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 Ma\u00eetre 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\u2019t expected to attend those meetings, but I didn\u2019t want to be anywhere else. The cheese lit up something inside me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I remember my first sliver of Berkswell, a British aged sheep\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI sense flavors of a caramel candy that has gone just a little stale and chewy, but in a good way.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt is deeply satisfying, but it makes me want more desperately.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis is giving me the feeling of the countryside in first light of dawn, right after a gentle rain, birds chirping and all.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI taste salty ocean air, with some taffy sweetness on the finish.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Cheese is as much science as it is art\u2014 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\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was once an earnest teenage poet, scrawling lines in my chemistry class notebook, publishing a zine, and eventually majoring in creative writing. I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve also found it exhilarating\u2014a satisfyingly worthwhile challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I first got paid to write about cheese at Fairway Market, and I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s something I can never articulate precisely. But I will never stop trying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 Ma\u00eetre Fromager Max McCalman. Each afternoon, just as I started my shift, he would share a taste of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":49158,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":true,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[590],"tags":[],"coauthors":[34644],"class_list":["post-49157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ruminations"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n