Growing up in the midwest, cheese was ubiquitous. We slapped cheese on everything. For us, it was a condiment, like Heinz 57 or Miracle Whip. It came in some sort of block shape, or, better yet, in pre-cut slices, and there was a law that required it to be hermetically sealed in WWIII-grade plastic and to have a shelf-life beyond cockroaches. We thought this was a good thing.
Kraft and Velveeta were household names (and still are, for that matter). A cheeseburger was just "a burger" -- you had to ask to have the Kraft American Single left off if you didn’t want a cheeseburger; that’s just the way we made them. Peas came in a can. There was no such thing as a tuna filet; tuna melt, yes.
They were simpler times. Looking back on it I realize that when your choices are extremely limited, the times become simpler by definition.
Then I did an amazing thing, amazing, anyway, by Midwestern American Standards of the time. I left. Packed my things and moved 2500 miles away to the Northern California wine country, right before the wine boom of the mid-80’s. It was there I discovered my true calling in life: to eat and drink as well as my budget would allow, and then surpass that budgetary restriction as often as feasibly possible.
It was there that I discovered the joys of wine, tomatoes other than beefsteak, real beer, women who had no desire to marry and pump out babies, and real, honest-to-goodness, farmstead, not-wrapped-in-plastic cheese. It was, to say the very least, a revelation. And times were good, for a time.
Then the wine boom hit. Which, although saving huge portions of Northern California from turning into strip malls and bedroom communities -- for which I remain eternally grateful -- brought with it the early demise of quality wine production. This may seem a rash statement, but ask anyone familiar with the wines of California from the 70's through the mid-80's and I think they'd agree: the overall level of quality has declined year after year. This is a natural progression when companies make wine as opposed to individuals. The stereotype of the crazed individual going against the odds to produce a few dozen barrels of home-made juice, just to see if he can actually do it, is true for a reason. Those people used to exist in Napa & Sonoma. With a handful of exceptions, they no longer do. It's just too damn expensive now, the stakes are too high to fail.
Then the microbrewed beer craze hit (see above for why this actually hurt microbrewed-beer lovers), and women (and myself) got old enough to hear the inevitable tick-tock and decide that they did, after all, want to get married and have babies. Nirvana replaced Michael Jackson on the radio.
At first, we thought these were good things, too.
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On the plus side, the heirloom tomatoes of October still rock at the farmer's market in Healdsburg -- even if you can no longer afford to park in that former farm town, let alone to live in it. And I escaped the marital noose.
But the cheese, my friends!
Well, the cheese got better. Or maybe it's just that the selection of cheeses got greater. Because now you can find cheeses in this country that were previously only heard of in whispers from fellow fromagophiles, just returned from small towns in France no one in Paris had ever heard of, or glimpsed in mythical, pre-WWII MFK Fisher stories.
There is no money to be made in handcrafted cheese. At least, not the kind of sick money that corporations need to make to stay alive. No, only a true gonzo lover of the stuff would think about doing this, someone hell-bent on sustainable agriculture, living off the land, keeping the family farm alive, or some such combination of altruism/make-the-best-of-what-ya-got mentality. That, or they're just really, really crazy for the stuff.
And these cheeses will make you crazy, like a Little-Kid-on-Xmas-Day crazy.
Here's something about cheese that keeps me awake at night: if 80% of our sense of taste comes through our olfactory glands, then why does a Tallegio taste so good? In other words, how can something that smells like your Uncle Buck's socks, left to rot under the bed for six weeks, taste like Aunt Betty's apple pie? There's no way around it, Tallegio stinks to high heaven; but the taste of it makes my mouth do the happy dance. As a matter of fact, it seems that the worse a cheese smells, the better it tastes. And that makes no logical sense whatsoever.
I suppose this would be the point where I whip out the Harold McGee and break it down molecularly, but why ruin it? I don't really want to know why, truth be told. That would suck all the fun out of it. And that's what it should be: fun.
Your mouth doing the happy dance.
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5 Things Cheese Wants You to Know:
1. Cheese is alive. Not like an apple or orange, ripe when picked but then dying little by little after you pick it, but like spoiled milk full of tiny organisms making magical magic only for you. However, it does have it's peak of ripeness, like produce, after which it starts to fall off, so look for that, just as you would in a canteloupe. The first question you should ask your fromager should not be "What's good with merlot?" but "What's ripe?".
2. Pairing wine & cheese together is not a sorcerer's art. Do you like the cheese you're eating? "Yes." Do you like the wine you're drinking? "You bet." There, then. Consider yourself paired. On the less flip side, a cheese and a wine from the same part of the world are usually going to be fantastic together. After all, whoever lives there has had the benefit of centuries of experimenting to come up with the right combination, while you only had 20 minutes at Murray's.
3. Do Not Cut Firm Cheeses Into Blocks. Repeat: Do Not Cut Firm Cheeses Into Blocks. That's usually too much cheese for the average person's mouth to handle at once, it's overwhelming to the palate. Shave it and let people use their fingers. And, please, no toothpicks. In my experience, a toothpick sticking out of something on a buffet is like a big neon sign saying "Avoid Me!"
4. Days-old bread is better than crackers. That could just be me, though.
5. Experiment. If you've never tried Cashel Blue from Ireland, or Bayley Hazen Blue from Vermont, don't say you don't like blue cheese. There are so many different kinds of cheese out there. You do your mouth a great disservice by letting your silly brain deny it access to the world's cornucopia. Loosen up, baby.
