Since one of my husband’s first distinct childhood memories had to do with eating steamers while sitting on someone’s lap, our teenage son’s foodie status should come as no surprise. So when Lucien started to pore over cookbooks—and then food blogs—and to be glued to the TV Food Network, I took it all in stride. His paternal grandparents, after all, always described their travels meal by meal, all other landmarks seemingly incidental...
Ruminations
The first time I saw udders up close and personal was from the rear of a brown Nubian goat. It was my first day as a volunteer at Sprout Creek Farm in Poughkeepsie, New York. I had my hands on two plastic cylinders protruding from a metal contraption, reminiscent of something from the Jetsons; it was meant to suction onto those two udders to milk the goat. I was terrified to use them. I didn’t grow up around farm animals (or any animals, really, besides a lazy cat), and I feared doing...
Winter 2012
At the age of six, when I was asked to identify my favorite cheese, the answer came effortlessly and without question: blue, and not just any blue—it had to be Roquefort.
I was at this age a recent transplant to the suburb of Harrison, New York, having just moved with my family from Ève, a quiet village northeast of Paris. I began attending a French-American school in the area, where other young émigrés like me often dwelled on the things they missed most. Apart from...
Fall 2012
"Que Dios te serba las manitas” (may God preserve your little hands) is the utmost appreciation a ham hand cutter can receive in Spain.
In that country cutting a whole leg of ham by hand is an artful ritual; those who do it are called cortadores. Technique is the very essence of this art, so it is considered a kind of performance. I know cortadores who handle as many as 400 jamones a year, cutting them during celebrations, expositions, fairs, wedding ceremonies,...
Web Exclusive
When I was growing up in the 1970s, there was always Ski Queen gjetost [YAY-toast] on the table at my grandmother’s house in Brooklyn. She was from Norway, where this sweet, firm brown goat cheese is made by adding cream to a boiling kettle of goat’s milk whey and cooking it for hours and hours. When it has cooled, it is formed into cubes that look like old-fashioned laundry soap or peanut butter fudge.
Gjet in Norwegian means goat; ost means cheese. Most gjetost tastes a lot...
Spring 2012
So I was asked to write about what I do as a cheese importer, how I find my cheese gems. There isn’t one specific way. Often, it’s about recognizing when an opportunity presents itself—“having the eye,” as a colleague once described to me.
Take the goat cheese Leonora, for example, that I bring in from León, Spain. I stumbled on that one at a trade show when I went to say hello to Tomas, the producer of Valdeón cheese. It was a cool-looking white brick tucked away in a refrigerated...
Winter 2011
A Texas teenager recounts his early years of cheese discovery
It started with my mother’s quest to find a snack food that would suit my toddler palate and dexterity. When she handed me a few Cheerios, I tasted one and handed the rest back. A series of other toddler snack attempts followed, but to no avail. Just when it appeared that I was destined for a snackless life, cheese came along, in the form of a fish: cheddar Goldfish, to be precise.
I was hooked. Goldfish were my...
Fall 2011
A cheesemonger recalls his pilgrimage
I asked the woman at the motel desk how I could find the big cheddar.
She replied, “You mean the big cheddar replica?”
For a moment I thought, “Why does the World’s Largest Talking Cow [Chatty Bell in Wisconsin] get to be a real cow, but the World’s Largest Cheese has to be a mere replica?” But I didn’t dwell. Maybe the clerk was a vegan. I had made my friend Anna, a sociologist, drive a couple of hundred miles out...
Summer 2011
It’s no coincidence that eggs are found in the dairy aisle
It’s possible that, even more than cheese, eggs are having their cultural moment. Recently, the Scientist and I attended a talk on home chicken-keeping by Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, who broke a cardinal actor’s rule by sharing the stage with a pair of charismatic, misbehaving hens. Still, nearly a hundred urban homesteaders turned out to watch the famous writer be upstaged by a pair of squawking...
Spring 2011
I’m not much of a joiner. I’ve got a AAA card, sure, but I gave up on the dance class. I’m not on the alumni committee, either. And this column? Strictly freelance.
But in the cheese world, we Bowling Alone types are far from the norm. With the exception of Kurt Timmermeister, that one-man-dairy from last issue’s Centerfold feature, cheese is a team sport—one of those things that begs for organization.
...
Winter 2010
