddar, wrapped up in larded muslin, rest on wooden shelves in a cool and humid aging room. There, their caretakers flip them weekly to distribute evenly the moisture they contain, rub them briskly to get rid of damaging cheese mites, and iron them to see how their flavors and texture are coming along. Every two months, Randolph Hodgson inspects them to see which ones he'll take for his shop, Neal's Yard Dairy, where cheesemongers like me sell them for over 20 pounds sterling a kilo.

Cheese, as with wine, get better with time.

I don't. In fact time and I don't get along at all. I wrestle with it, trying to pin it down, but it slips away and leaves me the loser in my ongoing battle with time.

One of the main reasons I gave up everything in New York City to go travelling for 10 months was to develop a better relationship with time. For over three years, I've mentioned writing a book about Cheddar cheese, but three years on, I don't have anything to show for it. It wasn't as though I didn't have sufficient free time to write it. My job at NYU, when I wasn't meeting a publication deadline, was very much like one in France, a 40-hour work week, with an hour off for lunch. That schedule should have left me plenty of spare time to work on my book, but those chunks of free time whittled away to nothing and, as a result, I got nothing done. I hoped that by leaving my life behind, I would shake up my routine, and time would slow down and let me grab onto it.

This hasn't happened. On my free days from the dairy and in the evenings when I get home, I have a long list of things to do, but very little of it gets done. I start off with high hopes to update my blog regularly, send out proposals for articles about Cheddar, do research about cheese, plan the upcoming segments of my trip, and work on my book proposal. I even had plans, when I first arrived in London, to shadow bartenders at fancy cocktail bars to learn their craft. Usually, I am too tired, too unfocused, or too busy with friends to check these goals off my list. It was very much the same story during those three years in New York City.

I know plenty of other people who could have finished a book in three years. These lucky people have a productive relationship with time, people like Anne, who, in less than a year, presented papers at academic conferences, wrote white papers, made progress on her Ph.D. in food studies, completed book proposals, taught two university classes, ate at every new restaurant in New York City, drank until late at trendy bars, conducted interviews for magazines and a cooking school's newsletter, and started an interdisciplinary institute at the same cooking school. She did all this with grace, confidence, and great success. How the hell did she do this? And there's my American coworker at Neal's Yard Dairy who in her free time improvises dishes with cheeses from the shop, catalogues all the fabric samples she has, affixes labels on every part of her sewing kit, finishes a handbag she designed, consults for bio-tech firms, catches up with numerous T.V. and radio programs, and learns French. How the hell does she do it?

I am not sure what I need to change to make the most of my free time. Perhaps I should have fewer pints of cask ale after work with my coworkers and instead go straight home to write. But Anne goes out regularly. Perhaps I should watch less tennis on T.V. But Loe is always catching up on her favorite programs. Perhaps I should fully take advantage of the free time that presents itself or I should create more free time by sleeping less. But I need the sleep and I am often tired. It's here where time is a great nemesis. The older you get, the more tired you become, especially when you are standing for hours on end behind the cheese counter. This means that in your free time, you want to have something to eat and drink, blob out in front of the T.V., and glance through your emails and friends' updates on Facebook. This is not, unfortunately, how a book gets written.

In one way time has been kind to me. I look young for my age. Few would guess that in three weeks, on December 23, I turn thirty-nine years old. I don't say this to brag. In fact, more often than not, I wish I looked--and acted--more my age. Because I look young, I get treated as though I have less life and job experience than I do. This mistaken youth comes in handy, however, when I am travelling. People don't look at me and think, Who is that old woman selling cheese in a shop for 7 pounds an hour? Shouldn't she have done more with her life by now? As a result, I fit in a bit better with my fellow cheesemongers...and fellow bunkmates at youth hostels.

Oh, how I wish I could just hang out, like a wheel of Cheddar on an old wooden shelf, and let time work for me instead of against me!

Thankful for Cheddar

2008-11-27T23:40:00.003-05:00

I am thankful for Cheddar cheese. The exceptional Cheddars that I sample every day for free at Neal's Yard Dairy make me appreciate the difference between handcrafted food and the industrial stuff. They keep me on the front line in the battle against bad, mass-produced food.

I am thankful that I never worry about having enough food to eat and that when I do eat, I can have the good stuff. If anything, I worry that I eat too much. This is the job hazard of working at a place where you are expected to sample every cheese every day to see how their flavors and textures change from batch to batch. We need to communicate this to our customers.

I am thankful for the job I have at Neal's Yard Dairy. Not only am I getting hands-on (or, mouth-on) training in artisanal cheeses, but I am also getting paid. In this economic downturn, it's exceptional that I am not worried about job (or food) security.

I am thankful for the safe and affordable accommodation in London that friends here have offered me. At both places I've stayed--Islington with Andrew & Cailin and Vauxhall with Inkeri--I've been able to walk to work. And what a walk from Vauxhall! It takes me along and over the Thames and past the Tate Britain, Parliament (see above), Lambeth Palace, the modern apartment where Match Point took place, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, the Horse Guards, Trafalgar Square, and the Seven Dials.

I am thankful for this 10-month adventure that I'm on, in search of Cheddar, the world, and myself. How lucky I am that I have the time, money, and the courage (and a good dose of recklessness) to give up a comfortable life in the U.S. to travel for travel's sake. Along the way, I am seeing friends and making new ones.

I am thankful for my many friends back in the U.S. who are making the effort to stay in touch with me even though I am no longer in their daily lives. Their support, encouragement, and fond wishes keep me going and will help me adjust when I return.

I am thankful for my family and their unconditional love. I try not to take it for granted that they will always welcome me back and give me love & shelter, even though I've been likened to Dylan Thomas, "that drunken Welsh poet"!

I am thankful that, as far as I know, I am in good health and that I have the NHS in case something goes wrong. I decided not to pay $530 a month for COBRA, partly because it's so expensive, partly because I can have free healthcare in the U.K., and partly because I am so disgusted that the U.S. government found $700 billion to bailout reckless financial institutions but can't "find" this money to provide all Americans with health security. I think this is a human rights violation, especially in a rich, first-world country.

I am thankful that I make the most of my working limbs by going for runs. These days I run in Battersea Park, where there are still some autumn colors and occasionally rays of sun. I am thankful, too, for my running team, Hellgate, back in Queens who made me physically and emotionally stronger. I am thankful to my trainer Jill, at Dolphin Fitness, for the same reasons. Too bad, though, that I am losing my six-pack abs to a steady diet of cheese (breakfast, lunch, and dinner!) and that I can no longer do push-ups. I injured myself doing them one morning in London. Can anyone say, Almost 40 years old?

I am thankful that I am learning to be thankful. I have a good life.

Good-bye, Cheddar!

2008-11-16T14:26:00.003-05:00

In a horrendously expensive city like London, why work at a cheese shop for a measly 7 pounds sterling an hour ? For the cheese, of course! And it’s usually free. Nothing makes me happier at the end of my shift than heading out to the Crown for a pint or two and a cigarette with Martin, the upbeat assistant manager, and having my well-used Neal’s Yard Dairy carrier bag filled to the brim with scraps of cheese that can’t be sold, loaves of good bread, like Poulain, that are left over at the end of t he day, sugary Eccles cakes that had fallen on the floor, and small containers of organic whole milk and double cream that expired that day. For a miser like me, with a taste for fine foods, these free goodies are almost reason enough to work at the Dairy.

But there’s a more noble reason: to play a role, albeit a small one, in promoting and thereby protecting nonindustrialized agricultural foods. If I love Cheddar, I’ve got to do my part to help the flavorful ones stick around. Without places like Neal’s Yard Dairy and people like me working there, the only Cheddar we might know would be the plastic-wrapped, bright orange bricks sold in supermarket chains. It would be good-bye to the good stuff.

The availability of exquisite farmstead Cheddars owes a lot to the Real Cheese movement that started in the 1970s in Britain. It rode on the coattails of the Real Ale and Real Bread movements. Without the efforts of these flavor crusaders--or maybe just larger louts with refined taste!--the foods of rural Britain were destined to be lost, replaced by their unvarying and tasteless counterparts on supermarket shelves.

Neal’s Yard Dairy and their employees in white Wellington boots and the cheesemakers from the British Isles who supply the shop and probably wear regular black Wellies are just a few players in a now greater and slightly more organized food movement. To anyone interested in promoting an alternative and more sustainable food supply, there’s membership in Slow Food International, shares in Community-Supported Agriculture, shopping at farmer’s markets, and reading books about eating locally. These organizations and consumer practices can throw a lifeline to good food from the land, to the producers of this good food, and to the land itself.

These movements are making a difference. Pubs throughout London proudly advertise that they serve real, cask ales. A chef I met last night at the French House in Soho in London, where I drank two glasses of kir in quick session (yes, I know, something French and not English) cooks at a modest pub outside of London and sources meat from only 12 miles away and uses veg that’s in season.

In contrast to these promising changes is the closing of Forfar Dairy in rural Eastern Ontario, not far from Ottawa. I just read about it thanks to Bill and Elise, who are so good about sending me cheese news from Ontario. Forfar Dairy has been around for almost 150 years. Although it has turned a profit since at least 2000, when the current family took it over, it’s had to close because of rising fuel and milk costs and new provincial government regulations. With the passage of the Nutrient Management Act, Forfar would have to build a storage tank for its whey or find an alternative method for disposing it. Currently it spreads whey on nearby fields as fertilizer. Even though this disposal method has caused no problems, the provincial government won’t allow them to continue it, for the sake of protecting groundwater. Now I know, especially in light of the fatal problems the U.S. recently had with spinach, we should be very careful about what agricultural waste might end up in our groundwater, but small places like Forfar, which have no history of negligence, aren’t really the ones who are threatening the food supply. But the passage of this law has guaranteed to put small dairies in jeopardy.

I visited Forfar with Bill and Elise on our way to their lake cottage (see my entry on cheese curds) and found that the quality of their Cheddars shared little resemblance with the ones at Neal’s Yard Dairy; they were only slightly better than the ones in supermarkets. (But their cheese curds were worth arriving early at their retail shop, to get them fresh, milky, and squeaky.) Just the same, I am sorry to see it go. Their closure marks another unfortunate victory for big business and government’s protection of it. Who will now help the remaining small dairies of Ontario, if, in fact, there are any left? As places like Forfar disappear, so too does part of Canada’s dairying history, as well as their sustainable farming practices. If there are no pigs in the area to eat the discarded whey, what makes more sense than spreading it on fields? Sadly, Ontario’s government believes that expensive storage units do.

So, so long Forfar. I hope your loss will inspire a similar real cheese movement in Canada. In the meantime, in my white Wellington boots, I will continue to be a minor crusader for small cheesemakers, and with my sturdy clear plastic bag in hand, I will continue to be a scavenger of their fine cheeses.

Hello, Cheddar!

2008-11-05T11:26:00.004-05:00

Montgomery is back in my life. Montgomery's Cheddar, that is.

What a delicious comfort it is to have a wedge of the world's best Cheddar in my fridge. Working at Neal's Yard Dairy in London for a second Christmas season means that my fridge never has to go without.

I was looking forward to this moment of returning to the cheese shop and regaining easy access (perhaps too easy!) to exceptional artisanal cheeses from the British Isles. It's the reason I'm back here in London, earning less than 8 pounds sterling an hour, and no longer sitting in comfort behind a desk at New York University. My first day of work at the cheese shop on Monday officially launched my great, 10-month Cheddar adventure. There was no Champagne at the launch, just nibbles of cheese from the moment I arrived at 11:30 a.m. until the time we closed the shop around 8 p.m. I did have a couple of bottles of "real" cider with Stony later to unwind after a long day on my feet, in white Wellington boots. Stony also heated up some leftover dal & basmati rice for me to counteract all those dairy products in my stomach.

It's comforting, too, how familiar work at the dairy is. Eight years is a long time to be away from a job, but so much about working behind the slate counter, encouraging customers in my unexpected American accent to sample and buy cheese, came back to me immediately. This familiarity made me realize how much I had learned in my four months at Neal's Yard back in fall 2000. Put a blue apron and cap and those white Wellies on me and I become a mean, but not lean, cheese-selling machine.

The smells are familiar, too. Usually the pungent aroma of aging cheeses assaults your senses right away and it can be overwhelming. People passing by the shop in Convent Garden can be heard yelling out to their mates, "God, would you smell that!" They are surprised and a bit disgusted. In this age of industralized food, when dinner usually comes wrapped in plastic, people no longer know what food really smells like. Customers who get turned around trying to find us will say that they ultimately located the shop by following its distinctive smell. It's that strong. Working at the dairy, however, you get used to the smell and don't even notice it after a while. I acclimated right away.

A lovely smell came from the cold room that I had forgotten. Whenever the stainless steel doors open for someone to pull butter, yogurt, or heavy creams for the shop, I enjoy the sour, milky scent. It smells like the essence of dairy, the aroma of northern Europe. Or as if you had taken a decadent bath in fresh, heavy cream at bedtime and then awoke to its lingering smell. Martin, one of the good-humored shop mangers, says it's actually coming from the industrial fan in the fridge. I would be really wrong, wouldn't I, if I were confusing fermenting milk with motor grease! But maybe that is the smell of northern Europe, agricultural products mixing with industry.

There was a moment on Monday that wasn't so positive. My doubts about Cheddar that have been growing for the past month returned. I didn't expect that at Neal's Yard Dairy, of all places. This was to be my reassuring return to real Cheddar. My first sample of Monty's was off-putting. I didn't taste its sweet and nutty complexity; all I got was mustiness. For sure, farmhouse Cheddars that have been aged in cloth will have a earthy quality close to the rind, kind of like wet potato skins, but it's all I tasted and I didn't like it. This is not what makes a world-class Cheddar. To my relief, my next sample of this naturally pale yellow cheese yielded that flavors I was after. Phew. This is the Cheddar that made me quit my job at NYU and sent me traveling the Anglophone world. It's that good.

easyCheddar

2008-11-02T18:11:00.005-05:00

A highly attractive part of living in Europe is the ease and the affordability of traveling to other countries. And you have the vacation time to do it! (But I can't join my fellow Americans in this complaint; NYU was very generous with days off, and I'll certainly miss this perk.) I don't know how they do it and stay viable, but there are many discount, no-frills European airlines that offer cheap fares to a range of European destinations, if you book your flight well ahead of time.

This past month, I took three flights on easyJet, an airline which Paul in Basel told me about: Berlin to Madrid, Madrid to Basel, and Basel to London (Luton). I didn't save as much money as I could have on these routes because I am totally incapable of making a commitment to a flight in a timely manner, even if I know that the fares will only go up in price. I don't know what I hold out for. I think that I am fearful of locking myself into a date until I am absolutely sure of where I want to go and when. Unfortunately, coming to this level of surety takes a while. We all have our issues.

After several anxious days in Berlin and Warsaw, driving myself absolutely crazy trying to decide where to go in my two free weeks between the marathon in Berlin and the arrival of my mother and her husband in Madrid, I finally took the plunge and booked my tickets. Exactly two weeks after my arrival in Berlin from NYC, I was on an easyJet flight to Madrid, with organic Cheddar, a pumpkin seed roll, rose and aloe yogurt, and apple in my black NYU canvas tote bag for my mid-flight lunch. It was a miracle I was on the plane, or at least in my mind it was. The morning of my flight I had to wait over 20 minutes for my S-bahn train to Berlin's secondary airport, and I made it to the check-in line with only 10 minutes to spare. EasyJet leads you to believe that if "you're late, we won't wait," and I was really afraid that I was going to be late and they wouldn't wait. Sweaty and worked up after checking in, I guzzled a bottle of water, which I had planed to refill before arriving at the departure gate, but after security, I made a beeline for the gate, afraid again that they wouldn't wait for me. In the lounge I remembered my empty bottle, but I didn't dare leave. I didn't want to miss this flight. Without any water on hand, my hydro-anxiety kicked in. How was I going to survive my two-hour flight without water? Well, I knew I could, but I also knew that I would be uncomfortable.

On board and in the aisle seat that I scored (there are no assigned seats; its first-come, first-served on easyJet), I leafed through the menu of beverages and foods on offer. To my great relief, the water was actually a Euro cheaper than the bottles in the vending machine in the departure lounge. I splurged and bought a can of Perrier and happily tucked into my Cheddar sandwich.

Continuing to leaf through the menu, I was really excited to see that there were some Cheddar-flavored snacks on sale. Proof, at last, that Cheddar is an international cheese. Here in airspace that wasn't exactly Cheddar friendly were familiar orange-colored snacks, keeping company with green olives in a vacuum-packed bag. And then I realized that easyJet was an British company. So of course they had something with Cheddar. Hell, they even offered Ribena. I can't imagine anyone else but the English wanting this black currant fruit drink. As a child, I never liked it, but I did name my Rub-a-Dub dolly after it. A strange drink, but an attractively exotic name.

No Cheddar on the flight to Basel, but I could have enjoyed some mountain-dried beef.

Excommunicated Cheddar

2008-10-31T12:08:00.009-04:00

Maître Bernard Anthony--eleveur de fromages, cheese pope of southern Alsace, host extraordinaire of Käs-Kaller, and kindred salt lover--doesn't welcome Cheddar into his holy sea of cheese, only the canonical raw milk ones of France, and maybe one or two from Italy. The closest he comes to pardoning English-style cheeses is a yellow, crumbly Cantal, which appeared at the center of one of the four cheese plates Paul, Katie, and I struggled--and failed--to finish last Thursday at Käs-Kaller. I can't remember when the Cantal appeared during our once-in-a-lifetime dining experience; there was just an extraordinary amount of cheese.

This is an entry about too much cheese, not the infallibility of Maître Anthony. It's about being overwhelmed by the occasion and not being appropriately reverent. It's about not being able to be counted among the faithful. It's about my humble status as a lay cheese lover.

Back in early September, when I was still in New York City and had not yet left my job to go on a great Cheddar adventure, Paul sent an e-mail, asking his wife Katie and me whether we would like a reservation at Käs-Kaller (42 EUR plus beverages) during my stay with them in Basel in October. With the dismally weak dollar, the price seemed quite steep, especially on my limited travel budget, but I gave Paul the go-ahead. The hilarious Babblefish-translated description of Bernard Anthony as the cheese pope was enough to persuade me, even though I had never heard of him--mirable dictu. Who can deny the cheese pope? Considering myself part of the cheese faithful, I certainly couldn't.

We three had no idea what to expect at this dinner. It was a given that there would be a lot cheese, but beyond that, we didn't give it much thought. We were willing to give ourselves over to Maître Anthony and his cérémonie de fromages. Katie and I got a bit worried, however, on the day of the cérémonie. Paul's former assistant, affectionately referred to as the Butler, sent Paul an e-mail, which he forwarded to us, with the specific details about the reservation. The Butler advised that "The tasting of cheeses comes with a few accouterments (potatoes, bread), however, is not a traditional soup-salad-main course-dessert meal, although it is absolutely possible to have cheese for hors-d'oeuvre-premier plat-dessert." He went on to wish us a "world of savors." It hit us: this meal was going to be just cheese. What had we gotten ourselves and stomachs into? And where exactly were we going?

Käs-Kaller wasn't listed in the red Michelin guide to France. This meant a couple of things. One, this unknown place might not be worth all the cheese and the dough, and two, we didn't know how to get there. Katie printed out Mapquest directions on her printer which didn't have enough toner and gave them, as illegible as they were, to me as the navigatrix. We hoped for the best on both counts.

Things didn't go well. The drive from Basel to Vieux-Ferrette that should have taken us forty minutes (or twenty, according to Souphie on chowhound.com, who extols Käs-Kaller as "the best fromagerie period, wherever in the World") took over an hour and a half. We got lost along the dark country roads of charmless Alsace. It was no one's fault, but as navigatrix, I blamed myself. By the time we had finally arrived in the empty village, forty minutes late for our reservation, and had found our way to Käs-Kaller, thanks to locals at the only restaurant around, my stomach was uncomfortably tense and I was thinking drink, not cheese. You know, to take the edge off....

It was going to take more than a drink to put everyone at ease. To my relief, Maître Anthony was gracious and didn't show any obvious frustration that we were so late. Looking more like a French version of Grandpa from the TV show The Munsters than a cheesemonger to royalty (Monaco) and the world's finest restaurants (Alain Ducasse's), he showed us into the small restaurant which seats just ten people. Attached to the retail section of his world-class operation, which looks to be carried out in a modest home, the dining room resembled a finished kaller in its first sense, a basement. The white walls had thick wooden detailing, and two of the three tables were placed in corners of the narrow room and had dark benches around them, with backs like picket fences. The unpretentious dining room, with framed photographs of a younger and slimmer M. Anthony, seemed more appropriate for hosting a neighborhood Super Bowl party with buffalo wings and nachos, not the finest cheese in the world (as many believe).

After a very necessary trip to the bathroom, I slipped onto the bench next to Paul, gulped the good, local pinot gris, and started talking much more loudly than Paul felt comfortable with. I can't help it. At the end of the day, I'm a loud American. On top of that, everyone, including the only other diners, a middle-aged German couple, was speaking in the hushed tones of church before the service, and I found this silly in such a simple dining room. We were meant to be relaxed, but no one was. I was just trying to be myself, but this was a no-go. I poured myself some more pinot gris from the extraneous fourth glass and resumed my anxious banter, sotto voce.

With everyone in place (and quieter), M. Anthony presented the first course, a lightly toasted slice of pale brown bread, brushed with olive oil, and topped with a circle of melted cheese, like a poached egg, and a sprinkle of herbes de Provence. I don't what the cheese was, unfortunately. That was the main problem with my fully appreciating audience with the cheese pope. He would say what the cheese was and I would soon forget because there were so many others to keep track of, or I just wouldn't understand him. He was speaking in French, of course, which I don't speak, and he had a funny accent that Paul and Katie had difficulty following. I wish I knew what it was because, for me, it was the most distinctive cheese of the evening. It resembled a slice of Bucheron, but the interior, instead of being chalky, was like warm, milky ricotta. The first course was promising. Maybe the meal wouldn't be all cheese, all the time.

Wrong. The next four courses were just cheese, one-ounce roughly hewn chunks circling the rim of our small, country plates. In all, M. Anthony must have served us about twenty-eight cheeses. The saving graces in this baptism by cheese were the boiled fingerling potatoes from Normandy liberally dusted with fleur de sel, the small plate of butter, also from Normandy, that tasted like caramel and was hard to stay away from, and Katie's stash of paper napkins and large, stylish handbag, into which she surreptiously placed the cheese we couldn't finish. Moderate Katie could eat no more after the first cheese plate of goats' & sheep's milk cheeses; I gave up after the second plate of cows' milk cheeses, and Paul slowed down after the third one, also cows' milk. Paul and I valiantly ate the two (or was it three?) cheeses on the fourth and final cheese plate, a Munster and something else, and also tucked into a simple, almost freezer-burned crescent of ice cream. To cut through all those thick dairy products in my stomach, I wanted a local kirsch, which was offered to me, but it was too late and I went without.

For the true believers, what I have written must border on blasphemy. Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe, but I just couldn't that evening. Here I was at the temple of cheese, but I couldn't appreciate the microbial miracles before me. There are a few reasons why. First, as mentioned above, there were just too many bloody cheeses! The normal person's palates can distinguish only so many different tastes at one sitting. At a certain point your tastebuds refuse to work. On top of that, the stomach can comfortably accommodate so much cheese. Eat too much, you feel ill. As the evening progressed, the appropriately modest slices of yellowish cheese on our plates became challenges instead of eagerly anticipated morsels of lactic yummy-ness. Second, I didn't know what I was eating. After he handed each of us our plates, M. Anthony would go around one of them, pointing at and naming the assembly of cheeses, but when he got to where he had started in the circle, he would start going around again, but give the cheeses a different name. That was only part of the problem. Just as our palates and stomachs can handle a limited amout of cheese, our brains can remember only so many names. I wish that we had had a list of all the cheeses served that evening so that I would know exactly what I was eating and trying to appreciate. A pen would have been helpful, too, so that I could write tasting notes on these sheets, if they existed, even if Paul protested in embarassment. As it was, the evening was just a creamy blur of cheese. Third--a confession here--I am not a connoisseur, just an enthusiast. If I were a connoisseur, I would have been able to have eaten all my cheeses and not have Katie wrap them up in napkins and stash away for another day. I would have been able to identify the cheeses and remark out loud--and too loudly--that these were the best cheeses in the world. To me, the uninitiated, I could tell that they were superb specimens of farmhouse cheeses--excellent texture, unblemished rinds (which M. Anthony believes, according to Souphie, are like women's clothing and should come off), desirable and balanced flavors that lingered long in the mouth. But the world's best? I just didn't have the expertise to say. If anything, they were a bit too salty. And that's saying a lot from me, salt-lover that I am. In sum, if I had been served M. Anthony's much-lauded four-year-old comté (which I could have been), I wouldn't have known it, and even if I did, I wouldn't have had the room or knowledge to fully appreciate it. Is this a sin?

I know I've been negative, but I really would like to go back, after I have learned my cheese catechism. My upcoming two-month stint at Neal's Yard Dairy in London, which starts Monday, should help. By January, after eating cheese seven hours a day, five days a week, I should be able to handle an obscene amount of cheese and know better what makes a properly aged farmhouse cheese extraordinary. For now I thank Paul and Katie for their generosity in treating me to a world of savours and for excusing my poor navigating skills and crude American ways.

Until I go back, I am left wondering whether M. Anthony, with his squinty eyes and slight resemblance to my father, is one of my people. Part of my background is Swiss French. I am also wondering whether, with his predilection for salty flavors, M. Anthony has a salt lick in the kitchen, which he turns to for solace when his American guests show up forty minutes late and his two typically punctual German ones are left waiting for their first course, which he inexplicably must serve at the same time to everyone. It is from them that I should have asked forgiveness. And if I go back, I'm going to get that kirsch!

Quesos Cheddar

2008-10-25T17:47:00.004-04:00

In Poland I got the orange version oozing out of pierogi filled and topped with pumpkin seeds. In Germany solid slices of the tangy white stuff were wedged (by me) between slices of dense bread, also topped with pumpkin seeds. What form of Cheddar was waiting for me in Spain?

I was amazed that I found any at all. My first encounter, however, was not a promising one, and it did nothing to prove that Cheddar is the world's favorite cheese. Again, it looked as though the Dutch ones take that prize. Really thirsty from walking around Salamanca all morning long and into the afternoon, I was desperate for some water. Going against what I usually do, I went into a chain store in search of a bottle of water. Usually I would patronize a local shop, but they had all just shut for their siesta and I needed something to drink quick. Inside Carrefour, I tracked down the water, and afterwards checked out the cheeses that were available. There were two sections: the fancy one where someone sliced and weighed decent quality cheeses at your request, and the convenient one with packaged, pre-sliced cheese. To my dismay, Cheddar was only available in the latter section. And what sorry Cheddar it was, deep orange, like the yolks of organic eggs, and dry and flaky, like the corners of my mouth in the wintertime when I don't properly moisturize. In short, gross. The only thing that I found intriguing was that the slices of Cheddar came in two different sizes, the normal square shape like Kraft Singles, but also rectangles. These are meant for baguettes. How ingenious!

The only good thing about my foray into Carrefour was that I was now properly hydrated. But I was fretting about Cheddar. Was I wrong in believing that it's the world's favorite? How could it be when this French chain store, the world's biggest retail group after Wal-Mart, had such slim and grim pickings? This wasn't the case for the other foreign cheeses.

But, lo and behold, I found it at a vineria in Madrid, just when I had stopped looking. It was Saturday night and just before 1 a.m., late for me, but not for Spaniards. I was alone and feeling a bit awkward about it. I probably should have gone directly to bed after seeing "Burn after Reading," but I needed something to eat and it just seemed too pathetic to turn in when the rest of the city was out and about enjoying themselves. It wasn't as though I had anything urgent to do the next day; I am, after all, unemployed. I had already been to one small bar, where I had a bad glass of rioja and a tosta (see picture for examples of tostas; picture was not taken by me) with honey, a chalky slice of warm goat cheese, and caramelized onions. By the time I got to the vineria, I really didn't need anything more to eat. I couldn't even finish my first tosta; I stashed the second slice in my totebag, a thrifty habit I've been embarrassing myself with during the past four weeks of travel (and most of my life). Needless to say, the tosta freed itself from the napkin which was poorly wrapped around it (by me) and nestled into my Spanish phrase book, now forever stained with an oil mark from the Bucheron. But I am a sucker for trying local foods that I haven't yet had. I was going to get a small fried thing to drink with what I hoped would be a better rioja, as I tried to make myself anonymous at the long zinc bar, but then I spied a tosta with Cheddar, Emmental, and smoked salmon. I felt it my duty to order it, even though images of a fatter me and a thinner wallet put up some resistance. As with the pieorgi in Warsaw, I can't say this dish did anything good for Cheddar. The bread wasn't toasted enough for the the melted cheese and soft fish, and, worse, it was like bad supermarket French bread. Oddly, one half of the toast was orange with Cheddar and the other half was white with Swiss. Having the two cheeses separated reminded me of an open-faced "grilled" cheese sandwich I had late at night at small dinner on Vancouver Island, when Sarah Jay and I arrived too late at the Sooke Harbor House from the ferry to have a world-class meal there. Dinner, instead, was at a log cabin in the damp woods. But I was in Madrid now, and I wondered what the kitchen was up to with this dish. Again, I wondered, Why Cheddar? And now a new question, And why Emmental? By ordering this dish, did I proclaim my Anglo-Saxon roots or did no one think anything about it? For the folks around me--a young, somewhat scruffy bunch for a white-tiled wine bar--perhaps Cheddar was just another foreign cheese.

World-class Cheddar, as it turns out, is available in Madrid at the cool and smart cheese shop, Poncelet, in the tony barrio of Salmanca. They've got both Montgommery's and the Isle of Mull from Scotland. I was so happy to find them. Montgommery's is perhaps my favorite cheeses in the world, and Mull is where I hope to make Cheddar next spring. Montgommery's is so exceptionally good that my host in Madrid, Javier, remembered the name of this cheese, which he sampled at Murray's in London, long after he had forgotten the name Poncelet, where he was told he could buy it. I bought him a modest 100-gram slice as a thank-you present. I hope he goes back to try the Mull.

Cheddar Kase

2008-10-22T04:21:00.004-04:00

Pumpkins, wheat, apples, ales, and Cheddar. These are the foods I associate with fall, as I wrote in my blog almost a year ago. Not only are they seasonal, but also aesthetically appropriate, their golden hues similar to the warm colors of turning leaves, illuminated by the glow of the autumnal sun.

Berlin has most of what it takes to make a simple fall lunch. There's no problem, of course, getting beer, especially in the fall, when Oktoberfest is raging down south in Munich. At my favorite Biomarkt in Mitte, and Becca's too, I pick up a brown bottle of Pinkus Special Organic Lager each time I go to the LPG, which is pretty much every day. On the label is a sketch of an old tavern, with men of yore enjoying themselves at rows of wooden tables. The tavern exists in reality and not just in seductive marketing, and Uli can point out where he once sat, savoring a beer of his own, when it was too cool to be outside in a biergarten. As much as I love beer--or any beverage with a kick--the breads are what get me in Berlin. They are so unlike what's commonly available in the States or anywhere else--dense, whole grain loaves and rolls, often topped with nuts or seeds. Some aren't made with wheat, but with spelt instead. Whatever the grain, they are hearty and substantial and certainly colon cleansing. I am particularly drawn to the breads topped with dark green pumpkin seeds, the same color as my hooded, woolen cape that I wear only from October to November. These, in my mind, are the breads for fall.

But where's the Cheddar, the best cheese to go with my bread and ale (ok, a lager)? Unfortunately, it's not easily found. There are plenty of other cheeses on offer, in particular the alpine cheeses of Switzerland and about any cheese from France. At first it didn't bother me that Cheddar is rarely on offer at markets in Berlin, but then I got a bit indignant. Why is Cheddar being ignored? Why isn't it included among the other cheeses of Europe? Unlike those other cheeses, this one is the most popular in the world! It looks, however, like Cheddar has lost the popularity contest in Berlin.

But then on my last night in Berlin, after my trip to Warsaw, where, as I wrote in my earlier post, I ate Cheddar-filled pierogi, I spied some organic Cheddar at the biomarkt. I was picking up some snacks for my plane ride the next morning and at the same time saying goodbye to beer and hearty breads before heading off to Madrid, where, I imagined, I wouldn't be finding my golden-hued foods of fall. In the fancy cheese section was a pale block of organic, farmhouse Cheddar, from the West Country of England, certified Cheddar country, according to the EU's PDO regulations. I bought some, even though I had planned to steal a wedge of the cumin Gouda I had brought Becca and Uli from the Schiphol airport 10 days earlier. It was my duty.

And it was good. It was no Montgomery's Farmhouse Cheddar, but Lye Cross Farm's organic cheese was creamy and sharp, and just what I wanted for my brown rolls, which I ate on the easyJet flight the next day. I didn't have a beer with it--it cost too much on the plane and I was typically dehydrated--but I did have a tart organic apple.

But the day after, on a bus ride from Madrid to Avila, I did feel self-conscious eating a decidedly non-Latin sandwich, made with the leftovers from my purchases at the LPG. I bet I was pegged as a German. But if the Spaniards on the bus only knew that I was eating rolls purchased from two days before, they would identify me as the frugal Brit that I am!

Eastern Bloc of Cheddar

2008-10-04T18:05:00.008-04:00

October was to be the Cheddar-less portion of my 10-month Great Cheddar Adventure. Germany, Poland, Spain, and Switzerland have great cheeses, but they don't have Cheddar.

But I ended up having a dish with my cheese of choice in Warsaw on Friday, baked pierogi with Cheddar, mozzarella, tomatoes, and pumpkin seeds. As soon as I heard that there were pierogi with Cheddar somewhere on offer in Warsaw, I had to have them. The place serving up such untraditional Polish fare was a warm and cute little eatery called Pierrogeria, located near one of the gates of the restored barbican in the old city. My friend Dorota took me there. When she was finally done taking care of administrative work at Warsaw University, an hour later than she said she would be done, she gave me the option of a vegetarian restaurant or place for pierogi for lunch. While I appreciate vegetarian restaurants, especially in meat-loving countries like Poland, I seldom frequent them. They're rarely what I am after, and what I was after on my first full day in Warsaw was something Polish and something with Cheddar. Dorota was happy with my choice because she rarely leaves the university area and she welcomed a break from her routine.

I was totally charmed by Pierrogeria. It was perfect for a chilly, grey day. Sitting and waiting for Dortota outside in a courtyard at the university for a hour while reading about how many times Poland was partitioned, I got more chilled than I thought I was. The restaurant warmed me up when I didn't know I needed warming.

Even though Pierrogeria served Polish food, it wasn't an old-school, kitchy place. It was fresh and new, and its light wood details and inventive pierogi signaled something modern and young. A nod to tradition was a humorous one, a wooden carving of a figure with three Easter Island-looking heads. It was Pierogigowid, the Pierogi God.

I can't say, however, that I loved my pierogi z cheddarem, mozzerella, pestkamidyni, pomidorami. The Cheddar wasn't really Cheddar, of course; it was more like melted Cheddar goo. It was all too rich and creamy and the tomatoes didn't provide the balancing acid that they should have. Even though I've been enjoying seasonsal and typical pumpkin seeds during my recent days in Eastern Europe, there were just too many of them in the dish. It was kind of like having trail mix inside your pierogi. I made the concoction even richer by swiping bites of pierogi into a creamy horseradish sauce. There was another vegetarian Chedddar option on the menu, with broccoli. I might go back to try it, but boiled this time instead of baked. And I will definitely have the double mead again. It made everything better!

I am still trying to figure out why Pierrogeria's spins on traditional pierogi used Cheddar and not some other cheese. Mozzarella, also in my dish, makes sense because pizza is popular everywhere these days. But Cheddar? Perhaps it's to make dishes seem international and therefore current. Perhaps it's to appeal to foreigners; there were several tables of them at Pierrogeria that afternoon. Maybe it's the backward migration of food. I just learned (thanks to wikipedia) that in Canada potatoes with Cheddar is a popular filling in pierogi (there's so much to love about Canada!). Polish immigrants to Canada must have made pierogi with what was easily avaiable (viz, Cheddar) and then this dish made its way back to Poland. I should probably ask someone. In the meantime I'll try to get some more Cheddar before I say goodbye to it for another few weeks. Or maybe I'll just relish my Cheddar-free days and eat more fried circles of smoked goat cheese (oscypek Zakopane) with cranberry sauce, washed down with hot beer and fruit syrup. Hey, don't knock it 'til you try it!

Running off the Cheddar

2008-10-01T09:41:00.009-04:00

The Berlin Marathon at the end of September is a lot like the New York City Marathon at the beginning of November. They're both large, world-class marathons that fortuitously fall on beautiful Sundays in autumn. The big difference in Berlin is that you don't have to get to friggin' Staten Island for the start!

The Berlin Marathon starts and ends right in the heart of the city, in front of the restored Reichstag. Such a convenient location meant that I didn't have to get up until the civilized hour of 7 a.m. for the 9 a.m. start and that I could take mein bananen and me right there by public transportation. No queuing for a bus at 5 a.m. or worrying about bridge closures was involved, only the U-Bahn 2 (yes, U2!) from Senefelderplatz in Mitte to Potsdamer Platz. It was a bit of walk from there to Platz der Republik, the large, grassy area accessible only to the runners, but it was easy. I wish that I had had my camera to take pictures of my fellow runners walking by the rows of evenly spaced trees with leaves that had already turned completely yellow. On the way to the starting area, I went past other runners peeing at the edge of the Tiergarten (I was soon to join them) and the temporary food stalls set up at the finish, just beyond the Brandenburg Gate. I could have gotten myself a chocolate-covered XXL pretzel or a Red Bull & Coke, but decided that pleasure now would mean pain later. The kuerbiskerne mit kase brotchen (a roll with pumpkin seeds and cheese) I ate on the U-bahn was a better, Teutonic bet, even with the very American peanut butter and honey I glooped onto it.

It's a joke with my running team that I show up at the very last minute to our races. This race was no different. I arrived with just over half an hour to spare, but it was enough time to find where to drop off my bag (though I did get into a bit of panic because my section didn't seem to be where it was on the map of the start/finish area), stretch atop the yellow plastic sack that was given to all the runners, courtesy of adidas, keep warm at the start, drink several cups of wasser in my starting area (there are six areas, based on your time and marathon experience; I had been placed in H, the last group, but I officially negotiated my way to the next group), cheer for Haile Gebrselassie from inside the port-a-john when his name was announced, and get a little teary that I was about to run one of the five major marathons.

I think we were the third or fourth group to start. And it was a majestic start--though not quite the Verrazano Bridge--along Strasse des 17 Juni, the major thoroughfare in the Tiergarten, toward the gilded victory column. Not even five minutes into the race, I stopped to pee in the park again. I suppose that takes away some of the majesty. Even though the New York Times reported that the temperature at the start wasn't even 50 degrees, it felt warm in the glow of the morning sun, but there was definitely an autumnal chill in the air. The scar that I got from running into a mailbox on a training run on the Jersey Shore (I am sure I had the right of way!) was raised and pink on my goose-pimpled arm, but soon the paper cuts on my fingers stung with sweat. I got them when my friend Becca here in Berlin accidentally slipped some documents for my German cell phone into my bag and my plump fingers got in the way.

Of course, more typical pains set in, and much too early. Well before the halfway point, the hamstrings in both my legs got super-tight, and I worried that they would cramp later on. What didn't set in were the pains that I was most fearing, the ones in my right knee and Achilles tendon, the ones that had sidelined me for half a year of running and made me cut back my marathon training in the summer. Throughout the first half of the race, I was anxiously expecting the searing pain in my Achilles to return; it had made me yelp out loud during a training run along the East River in early August. But it never came. But I myself inflicted pain on it later, after the marathon, when I took the preventive measure of icing it, but for too long. I gave myself freezer burn!

All this pain is self-inflicted. I don't have to run. I want to, but I don't have to. And if the pain is too great, I can simply stop. Walking past the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (a name shockingly direct and different from the euphemistic Final Solution that caused it) on the way to the start in the morning and then running by Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirsche, the church bombed during World War II later in the afternoon, put all this into perspective. I would be disappointed if I couldn't complete the marathon, but it certainly wouldn't be the end of the world. There are greater catastrophes. With this in mind, I could do as my teammates urged me to do and just enjoy the experience of running one of the top marathons in the world.

At the halfway point, my hamstrings were tight and I was a bit worried about them, but I was barely huffing and puffing and I felt no other pain. My time was 2.01. If I kept going at this pace, I would finish in just over four hours, which is totally respectable, epecially given my interrupted training, but I knew that I was capable of a faster time on such a flat, forgiving course. I made a decision. I was going to finish under four hours. I told myself, No more walking at the overly crowded water stops. No more talking to friendly Finns. No more peeing behind bushes on the course. Just go! And I did. I got my burly legs in motion and I picked up the pace.

It was an uplifting feeling, and one that I am not sure I had experienced in my other two marathons, to know well into the race that I would finish (unless I had another run-in with a mailbox!). I probably wouldn't have had this confidence if the course had any hills, but it didn't. Initially I thought that the flat course was wasted on me since I was so under-trained and accordingly incapable of a fast time, but in the end I was thankful for it. I knew that once my legs got going, there wasn't much, but a finish line to stop them. From kilometer 24, I counted down the kilometers two at a time, striving to complete the distance in about 11 minutes. If I did that, I was on track for a sub-four-hour marathon. I completed the second 21 kilometers in 1.54, a whopping seven minutes faster than the first 21, and I finished all 42.195 km. in 3.56.49, just 13 seconds slower than my personal record in New York City in 2005. Not bloody bad for someone who lost three weeks of training (out of 16) for a wedding in Montana, an injury, and a fainting spell on the E train in Queens!

My goal wasn't necessarily to finish the marathon in any particular time (though my ultimate goal, I must confess, is to qualify for Boston one day), but to get back into shape. Half a year of not running had taken its toll. I was heavy and slow. At km. 10, I passed Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, the U2 stop close to where I had stayed in Berlin back in March to celebrate my friend Alec's 40th birthday. It was a hedonistic trip. My belly was never empty and my head was rarely sober. I made a plan then to return to Berlin in the fall for the marathon, as a way to get back in shape after months of indulgence and inactivity. Six months later I had lost several pounds, gained muscle, and found my six-pack abs (well, maybe just a fourpack. I didn’t totally give up drinking!). Too bad I am going to lose that four-pack when I start the Cheddar portion of my trip!

For these reasons, Berlin was a happy triumph. I raised my hands with joy and a few tears at the end. I was so proud of myself for finishing and pushing myself during the second half to meet my modest time goal. It was a solitary triumph, however. I had no friends along the route or at the end (Becca had to work that day, cooking brunch for Brangelina and their six kinder). There didn't seem to be any other Americans, either in the crowd or among the runners. But these aren't the days for waving an American flag. It was just the Danes and the rest of the field. I swear, half of Denmark was either running or cheering. I learned later, while waiting for my free massage, that more Danes run the Berlin Marathon than the one in Copenhagen! No one yelled out my name, like they do in New York City, or even commented on my Hellgate singlet. But maybe they feared that with my race number of 6669, I was actually running with the Devil! There were plenty of shout-outs, however, to Wolfgang, Jens, and Bjorn. All this was OK. It was a race for myself, and there was enough of a crowd to keep my energy up and make me feel like a part of something bigger (and very European).

The music and sounds from the spectators along the course were great, except for the guy who made a noise that sounded eerily like an air-raid siren. You don't want to hear that in Berlin! There were an inexplicably large number of samba bands. I love that energetic music and even wasted some of my own precious energy wiggling to it. My favorite music came from a bunch of twentysomethings blaring the menancing industrial sounds of Rammstein from a balcony. Now, that's what I expected in Berlin! I didn't expect, however, Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here," in Berlin or anywhere else in a marathon. It's not exactly the most uplifting running song. But the oompa band that followed made up for it.

There were also several 70s bands, including some middle-aged Frauen in neon outfits singing to ABBA. The theme of this marathon was celebrating the 70s and the marathon's 35th anniversary. I thought this was strange since I didn't think that the 70s had ever left Eastern Europe! What I think they should have celebrated instead was the participation of women. I don't think 35 years ago, women were allowed to run in the marathon, and today only 7,429 women finished compared with 28,357 men. I can't get over this. Where are you fellow Frauen?

I've run marathons in only two cities, but I think I can safely say that NYC is the best, even if you don't get free beer and a massage afterwards (and you have to get to Staten Island far too early in the morning), but Berlin is great too. I'd like to run here again when I'm in better shape and to nail the 3.45 that I'm after, a time that would be hard for me in NYC. I am still high from the experience and can sum it up with the words of teammate Fast Phil, Wow. Cool.

Big Cheddar or small cheddar?

2008-06-23T23:15:00.001-04:00

Cheddar is, of course, a big cheese, both in terms of size and worldwide popularity, but should it be spelled with a big C or a little c?

I can't decide.

Initially, once I had given this issue my full consideration and no longer wanted to switch indiscriminately between both spellings, I opted for a capital C. My guides for spelling it this way were reputable: the New York Times, Fine Cooking, and from Cheddar's country of origin, the Oxford English Dictionary. How can you go wrong with them?

But a friend, to whom I showed some of my writing about Cheddar cheese, curtly dismissed this spelling, along with most of my writing. She pulls no punches. As director of publications for a prestigious academic press, she works with top American scholars in the fields of economics and sociology. With these credentials, as well as glowing references from her authors, she's definitely a reputable source when it comes to proper spelling.

I usually defer to her, but I stuck to my guns. Cheddar was to remain capitalized, and I had other sources to back me up. After all, my friend doesn't work with food writers. Her authors bring up food only in the grim context of the sociology of poverty. If they're discussing government cheese, or "Pasteurized Process American Cheese for Use in Domestic Programs," cheddar should probably remain lowercase, as in blocks of cheddar cheese.

But then I caved to another trusty source, one that I consult almost daily at work and have pretty much memorized, the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed. They don't capitalize anything: the seasons and the two solstices; golden retrievers; the big bang theory; cold war; and professional titles like director of publications, the pope, the president of the United States, and the queen of England—they all get the lowercase treatment. If the queen of England isn't capitalized, how can her sovereign nation's cheese be?

Also pulling me in a lower direction was the Association of Food Journalists' FOODSPELL, their "guide to style and spelling for food terms, both common and exotic." For them, cheddar is lowercase. But so is champagne and camembert. If left up to me, I would capitalize camembert since it's a name-protected cheese. Even Blogger's spell check wants to capitalize camembert, underlining the lowercase spelling in red every time I write it this way. AFJ's reasoning for the lowercase spelling is to "deflate the snootiness unwarranted capitals represent." But then why do they capitalize Calvados (an apple brandy made in the Normandy area of France) and Emmentaler cheese (a variety of Swiss cheese from the Emmental Valley)? Are these food products worthy of snootiness? I would understand if they capitalized a brandy made from pears. A noble pear would warrant snootiness.

In a quandary like this, I usually turn to Webster's to settle the score. They're the reason why I capitalize Web site and write it as two words and why I hyphenate on-line. But they don't come down one way or the other about cheddar. Their entry is lowercase, but they say that cheddar is often capitalized. Thanks for nothing, Webster's!

I suppose I could take the middle ground put forward by the independent food writer Edward Behr, of the Art of Eating. He capitalizes Cheddar when referring to proper English, clothbound Cheddars made in the southwest of England. All other cheddars, whether clothbound or plastic wrapped, are kept lowercase.

But Behr's distinction gets too complicated and I like absolutes. I was a Latin teacher after all. What to do? I still don't know. I guess I'll leave it up to my (potential) editors and their house style. Ah, the easy way out.

Cheddar, Murray, and Me

2008-06-02T22:25:00.005-04:00

First, there were three: a Vermont classic (either Grafton or Shelburne Farms), cheap and yellow block cheese, and some mouth-puckering stuff from north of the border, whose distributor has long been forgotten. Then, a few years later, came the English invasion of clothbound, farmstead Cheddars. And now the Americans, in the midst of a cheese revolution, handcraft their own.

Since the early 1990s a wide range of Cheddar cheese has been sold at Murray's Cheese Shop in New York City. I haven't been shopping at Murray's all that time (I didn't move to New York until 1996), but owner Rob Kaufelt knows and remembers which Cheddars have been coming in and out of his cheese shop on Bleecker Street for the past 15 years.

What I find most intriguing about Rob's selection of Cheddars over the years is that they clearly reflect America's maturing taste for good food. In the early 1990s, we wanted what we knew and we wanted it cheap. If we wanted something new back then, it had to knock our socks off and slam us to the ground. Subtle flavors weren't in the picture. By the mid 1990s, we came to realize that superior food didn't come cheaply from factories and that to have high-quality cheeses we had to pay a higher price for them. This opened the door for the complex--and expensive--clothbound Cheddars (e.g., Keen's and Montogomery's) to leave Greenwich Mean Time and enter Greenwich Village. Won over by the novel and nuanced taste of traditionally made cheese, Americans gave farmstead cheeses that were made in their own time zones a shot, and now we find ourselves searching for regional cheeses, like the Cheddars made by the Amish, which somehow make their way to NYC. Do they travel by horse and buggy?

What new Cheddars will find their way to Murray's in the next few years, by truck, van, or buggy? It may seem like we have reached the summit of our knowledge about exceptional food, but there's always something new to be had and learned. Rob suspects that what's around the corner is right under our noses, like the Cheddars being made today by small producers in Wisconsin, which are going to the big guys for mass distribution, but could be made on a small scale. Smaller usually means better. Or maybe these Wisconsin Cheddars will stay big, but find a different market. Rob hopes that the real cheeses of Wisconsin will end up on Big Macs one day and replace the processed stuff. Rob doesn't know why this isn't the case now.

Well, he does know. We all know. It's the issue of big business. Despite what we have learned about good food, most of us still want our food familiar and cheap, and this means mass-produced food from factories. But when we see that this might be doing us--our health, our environment-- in, we may finally change this mode of production around.

And when things change, Cheddar will still be there. It always is.

Cheddar's Problems Solved

2008-05-10T15:52:00.008-04:00

You think you've got problems, what about Cheddar?

Cheese has so many potential problems that a whole book has been devoted to solving them, the straightforwardly titled, Cheese Problems Solved. Cheddar's own tricky issues take up just a chapter in this full-length book, but, as the world's most popular cheese type, it's mentioned throughout, in sections covering the typical composition of cows' milk, the various starter cultures used for cheesemaking, the processing variables that affect syneresis, etc. You know, typical problems.

Cheese Problems Solved is no self-help book, and it certainly shouldn't be written off with a bewildered laugh as one of the oddest titles in 2007. What other book could you possibly consult to answer one of your 200 most pressing questions about cheese and the cheesemaking process? This is a serious and helpful reference manual for commercial cheese manufacturers who have their hands full, trying to make their young cheeses live up to their gustatory potential. This can be a daunting challenge. Just as no one can fully know how demanding childrearing can be until she has a little human of her own, few know all the work that goes into making a successful cheese for market.

Part of cheese's allure is its magic. Cheese mysteriously comes forth in a solid, tasty mass from a monochromatic liquid, and its list of ingredients are bafflingly short: milk, salt, rennet, and lactic acid bacteria. You can't help but marvel at how a cheese is born. Compare cheese with a Twinkie and its long list of unpronounceable and unfamiliar ingredients. It's no secret that scientists in labs produce unnatural foods like Twinkies. Cheese, on the other hand, seems elemental.

But there are scientists in labs working on cheese, too. As Woodhead Publishing points out in its description of Cheese Problems Solved, cheese "requires a significant amount of scientific knowledge to be produced successfully." So many things can go wrong with cheesemaking--low yields, worms & flies, bitter or soapy off-flavors, health hazards, sliminess and stickiness, slits and fissures--that dairy scientists have stepped in to figure out what cheesemakers can do to avoid these problems. It's not magic, then, but a grasp of science that increases a cheesemaker's chances of making a marketable cheese. The published and shared research of scientists guide cheesemakers when they are determining the ideal caesin to fat ratio in the milk, the temperature to heat and hold the milk, the time to add salt to the curds or the pressed cheese, etc. Cheesemaking is no simple thing.

And it seems like someone is having some urgent problems with his cheese. My copy of Cheese Problems Solved was recalled by the library in South Dakota soon after I received it from Interlibrary Loan!

Cheddar: Breakfast of Champions

2008-04-08T21:47:00.006-04:00

Cheddar hasn't been the chief cheese on my mind lately. Several other cheeses have been competing for my attention and taste buds.

I've been spending most of my free time, when I haven't been wretchedly sick, preparing for my upcoming class at Murray's Cheese shop (Monday, April 14). For a class on cheeses to eat for breakfast, I've got to put more than just Cheddar on the tasting plate. So far I've lined up seven cheeses for the class: Ben's Cream Cheese, Manouri, Young Goat Gouda, Burrata, Greek Feta, Ombra, and Mrs. Quicke's Cheddar.

Only half of the cheeses listed above are traditionally eaten for breakfast (cream cheese, Gouda, and feta), but all of them make for a delicious breakfast. Manouri can replace cream cheese and offer a more luxurious mouth feel; Ombra is a hard Spanish sheep's milk cheese that doesn't clash with your morning coffee and goes quite nicely with a drizzle of honey and some fresh fruit; and Cheddar can be eaten on its own on toast or paired with marmalade or a spicy plum chutney.

What Cheddar really has going for it as a breakfast cheese is that you can do so damn much with it. Here are just a few breakfast dishes that Cheddar make great:

Toast with thin slices of Cheddar, topped with pear slices and a drizzle of honey
Cheddar and chive biscuits or scones
Omelet with spinach, roasted tomatoes, and Cheddar
Omelet with sauteed apples
Scrambled eggs with Cheddar and pimenton
Cheddar and green chili breakfast burrito
Cheddar grits with shrimp or sun-dried tomatoes
Pimento cheese spread
Pizza topped with Cheddar and slices of fresh fruit

Basically, you can eat Cheddar morning, noon, and night.

Cheddar-Its

2008-03-19T21:22:00.007-04:00

When I travel, I collect potato chips. And I eat them, too. I am fascinated by how regionally determined potato chip flavors are. Here in the States, barbecue and sour cream & onion reign supreme, while I myself go for salt and vinegar, a tongue-tingling English combo which has become more easily available here. I never really got the concept of sour cream and onion. In England, home to some of the world's most intriguing and bewildering flavors, you can savor a full meal in a single chip, or crisp: prawn cocktail; ham and pickle; lamb and mint; roast beef and mustard; roast chicken; and many more imaginative flavors that wouldn't fly here. In Thailand, flavors are spicier and more pungent: Thai basil, hot chili squid, spicy seafood, and nori. Thai basil would probably gain a following here, but I am not sure how anything squid flavored would do, despite the ubiquity of calamari. In my cupboard in Queens, I've got a bag of Lay's dill pickle (cornichons a l'aneth)-flavored chips from Canada. I wonder why you can't buy them here. Maybe I should get the Pickle Guy on the Lower East Side to stock them.

Of course the American flavor I am most interested in is Cheddar. There are so many Cheddar-flavored (or implied) snacks in the States. A full 1/4 of the non-candy items in my work's vending machine offer some sort of Cheddar experience: Goldfish Cheddar, Sun Chips--Harvest Cheddar, Combos Cheddar Cheese Pretzels, Smartfood with White Cheddar, Cheeze-Its, and Crunchy Cheetos. Even health food stores carry Cheddar-flavored snacks, but theirs tend not to be of the bright orange variety: Kettle Brand Chips' New York Cheddar with Herbs, Pirate's Booty with Aged White Cheddar, and Smart Puffs with Real Wisconsin Cheddar. Whether you're fooling yourself with supposedly more healthful snack or guiltily feeding quarters into a vending machine, chances are Cheddar will be the flavor of the day.

Having noted the incredible variety of Cheddar-flavored treats all over town, I wanted to try a sampling of them and I wanted to try them out on my friends. The chance came on Sunday night, before a small group of us went out for Egyptian food on Steinway in Queens. Cheddar-flavored snacks may not quite be the appropriate food to whet one's appetite for a North African meal, but they do make for a fun, tasty gathering, especially when you throw a few cocktails into the mix.

I warned my three friends about the tasting, but they were game. Upon entering my apartment and seeing the snacks on offer in pretty little bowls (see picture above), they gasped at the bright orange glow of Wise Ridgies--Cheddar and Sour Cream. It's been a while since any of us have been to parties with artificially colored nibbles. While I mixed the cocktails, my three friends sampled the chips: Wise Ridgies, Sun Chips--Harvest Cheddar, and Kettle Brand Chips' New York Cheddar with Herbs. The Ridgies were initially an arid shock to the taste buds, having the bald flavor of something engineered in a food lab. But after giving them three chances, my friend Rachel actually began to like them, just as you end up giving in and liking a pop song the tenth time you hear it on the radio. The song and the chip are miracles of American marketing. To get any sense of the "harvest" Cheddar, my friends got the wise idea to lick the chip before eating it. Without doing so, it tasted just like any flavored Sun Chip. Soon they were licking all three chips. The winner was the meaty-tasting Kettle Chips with "bold GROWN-UP" cheese. They probably had the most alluring flavor, but I couldn't help but wonder whether we were seduced by the packaging. They seemed to be marketed for women like us, who wanted a snack but didn't want anything bright orange and obviously bad for you. Aren't we in New York, aren't we bold, aren't we grown up?

A lot of slick marketing goes into these crispy, savory snacks. The use of white Cheddar seems to evoke something pure, something that might even make you smarter, or at least appear smart to your fellow consumers. Think of Smartfood and Smart Puffs. Some products bother to localize their Cheddar (in name only), from either Wisconsin or New York, perhaps falsely allying themselves with the local food movement. Some evoke nature with names like Harvest Cheddar and Country Cheddar (Kashi crackers at Whole Foods). My friend Deidre laughed and wondered at what time of year farmer and son go off for the wild Cheddar harvest. I must do a lot more work in unpacking these loaded names.

I hope by now, fair reader, you are a believer that Cheddar is the American cheese and a basic American flavor. If not, go find me baked brie crisps, cave-aged roquefort cruchies, mountain emmenthaler puffs, or goedemorgen gouda chips.

The Cheddar Thief

2008-03-13T21:57:00.006-04:00

The nerve! They ran off with my cheese!

Almost a week ago, I put out for my guests a sweet, anytime treat of chunky peanut butter mixed with honey. To my dismay, they turned their little noses up at it. The whipped-up concoction remained untouched for days. So, I put out slices of Cheddar cheese for them, as I probably should have done from the start, if I weren't so stingy with my cheese. I put out just a bit, about half the size of a postage stamp and possibly twice as thick. Since word hadn't gotten out yet that I was offering cheese instead of an oily lump of peanut butter, it lay about for an evening, but then two mornings later it was gone. That's fine since I had put it out for them, but what irritated me was that they didn't bother to stay around and thank me. They took off without any sign of gratitude. Foolishly, I forgave their rude slyness and attempted to win them back with a festive honey cheese ball. This, too, was popular, but again they didn't stick around. Off they scampered.

Well, I've had enough. I never invited these guests into my home, and I don't want them any more. They may have thought they were winning my heart with their earnest love of cheese, but this hostess' icy heart is only so big. Same goes for my tiny apartment in Queens. There's little room here for an indeterminate number of ungrateful guests.

To get rid of these foul-weather friends, I will have to cast aside my peaceful vegetarian side, as well as my useless traps that are about as insensitive as I am, and call upon my inner Anton Chigurh. Glue traps will be my multi-use bovine killing machine. And there will be no cheese.

Best in Cheddar

2008-03-11T22:25:00.001-04:00

If you do something three years in a row, it's enough to call it a tradition.

Since 2006, my friend Suzanne and I have gotten together on the 2nd Tuesday in February to crowd around the T.V. in my small apartment and watch the annual Westminster Dog Show. We drink bourbon while we coo at the dogs (except the poodles) and laugh at the big-boned trainers awkwardly running around the floor with their coiffured dogs. It's a good time.

I can't remember what we ate on Valentine's Day in 2006 to accompany our bourbon, but I do recall that last year I introduced Suzanne to Lower Eastsiders, a delicious cocktail of bourbon, Dr. Brown's Cream Soda, and a wedge of lime. It's the bi-cultural invention of Mo' Pitkins House of Satisfaction, a hip Jewish-Latin restaurant on Ave. A in the East Village. As my friend Rich said about the drink, it's all that we need to help the bourbon go down more easily! With the cocktails, we ate a zippy salad of radishes, lime juice, and red onion and a black bean dip, covered with baked Cheddar cheese--of course--from Fine Cooking.

This year I tried out a new bourbon cocktail, and I pushed the Cheddar theme. The bourbon cocktail also came from an East Village restaurant, Peter Hoffman's new and conscientious Back Forty. I enjoyed the eponymous cocktail's seasonal mixture of bourbon and maple syrup, but Suzanne reverted back to the Lower Eastsiders after just one Back Forty. But she heartily enjoyed all my Cheddar cocktail snacks: pimento-stuffed olives baked in Cheddar dough (The Gourmet Cookbook), Bite-Size Blue Ball Cheese Balls (Amy Sedaris' hilarious but unexpectedly practical I Like You: Hospitality under the Influence), and spicy cheese straws (the Lee brothers in the New York Times).

The retro snacks were perfect for the bourbon cocktails and for the occasion. They matched the timeless frumpy-ness of the dog trainers and their ill-fitting suits, and they hearkened back to a time when bras and girdles were not as well engineered as they are today. I wouldn't know about this, but Suzanne, who has experience, would gladly advise the trainers on proper undergarments to prevent bouncing and flouncing on their nervous runs around the ring. Unlike bras, Cheddar can be at its best when it doesn't try to modernize itself and go with the times. Like the dogs on show, Cheddar is a classic.

I can see myself making these treats again next year. If they appear again in February 2010, we've got a tradition on our hands.

Top Curd

2008-03-09T19:17:00.014-04:00

Full disclosure: I lifted this picture, like most of the photos on my blog, from Google Images, without asking permission from the site that hosts it. Now that I finally have a digital camera, this improper use of photos should come to an end. I just hope that Forfar Dairy, who took this on-site picture, doesn't mind, especially when they learn that I have bestowed upon them the honor of Top Curd.

Forfar is a small but highly regarded cheese-making operation in Ontario, about halfway between Ottawa and Kingston. They make a variety of cheeses with a variety of milks, but specialize in Cheddar, like most commercial dairies in Canada. Their mature and flavored Cheddars attract a following, but it's their fresh cheese curds which make people pull off Route 15 to visit their small rural store (see photo below). The curds are so popular that Forfar makes Cheddar at night, instead of during the day, as is typical. By making cheese at night, they can be sure that they have little plastic bags of fresh cheese curds available throughout the day. Freshness is key when buying and eating cheese curds. Ideally, they should be eaten the day they are made. Eaten a day or two later, they lose their characteristic squeak, when bitten into, and their flavor dulls or becomes unpleasantly bitter and acidic.

All cheese, except for a very few made from whey, start as curds, the coagulated solids of milk formed by the action of acids. When making cheese, dairies separate the curds from the whey and then market the cheese fresh or put the curds into molds and age them from a few days to a few years, depending on the type of cheese. When someone speaks of cheese curds, as opposed to just plain curds, this person is probably Canadian or from Wisconsin and he or she is referring specifically to the curds made during the production of Cheddar cheese, before the curds are shoveled into hoops, pressed, and aged. Cheese curds are widely available in Ontario, and connoisseurs stress that one should buy directly from the dairy to ensure freshness. In Wisconsin freshness may not be as key when they coat cheese curds in a beer batter and deep fry them.

It was back in May 2007 that my Canadian friends, Bill and Elise, and I pulled off Route 15 to buy fresh cheese curds at Forfar for a blind tasting of local curds. After an afternoon spent kayaking on the lake at their delightful cottage near Smith Falls, Ontario, we settled in for the tasting. I didn't necessarily want to know whose cheese curds were the best; I just wanted to get to know curds better. I knew that cheese curds were a regional delight and that was reason enough for me to try them. My interest in cheese curds began when my former real estate agent told me that she always makes a pit stop at St. Albert on her drive up to Ottawa from New York City to stock up on cheese curds. To get better acquainted with Canadian curds, my friends and I picked up three different brands from cheese shops in the market area of Ottawa, in addition to the ones purchased directly at Forfar: St. Albert, St. Albans, and Kingsley Falls. Some of the knobbly curds were orange and some were white, just like aged Cheddars. It's probably no surprise that Forfar came out on top because their curds were the freshest. I definitely enjoyed tasting the four different brands and getting a sense of a regional treat, but I don't think they could ever be a regular snack for me. Popping curds into my mouth as a snack seems just a little decadent. But give me some of those fried cheese curds.... Anyone know where I can get some in New York City?

Final disclosure: This wasn't my first taste of cheese curds. My favorite type to date are the ones that I have stealthily taken directly from the cheese vats at dairies where I've helped make Cheddar for a day. When the curds are this fresh and when they have just been salted, it's like eating popcorn at the movies--buttery, salty, warm, and satisfying. Unfortunately, I don't think you could ever mass produce these cheese curds and put them in little plastic bags.

A Damn Mess of Cheddar

2008-02-27T19:57:00.008-05:00

What do you get when you mix French fries with fresh Cheddar curds and gravy? For most folks it sounds like a decadent mess to eat when you're drinking heavily or trying to recover from a night of heavy drinking. But for the Québécois and their fellow (as of now) Canadians, it's poutine, a delicious dish that fortifies Canadians during their harsh winters.

Prior to traveling to Ottawa, which I've done at least once a year for the past three years, I didn't know anything about poutine. I had heard, of course, of cheese fries and fries with gravy and even cheese fries with gravy (I was a member of a co-ed fraternity, after all, and never shied away from bars and bar food), but these dishes are something quite different from poutine. Those culinary travesties, made with processed orange cheese and commercial gravy, claim a place only at the bar and cannot, like poutine, secure the exalted status of a national dish. In Ottawa I've seen mothers and daughters solemnly eating poutine, not saying a word to each other and only taking a break from putting fork to mouth to take a sip of black coffee. This is a far cry from a drunken and loud bar meal.

I've become a bit obsessed with poutine and want to eat it every day when I'm in Ottawa. Part of my fascination has to do with my continual quest for local and regional foods, but another part--a greater part, perhaps--has to do with its undeniable deliciousness. When eating a grilled veggie sandwich at the Elgin Street Diner, how could I possibly turn down the chance to transform plain fries into a gloriously rich dish with gravy and milky cheese curds, made at a nearby cheese factory, for only two extra dollars? And I don't even have to worry about fooling myself that the gravy is vegetarian. At the Elgin Street Dinner the deeply flavored gravy is made from mushrooms. This is not the case with the gravy offered at other establishments, but I still might have to try it from a roadside poutine truck. After all, it's the local thing to do.

If you want to try some nonlocal poutine that's served on white plates in a trendy New York City setting, instead of in Styrofoam cups in cold Canada, visit The Inn LW 12, an Anglo-Canadian gastro-pub in the Meatpacking District (7 Ninth Ave., at Little W. 12th St.).

No Country for Aged Cheese

2008-02-21T22:14:00.010-05:00

I'm back! Not just to my blog, but also to the U.S. For most of January and the last few days of 2007, I was away in Thailand, visiting friends based in Bangkok and exploring the country's northern and northeastern provinces.

During my four weeks in Thailand, I was surprised by how interested I became in the history of Southeast Asia and in the well-maintained remains of its past. I spent a good deal of my vacation touring ruins, some of which are listed as UNESCO World Heritage sites.

What didn't surprise me was the lack of cheese in Thailand, beyond the Italian ones my friends in Bangkok generously bought for me at the fancy food market at Siam Paragon. Southeast Asia is not the place for cheese. But it is the place for many other foods. Never before have I been to a country where there was so much food available, anywhere anytime. There were restaurants and food stalls everywhere: in markets, on main roads, on sidewalks, in parking lots, on the beach, in homes, in night bazaars, down side streets, just about everywhere! And there was an incredible variety of food. Usually, after a few days in a new country, I can figure out a country's or a region's typical dishes, especially the vegetarian ones, but in Thailand I just couldn't. The variety of food in Thailand is so great that it's impossible to sample it all. Just as soon as you buy something to eat from one food stall, something else tempts you. Full from whatever you've bought earlier, you decide to eat your new treat later, but when it comes time to eat it, you find yet something else to try. And I'm a vegetarian! If I ate meat, the extensive choice would have been even more overwhelming!

Pork is popular at markets and food stalls. You can sample easily identifiable pig noses, feet, and ears; pork balls, sausages, hot dogs, and even Hello Kitty, grilled on thin bamboo skewers; and a limp tangle of pig skin that I myself bought and ate, thinking that it was a dish of broken, cooked noodles. If you don't want pork, there's chicken: feet on skewers and in stews; slabs of raw poultry with shell-less yolks still attached; and grilled quarter chickens on thick wooden skewers, sold from wicker baskets on trains. If there's chicken, there are eggs: white, brown, pale blue, and shocking pink; scrambled and mixed into noodles or rice, prepared in portable, street-side woks; or hardboiled and then grilled on skewers, deep fried, or sliced to reveal their vibrant orange yolks. These can be served in a tart salad of onions marinated in lime juice, fresh chili peppers, fish sauce, and cilantro. For the daring, there a bowls of deep-fried bugs: crickets, grasshoppers, grubs, dragonflies, some of which are ground into curries.

And this isn't even the half of it. If, like most Bangkokians, you constantly think of what to eat next, then Thailand is the place for you. You'll be in like-minded company. Bring a spoon with you (Thais use chopsticks only for noodles) and know that there won't be any cheese.

A Toast to Cheddar

2007-12-13T22:26:00.001-05:00

Here's an empty glass. What are you going to pour into it to toast lovely Cheddar cheese?

For Americans this can be a difficult question to answer. More than any other swilling nation, we Americans can be hung up about what we should drink with certain foods. We seem to lack the confidence to choose for ourselves the appropriate potent potable. Believing that there is a scientific, knowable formula for pairing beverages with food, we seek advice from experts and books instead of just popping open a bottle of something and seeing whether or not we like it. I think this quest for the perfect food & wine pairing stems from our lack of enduring food traditions and from the immense variety of foods we have to chose from. We can't simply do what's always been done (e.g., as the English do with port and Stilton).

What we should keep in mind when pairing food with wine and other beverages is that it's all a matter of taste and that there are no steadfast rules or a correct body of knowledge. Instead we should try something on our own and then stick with (and up for) what we like.

As you'll see from this long list of what cheese experts pair with Cheddar, it's hard to go wrong:

Beaujolais
Cabernet Sauvignon
Champagne
Chardonnay
Chenin Blanc
Gamay
Gewurztraminer
Grenache
Late-Harvest Gewurztraminer
Merlot
Pinot Noir
Riesling
Rioja
Sauvignon Blanc
Syrah
Zinfandel
***
Ale
Indian Pale Ale
Pale Ale
Stout
***
Oloroso Sherry
Ruby Port
Tawny Port
***
Tobermory Scotch
Ledaig Scotch
***
Hard Cider

It's ok if you want to learn how to increase your chances of a favorable pairing. If you do, I suggest Laura Werlin's, The All American Cheese and Wine Book: Pairings, Profiles, & Recipes, which I've finally just started reading. It's great, of course.

But don't wait until you've finished reading her book to pop open a bottle of something, fill your empty glass, and toast Cheddar!

Cheddar's Chunky Chums

2007-12-03T23:03:00.000-05:00

Just who are Cheddar's chunky chums? Chutney and pickle, of course. They are standouts from the fine relish family.

On a sandwich these relishes make classic, satisfying pairings. When I say classic, I am referring to the British model for eating Cheddar out of hand. Those Brits like their cheese sandwiches either with thickly buttered bread or with a sticky dollop of chutney or tart pickle relish. When I was young and visiting relatives in the U.K., I opted for butter. To my young, American mind, the combo of Cheddar and chutney was just too bewildering and foreign.

Now as an adult, with a stint at Neal's Yard Dairy and a trip to India under my belt, I've come to embrace English relishes on my sandwiches. In fact, I had some for both lunch and dinner on Sunday, along with a cup of spiced Norwegian pumpkin soup and a glass of hard, local cider for lunch and a green salad with pecans and a bottle of ale for dinner. These meals were super fast, entailing nothing more than toasting the bread, melting the cheese, and reheating the soup which was left over from my Great Squash Sacrifice dinner the night before. Not bloody bad for a snowy Sunday!

Lunch on Sunday was particularly fast because it entailed reheating not only the soup but also my toasted cheese sandwiches. They, too, were left over from my squash supper. I had served them as an appetizer with boozy applejack cobblers, and they were the only dish—as hard as it is for me to tell and for you to hear—that contained Cheddar. More bruschette than sandwiches, they are slices of toasted Sicilian whole wheat bread, brushed with melted butter and pumpkin seed oil, topped with homemade pumpkin chutney (see Thanksgiving entry below) and cave-ripened Jersey Cheddar, and then toasted again until the cheese melts. (Note: I mean New Jersey, not the island in England, famous for its creamy Chanel Island milk!) I make this chutney each year at the end of November, and I think it's a lovely, seasonal companion for Cheddar. Spiced with nutmeg, ginger, allspice, and cloves, it's kind of like pickled pumpkin pie, but in a good way. Of the relishes accompanying my Cheddar on Sunday, this was the one that most resembled the pickle by which to judge all pickles, Branston Pickle Relish. It's the Heinz ketchup of the British pickle world, and it's the common pickle for a ploughman's lunch or a cheese and pickle sandwich bought at a railway station. Branston's chunky bulk comes from diced cubes of rutabaga and a medley of other vegetables, so my chutney made from diced winter squash isn't far off.

Sunday's dinner entailed a little more work, but not much. I halved a Sicilian whole wheat roll, also left over from my dinner, and toasted each half. On one half, I spread ajvar and then topped it with thin slices of Cheddar, and on the other, I put the Cheddar directly on top of the roll, and then spooned on a pickle relish from Brooklyn, that I had planned to eat at Thanksgiving (again, see post below) after the cheese was nicely melted. The Brooklyn pickle certainly sounds classic, but the ajvar doesn't seem typical, does it? It's not British; it's a moderately chunky Balkan relish, made with red bell peppers, eggplant, garlic, and chili peppers. It doesn't have the zippy acidity of an English pickle or chutney, but it does have the sweetness along with a hint of heat. Acidity is usually a welcome counterpoint to the sweetness of Cheddar, but the ajvar emphasizes it, and the relish's silky eggplant complements the unctuousness of melted cheese. The mild heat prevents everything from going over the top. I must admit that I was mildly disappointed by the Brooklyn pickle, Wheelhouse Pickles' seasonal Ploughman's Pickle. Florence Fabricant of the New York Times billed it as the local, small production alternative to Branston, but it couldn't have been more different. There were no cubes of vegetables and no zip. It was kind of dull and flat and tasted or raw, poorly integrated spices. But atop the roll and melted cheese, it wasn't all that bad, proving that Cheddar can bring out the best in its chums.

Gobble Cheddar Gobble!

2007-11-20T18:03:00.000-05:00

You'll notice that I don't have a turkey as my pictorial representation of Thanksgiving. That's because I am a vegetarian, and I won't be eating turkey on Thursday. But I will gobble gobble!

To make up for the absent turkey, I won't opt for a meatless substitute, like the mysterious tofuerky. Instead, I'll emphasize local, seasonal vegetables and prepare a veggie casserole as the main part of my holiday meal. The casserole will includes Cheddar, of course.

The reason Cheddar entered my Thanksgiving menu at age fifteen has everything to do with the Moosewood Cookbook. This was my first vegetarian cookbook after I read the influential Diet for a Small Planet. Rare is the dish in this iconic cookbook that doesn't call for a cup of Cheddar cheese. Moosewood hearkens back to the days when vegetarians were encouraged to eat complimentary proteins to ensure getting a complete one. So much for the purported benefits of a low-fat, low-calorie vegetarian diet! For its 10th anniversary, Mollie Katzen revised the Moosewood Cookbook, and after that, the recipes didn't call for nearly as much cheese, but I still like to cook the original Chilean Squash, but without the corn. I'm not going to skimp on the Cheddar!

Fearing that I was falling into a Thanksgiving rut, I broke free from Moosewood last year, and turned to my favorite cooking magazine, Fine Cooking, to find a new veggie casserole. The one I chose has a much longer name but almost the same amount of cheese: Butternut Squash, Apple, Leek and Potato Gratin with Cheddar Crust. It was really yummy, and I plan to make it again this year, along an apple pie with a Cheddar crust. We'll also have toasted Cheddar sandwiches one day for lunch, with a choice of my homemade spiced pumpkin chutney (which I fear I made too spicy this year), cranberry chutney from the Union Square farmer's market, and Ploughman's Pickle, made over the Pulaski Bridge in Brooklyn. I am looking forward to trying this seasonal pickle, which, I bought--horrible dictu!--at the beer room at the Whole Foods on the Bowery.

I shouldn't blame the Moosewood Cookbook for all this Cheddar. Cheddar, after all, is the perfect cheese for Thanksgiving. Like the Pilgrims and Puritans, Cheddar was originally English, but became decidedly American. And its sweet and nutty taste and lovely golden hue complement autumnal cooking. Eating Cheddar is like a walk in the woods in the fall, when the sun casts a soft glow on the the turning leaves, and acorns and horse chestnuts crunch under your heavy shoes.

Autumn and its pumpkins will be gone soon, so eat a chunk of Cheddar now!

Cheddar for Charity

2007-11-16T14:47:00.001-05:00

Hurry up! You have only two more days (November 19) to bid on Wedginald, the celebrity Cheddar. Proceeds from the eBay auction go to the charity, BBC Children in Need. To learn more about the auction, read this short Reuters article, and visit CheddarVision to make your bid or donate to BBC Children in Need. Good luck!

Cheddar and Apples and Ale! Oh My!

2007-11-15T19:03:00.000-05:00

I am doing another Cheddar talk. Please come!

Monday, November 26, 7:30 PM

Come on down to Jimmy's No. 43 and join Slow Food NYC's Amy Thompson and food historian Diana Pittet for a guided tasting of four farmstead Cheddars--Old World (Britain) and New World (Vermont and California)--accompanied by four varieties of apples from the Greenmarket and beers selected by Jimmy himself!

Jimmy's No. 43
43 E. 7th St, downstairs
(between 2nd and 3rd Avenues)

www.jimmysno43.com

Tickets are $30 each, and reservations are required. To reserve a spot send an e-mail to Amy at amethomp@yahoo.com.

Cheddar's California Dreaming

2007-11-11T21:45:00.001-05:00

Cheddar has traveled the world (as I noted in my first post), but there are some places where it lingered longer and put down solid roots. These places aren't a secret--like Vice President Dick Cheney's residence on Google Maps. They include, England, of course, the rest of the British Isles, the Antipodes, and North America. Within the US., Cheddar seems most at home in Vermont, New York, and Wisconsin, the states we equate with good Cheddar.

There are reasons why Cheddar settled in these areas of the U.S. To uncover them, we must go back to feudal England. According to Paul Kindstedt, a dairy scientist at the University of Vermont and co-director of the Vermont Institute for Artisanl Cheese, the major site of cheese production in England in the 16th & 17th centuries, after the collapse of feudalism and the rise of capitalist markets, was East Anglia. The local cheesemakers, many of them Puritans, were quite enterprising and made large, durable cheeses that could be transported safely to urban markets, like London. When these Puritans chose America as their promised land, they brought their cheesemaking know-how and keen marketing sense with them. Set up in the New World, they made cheeses like the ones they had produced back home across the pond. These cheeses were consumed locally and were also exported to the southern colonies and the West Indies, which grew cash crops and were short on food for themselves. It should be noted that before the arrival of Europeans in North America, there was no indigenous cheese production; there is no good evidence that Native American ate dairy products. As the Puritans moved about the New World, so did their Cheddar-like cheeses. They accompanied the Puritans when they sought deeper religious freedom (e.g., Rhode Island) and when they wanted more land after the Revolutionary War (e.g., New York). And they migrated further west through Ohio into Wisconsin, as the Puritans, or their descendants, went in search of even more land. It was there in Wisconsin that Cheddar seemingly met the western edge of its migration.

But Cheddar has become restless and has resumed its westward migration. California beckons. Perhaps the Golden State is a natural destination for Cheddar. They share the same sunny hue, after all. And Cheddar is a star. It plays the main role on CheddarVision. What video star doesn't want to try its luck and make it big in California? Maybe it was California's tourism ads, with charming Clint Eastwood and Mr. & Mrs. Schwarzenegger, that got the better of Cheddar. The more likely explanation is that California is a major dairying state. This may come as a surprise, since we think of Californian wine before we think of its milk. It makes sense that a dairying state makes cheese and that one of its chief cheeses is Cheddar, the cheese which competes with mozzarella for the title of most popular cheese in the U.S. California produces one-third of all Cheddar in the U.S., and one Cheddar producer, Hilmar, near Modesto, makes 1.3 million pounds of cheddar and American cheese (e. g. , Monterey Jack, Pepper Jack, Colby, Colby Jack, and flavored Jacks) a day!

Very near Hilmar is a totally different operation, Fiscalini. This three-generation dairy farm only recently got into cheesemaking, as a way for the dairy to stay financially viable. With a name like Fiscalini (Swiss-Italian) and with a farm in the hot Central Valley, it wouldn't seem likely that Cheddar, an Anglo cheese with strong connections to the East Coast, would be the cheese of choice. But this is the cheese with which Fiscalini has made a name for itself. Their 30-month bandaged-wrapped cheese is so exceptional that it has even beaten traditional Somerset Cheddars in a blind tasting. And it was certainly a favorite at the Cheddar tasting I held at Princeton three weeks ago. It has a sweet profile that Americans like.

What is even more surprising than a farmstead Cheddar being made outside of New England is that the master cheesemaker at Fiscalini, Mariano Gonzalez, is from Paraguay, a country that is certainly not known for English cheeses, if it even registers in one's geographical consciousness. But it all makes sense when one learns that Mariano's first job was at Shelburne Farm in Vermont, known for its farmstead Cheddar. Here he honed his cheesemaking skills and became the master cheesemaker there, before returning to Paraguay to start his own Cheddar operation (which sadly failed because of a coup). When he came back to the States, the California Milk Marketing Board wooed Mariano to the Fiscalini. With his arrival at Fiscalini, under the shadow of Hilmar, traditional Cheddar went into production in California.

Through Mariano, the Puritans and their cheeses have finally made it to sunny California.

Grading Cheddar

2007-10-23T22:24:00.000-04:00

So, how did Cheddar fare during its brief stint in night school? I am relieved to report that it passed. I wish I could say that it earned an A+, but it fell slightly off the mark, mainly because of me.

For the most part, I succeeded in achieving what I had planned for my hour-plus-long class at the Princeton Club of New York. I introduced the guests, about 25 of them, to the varied tastes of Cheddar from around the world, and I survived conducting my first cheese tasting. I also competently outlined Cheddar's long history, and I wasn't flustered by several self-important guests.

This is where I fell off the mark:
1. I am not sure I successfully explained why the guests should care about Cheddar and its history.

2. I didn't do a good job of showing the delicious differences between a mass-produced Cheddar and a farmstead/artisanal one. This fault may have rested more with the cheeses than with me. None of the five cheeses particularly impressed the guests. If one stood out favorably, it might have been the Fiscalini.

3. I forgot to ask the guests which of the Cheddars was their favorite. What a wasted opportunity!

4. I realized that I am not yet adept at identifying different Cheddars without some visual clues or labels. When I first arrived in my "classroom," none of the cubed cheeses, which were placed in separate piles on one plate, were labeled. I panicked that I couldn't tell them apart and that I was going to mislead my guests during the tasting. I could safely distinguish the musty Keen's and the caramel-ly Le Chevre Noir, but I wasn't at all sure about the other three, Isle of Mull, Fiscalini, and Cabot (Classic Vermont, Sharp). Thank goodness some labels finally appeared and rescued me!

This evening served as an excellent opportunity for me to see what the public wants to know about Cheddar, if anything. Here's a summary of their instructive questions: how much does each cheese cost, how should the cheeses be stored and for how long, how do the properties of milk differ among breeds of cows, why do you push the cheese to the roof of your mouth when tasting it, how can you tell a supermarket Cheddar from a supermarket Jarlsberg, what role does snobism play in assessing specialty foods, how is the pH level controlled during cheesemaking and how does its level affect the final product, how will cheddaring or stirring the curd create different tasting cheeses, and when will my book about Cheddar come out.

Despite not being able to answer the above questions fully, I felt confident with the material and in control of it and for that, I am much relieved. But I've got so much more to learn and master!

I want to thank both the Princeton Club of New York for inviting me to speak and for putting on such a well-run program and the food historian Francine Segan for recommending me to the club's program director, Wanda Mann.

Ivy League Cheddar

2007-10-20T16:40:00.001-04:00

Here's a description of my upcoming talk at the Princeton Club of New York, which members are paying $18 to attend. I hope it's worth their while! So far 30 or so people have signed up.

Cheddar Strikes Back:
The Rise, Fall, and Return of Traditional Cheddar

Cheddar cheese originated modestly and long ago as a local agricultural product in Somerset, England. Over the course of 800 years, Cheddar has become the most popular cheese type in the world, and its historical connection to England forgotten or overlooked. Food historian Diana Pittet will uncover Cheddar’s English origins and trace its globe-trotting travels to North America and to Australia and New Zealand. The Cheddar found in supermarkets is a far cry from the original farmstead product. This is in large part due to the industrialization of cheesemaking which began in Rome, N.Y., in 1851, and to the lack of regulations for using the name Cheddar. Unlike other world-class cheeses, its name was never protected, so almost any semi-hard, cow’s milk cheese can call itself Cheddar. Luckily, small cheesemakers throughout the world are preserving or reviving the traditional way to make Cheddar. During the course of Ms. Pittet’s talk, traditionally made Cheddars from around the world will be sampled.

Ms. Pittet has a master’s in food studies from New York University and is co-chair of the program committee of the Culinary Historians of New York. Described as “cheese possessed” by the New York Times, Ms. Pittet gave up her job teaching Latin in New York City to sell English farmstead cheeses at Neal’s Yard Dairy in London. She wrote about the Americanization of English Cheddar for her master’s paper and has contributed to Oxford’s forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Cheese.

I will be speaking about Cheddar again, but briefly and less formally, at the awesome alehouse hideaway, Jimmy's 43, on Monday, November 26, at 7:30 p.m. My former food studies classmate, Amy, is organizing a tasting of Cheddars, apples, ciders, and ales, and she asked me, along with an apple expert, to say a little something.

Cheddar Abuse

2007-10-12T18:38:00.000-04:00

A confession: when I am not cheating on Cheddar, I am inclined to abuse it. I can be hard on the Cheddar.

My crime is storing Cheddar improperly. I am not 100 percent sure of the ideal way to store Cheddar at home--professional cheesemongers have slightly varying guidelines--but I am sure that whatever I am doing, it is wrong.

My first misstep is keeping Cheddar in the fridge, which is a hostile environment for cheese. Refrigerators are designed to suck the moisture out of everything, and this isn't good for cheese. Neal's Yard Dairy in London, where I worked for the Christmas season of 2000, recommends that semihard cheeses, like Cheddar, be stored in a cool, moist spot (not hard to come by in the UK!) like a garage or in a shoebox placed by a windowsill. I tried this once while staying with friends in London one November. They didn't have a garage, like most urban dwellers, so I put my precious stash of Somerset Cheddars outside on their windowsill, in a bag, not a shoebox. The next morning, my bag of cheeses was gone. Katie had to break the news that she and the children had spied a fox that morning, slinking atop their clerestory. She suspected that the fox had nicked my cheese. Outfoxed by a fox, I realized that I had gone too far by putting my cheeses outside on a chilly November night. From then on, I decided that the fridge, as deleterious as it may be, was the place for my cheese.

I further abuse Cheddar by storing it in plastic cling wrap. This isn't entirely bad; in fact, most cheese shops, even the good ones, use plastic wrap to wrap cuts of cheese. The plastic wrap prevents the cut surface of the cheese from drying out. But what the good cheese shops don't do is send you home with cheese wrapped in plastic. Cheesemongers wrap customers' slices of cheese in special waxed paper, like butcher paper, and then wrap the cheese they are left with in a fresh sheet of plastic. Plastic wrap isn't suitable for longterm storage. Impermeable, it doesn't allow the cheese to breathe, and it may maintain too much moisture, which can make a cheese die. Who wants dead cheese? Plastic wrap can also impart its unwanted flavor. And who wants plastic-flavored cheese? Waxed paper does the trick of allowing the cheese to breathe while maintaining a suitable amount of moisture. My problem with butcher paper is that I am disorderly, and I can't keep the paper neatly folded around my cheese. As a result, I end up exposing my cheese to the adverse environs of the fridge and the cheese hardens around the rind. Even when I did my stint as a cheesemonger, I couldn't expertly make origami-like folds with the butcher paper and therefore failed to present my customers with pretty packages of cheese.

My chief crime is that I keep the plastic cling wrap on for too long. If I didn't live alone or if I ate Cheddar at every meal, the cheese would be consumed quickly and would not succumb to the evils of longterm storage in plastic. But I do live alone and I try to eat cheese in moderation, mostly out of cheapness. Also out of cheapness, as well as mindfulness for the environment, I can't bring myself to unwrap my cheeses, throw away the plastic, and then rewrap the cheeses with plastic that I will soon throw out again. It just seems so wasteful. But what ends up being wasteful is ruining a fine piece of cheese.

I finally had to accept this contradiction (viz., by not wasting plastic, I was wasting cheese) when I returned to the States after a trip to Australia in January 2007. While in Oz, I made Cheddar at two dairies in Tasmania and bought a lot of Australian Cheddar. For two weeks, I kept my purchases in the bottom drawer of my friend's fridge in Melbourne, without changing the plastic. Cheese was on my mental back burner while I focused on the Australian Open. I would sometimes check in with my cheese, but I would just look at them admiringly; I wouldn't do anything to ascertain how they were faring. I naively hoped that they would hang in there until I got back to the States. I was wrong. When I did a cheese tasting with friends upon my return, I could tell that the flavor and textures of the cheeses had been compromised. One cheese even mysteriously picked up an unpleasant onion-y taste.

With ruined cheeses on my hands, ones that I had carried for over 10,000 miles to Queens, I vowed to follow proper cheese storage and stop the abuse. Here's my vow:

1. If I don't have access to a garage, I will keep my cheese in the produce drawer of my fridge. This is the least dry section.

2. I will keep my cheese securely wrapped in waxed cheese paper and will hone my paper-folding skills.

3. Once my waxed paper is too crinkled to fold anymore, I will loosely wrap my cheese in a light-weight plastic cling wrap. If my Cheddar has a traditional rind, I will leave it exposed to allow the cheese to breathe.

4. I will change the plastic wrap frequently, or buy only a small amount of cheese so I eat it quickly and won't have to keep it for too long in plastic.

Of course, the above procedure doesn't do you any good if your landlord accidentally opens your fridge and the door stays wide open while you are away in D.C. for a long weekend. I came back to sweaty, unhappy cheese, and I am sure I will have a frightfully high electricity bill. Talk about waste! But I suppose this is my punishment for years of Cheddar abuse.

Cheating on Cheddar

2007-10-08T23:22:00.000-04:00

Until the autumn properly arrives and the sun's merciless heat is reduced to a lovely warm glow, I don't eat much Cheddar or even have much in my fridge. I tend to eat feta, which I buy from one of the many Greek delis in my neighborhood in Queens.

When I am sweaty and listless (like I am now, even though it's October), Cheddar seems too fatty and heavy, and its nutty sweetness too cloying. Feta, on the other hand, is refreshingly zippy and tangy. I crave it in green salads, which is often all I can face eating on humid, sticky nights. Joey Ramone may have eaten refried beans in Queens, but I want feta. It magically manages to add richness to a light salad without make it undesirably heavy. Maybe it's the salt, or the slightly lower fat content (6 grams versus 8.5 grams per oz of cheese). It's certainly feta's briny sharpness that I want as a counterpoint to the sweetness of fleshy watermelon chunks in a cooling salad of black olives, mint, tomatoes, and red onion. Too bad watermelon is now out of season even though it is still hot and uncomfortable.

Another cheese I dig during summer is fresh ricotta, the type from a deli, not a plastic container in the dairy section of a supermarket. Mark Bittman of the New York Times calls this "good" ricotta. This is the cheese I use when I want to eat something more substantial than a salad, like pasta, after a tough speed workout with my running team. Ricotta is not tangy or salty like feta, but it's light, and sometimes this is all you ask of your cheese. A favorite pasta dish with ricotta comes from one of Bittman's recipes, with fresh basil and sauteed zucchini.

Feta and ricotta are the cheeses of the Mediterranean, so it's not at all surprising that I crave them during the summer and that I avoid the cheeses of cooler northern Europe, like my beloved Cheddar. But I need to ask why Australia, a super hot country, has embraced feta but the U.S.'s own sticky South has not. Cheddar still rules down there. Think cornbread with jalapeños and Cheddar. Or grits with Cheddar. Or pimento cheese.

When is autumn finally going to come so I can happily eat Cheddar again? And stop sweating?

Celebrity Cheddar

2007-10-02T18:59:00.000-04:00

Cheddar has been in the news.

Perhaps the coverage hasn't been on the same crazed level as stories about Paris Hilton or Beckham & Posh, but a certain wheel of Cheddar has reached celebrity status and found its way into big-time, popular news outlets (e.g., AOL , Yahoo, CNN, New York Times). What helped Cheddar tick along the AP wire is a still-active Web site, courtesy of the West Country Farmhouse Cheesmakers (UK), that shows a clothbound English Cheddar maturing in real time. Despite being likened to watching paint dry, CheddarVision has captured people's attention.

I believe--and hope--that the chief reason why a moldy wheel of cheese has generated so much media coverage, and has even received fan mail, is that in this fast-food age, when we are divorced from the true source of the foods we eat, people are fascinated by seeing the slow-- excruciatingly slow--process involved in making food that isn't produced on a massive scale in a factory. It's a novelty to see slow food.

I am pleased as a mouse with cheese that a story about Cheddar has made the news. The stories certainly helped me look less like a Cheddar-crazed person! But I am shocked, too, by the comments posted on YouTube in reaction to the video. A few people are utterly convinced that the video is fake and it's a stunt. The chief reason that they think so is their misconception that all cheese has to be refrigerated or it will spoil. This is wrong. Cheddar is aged at 50 degrees F, +/- 2 degrees, or at least this is the temperature at which the master cheesemakers at Fiscalini in Modesto, Calif., age their delicious clothbound Cheddars. A fridge's temperature is much lower that that.

Other folks posting on YouTube were disgusted by the mold. I didn't realize that fears and misconceptions about mold were still so strong. I guess I shouldn't be when most people buy their Cheddar (as well as factory-farmed chicken) neatly wrapped in plastic, with no signs of its production. And I shouldn't be surprised that no one, not even the ones who tried to call people on their mold phobia, didn't realize that the mold is chiefly exterior. The mold is on the cloth that wraps the large (almost 50 lbs) wheel of cheese. When the cheese is ready to be sold, the cloth will be ripped off, along with the mold, and all that will be left (unless some mold has found its way into a fissure in the cheese and caused some bluing--the same blue as Roquefort) is the complex taste of a cheese that the mold helped create.

Yum!

Why Cheddar?

2007-09-27T10:01:00.000-04:00

My first entry should address two questions: why Cheddar and why a blog?

If you discovered my blog because you are mad about cheese or you are an enthusiastic foodie, you must be thinking to yourself that there are plenty of other cheeses that I could or should devote a blog to. Why Cheddar, and why not a more "gourmet" cheese, like Camembert? The reason is that no other cheese has as rich and international a history as Cheddar. Cheddar has traveled the world and taken it by storm. It's the world's most popular cheese type. Camembert can't boast that. Cheddar is a jet-setter, keeping homes all around the world, just like a professional tennis player, who might own a Spanish-style villa in Florida to practice with the Williams sisters, an apartment in her hometown in Serbia to keep it real, and a residence in Monaco to avoid heavy taxes. This tennis player is so international and multilingual that one easily forgets where she's from. Likewise, Cheddar has so comfortably incorporated itself into the cuisines of the Anglophone world (chiefly, the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the British Isles) that people forget its country of origin—England—and claim Cheddar as their own. Case in point, my friend who writes a wonderfully insightful and humorous blog from Berlin, lists Cheddar as one of the basic American foods that she misses in her new hometown. (I am sure she knows that Cheddar is English—she knows a lot about food. The point is that she regards the English cheese as fully American.) It's almost like an English woman in Berlin yearning for French Camembert.

So, why pollute cyberspace with another blog? Well, I want people to know about Cheddar's obscured history and to know more generally about how the foods we eat end up on our forks. The more we know about the food we eat, the wiser and healthier we are. And, from a more selfish point of view, Cheddar allows me to travel the world, from Tasmania to Modesto, Calif., and take you with me.