When I was an 18-year-old college student in New York City, I found a job on Craigslist. It happened to be at a Michelin-starred, old-school French restaurant called Picholine with a magnificent cheese cart curated by Maître Fromager Max McCalman. Each afternoon, just as I started my shift, he would share a taste of a new or beloved cheese with the staff. I wasn’t expected to attend those meetings, but I didn’t want to be anywhere else. The cheese lit up something inside me.
I remember my first sliver of Berkswell, a British aged sheep’s milk cheese that tasted like brown butter and smelled of just-mown grass. I remember, too, how the staff talked about it in hushed voices.
“I sense flavors of a caramel candy that has gone just a little stale and chewy, but in a good way.”
“It is deeply satisfying, but it makes me want more desperately.”
“This is giving me the feeling of the countryside in first light of dawn, right after a gentle rain, birds chirping and all.”
“I taste salty ocean air, with some taffy sweetness on the finish.”
Cheese is as much science as it is art— rennet is added to milk to cause casein to coagulate; bacteria digest milk sugars to create lactic acid; bacteria and fungi break down a cheese’s proteins as it ages to create complex flavors. Yet when it comes to talking about cheese, poetry feels fitting. How else are we to capture the layers of depth, beauty, and power that sparks something inside of us?
I was once an earnest teenage poet, scrawling lines in my chemistry class notebook, publishing a zine, and eventually majoring in creative writing. I’ve always felt compelled to tell stories, to share, to extract meaning. Trying to describe an evolving wheel of cheese in a few sentences can feel impossible. But since those pre-shift meetings circa 2005, I’ve also found it exhilarating—a satisfyingly worthwhile challenge.
I followed cheese as I carved out a career for myself, and I also followed my obsession with how we write about it, talk about it, and try to explain it. At [now closed] Casellula, the wonderful cheese and wine bar in Hell’s Kitchen where I waited tables and assembled cheese plates, we illustrated cheeses with essential adjectives: funky, mushroomy, silky, perfumy, herbaceous, barnyardy, walnutty, butterscotchy, luscious, bright, crunchy, and so on.
I first got paid to write about cheese at Fairway Market, and I’ve never looked back. The cheese signs were the pride of my boss and mentor, Steven Jenkins, who was known to compare cheeses to Sophia Loren and animated characters. His signs were full of irreverent jokes, insults, pop culture references, and obscure allusions nobody understood. They were, above all else, fun.
There is so much to say when we write about cheese: the histories and traditions that lead to recipes, the time and place where a wheel or wedge exists right now, the people who make it and their dreams and passions, the animals that supply the milk, the vats, the equipment, the regulations, the economic intricacies, and the trends. I could go on forever. There are strata of appearance, flavors, textures, aromas, and, most importantly, there is the way it makes us feel. It’s something I can never articulate precisely. But I will never stop trying.
Hannah Howard
Hannah Howard is the author of the memoirs "Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen" and "Plenty: A Memoir of Food and Family." She writes for The Guardian, Bon Appetit, and Wine Enthusiast and teaches writing classes online. Howard lives in New Jersey with her family and loves stinky cheese. Photo credit: Tiffany Simone.
