Cheese is a gateway to memory.
Cheese possesses plenty of mystical qualities, but my favorite is its ability to manipulate space and time. Time crawls a bit slower when you gather with friends, telling (or re-telling) stories over a late-night cheese board that ends up saving you from the morning-after clutches of the two empty wine bottles on the table.
Cheese allows us to hop from country to country in the comfort of our own home, experiencing a sliver of the Swiss Alps, a piece of the Pyrenees, or an iota of the Italian countryside. We can ingest moments of history and tradition, tasting the Roquefort caves preserved in the same form for almost 100 years. But the alchemical magic that cheese inspires within our own minds is what fascinates me the most.
Our bodies and brains are filled to the brim with memories, splendors of personal antiquity, and our own particular lore. And one of the easiest (and tastiest) ways to access all of it is to eat cheese.
You could make the same argument for wine, beer, tea, or anything culinarily complex, really. But there is a certain magic in the collaboration between land, animal, and human that makes cheese an extra-potent vehicle for time travel.
There is no downplaying the massive effect appearance and texture have on cheese tasting; however, most of what we taste is affected by our sense of smell, so naturally, smell is our biggest gateway to memory.
There are three types of smells: identifiable smells, composite smells, and flashback smells. Identifiable smells tend to be one ingredient such as jasmine, leather, or fresh-cut grass. Composite smells could be different things to different people, but somehow fairly universal like basement, new car, and—a wino favorite—petrichor (the smell of earth after fresh rain).
And then there’s flashback smells. These immediately transport us to a specific time, place, person, or feeling. Some notes I’ve heard are, “It smells like being left alone in my dad’s cold car,” “That is 100 percent the first week of summer on Lake Michigan,” and “This is my aunt’s house during Thanksgiving…but before the grandkids were born.”
Humans are innate storytellers, and cheese is an edible story. When we actually slow down and commune with ourselves, each other, and, yes, the cheese itself, parts of our own world can be opened up to us. If we listen, cheese can tell (or re-tell) us stories about the world and ourselves.
Anne-Marie Pietersma
Anne-Marie Pietersma is an actress, comedian, writer, and cheese educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the co-creator of the podcast "Is This a Brie?" and owner of The Cheese Basement, where she curates custom food and beverage experiences.
