Day 4: C'est fort comme du Roquefort!

[mousme]

Cheese! (In 1411, King Charles VI of France granted a monopoly on the ripening of Roquefort cheese to the people of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon). This is today's topic, provided by the prolific sorceror, for the choose Phnee's topic of the day meme.

Oh, man, cheese. Cheese is wonderful. I am, once again, going to talk about my father. I don't know what it is about the topics sorceror has been picking thus far, but they all seem to tie in with some strong childhood associations with my father.

I suppose it shouldn't come as that much of a surprise. I'm very much a Daddy's Girl, even though my mother and I are close and I love her dearly. My father was the parent who stayed home with me during the early years, from when I was about one and a half to five years old. My mother went back to work, and while my father was always working during that time, the advantage of being a university professor was that he could work from home a lot of the time and basically made his own hours when he wasn't actively teaching a course. So many of my early childhood memories of home feature him.

Anyway, cheese. My father (and to a lesser extent my mother) is a big fan of all things cheese, especially French cheese. Anything unpasteurised, he would purchase it with glee and bring it home to try. I was introduced to Brie when I was fairly young, probably around the age of five or maybe six. It's a good "starter" cheese, if you will, because the flavour is mild and the texture generally creamy.

It's not like I didn't have any cheese before then. It was just that it was all the more conventional cheeses that you get in North America. Hard cheddar (always Cracker Barrel), mozzarella sprinkled over pizza, and MacLaren's Imperial Cheese (which is basically old cheddar but found in a red container), which my father inexplicably used to put on his breakfast toast. For a while we had Kraft sliced cheese in the house, but my mother refused to give it to anyone but the dog (bad idea), and when it unsurprisingly made the dog sick she banned it from the house entirely. My father also used to buy La Vache Qui Rit (Laughing Cow cheese), which is creamy something-or-other cheese that probably wouldn't stand up to very close scrutiny, and Babybel cheese as well.

But when I was old enough to understand that there was a significant difference between processed food out of a package and food made from scratch and from whole ingredients, we very quickly began changing our eating habits. Apart from my father's nostalgic love for things in various packaging (which I share to this day), we started eating a lot better, and that included cheese. My father's repertoire of unpasteurised cheeses was vast, but family favourites were always various kinds of brie and Muenster, any kind of cheese that had a little bit of a kick to it. My mother adored chèvre in all its various forms ("En bûche ou en meule, monsieur?" was another household phrase, which would likely need a post of its own to explain that particular in-joke), and my father was especially fond of blue cheese.

Blue cheese was one of the few things I held out on trying as a child. I was not particularly difficult when it came to food. The rule in our house was that, if you didn't like something, you didn't have to eat it, so long as you had given it a chance. The one time my father decided enough was enough and forced me to eat the liver I'd been served, I promptly threw up, ending that particular discussion right there. Blue cheese, however, was the food I balked at. I mean, it literally had mould growing on it. How could it possibly be good? I'd seen my mother throw away mouldy food, I'd seen her cut away the mould on hard cheese. Why was mould bad on other foods but good on blue cheese? Because I ate other cheese well and was not generally a fussy eater, my parents let the blue cheese thing slide.

Roquefort, as a result, was revelation. I don't remember how old I was when I finally decided to try it. I think I was probably about seven or eight years old. Either way, Roquefort was goddamned delicious, and I have not looked back since.

For a while when I was in my teens and cheese was not expensive, we went through a phase of many years in which we decided to have cheese-tasting adventures. We were lucky enough to live near a market with a cheesemonger, and so every week we'd go there and ask them what was new, what was exciting, and what they'd recommend. I can't even remember all of the various cheeses we tried over the span of several years, but they all ranged from "okay it's good but kind of boring" to "holy shit the heavens have parted and I can hear the divine choir singing." A few of those cheeses made it into our weekly rotation of cheeses, while others got put on the "once was fine but never again" list.

These days, cheese has become ridiculously expensive. Our beloved Île aux grues Riopelle is now something like $12 for a small wedge. I know that since I've been on my own I have only bought artisanal cheese a handful of times in the last 12 years, and even my parents, who have a much bigger budget for food than I do, have stopped buying it except for dinner parties. What used to be a weekly staple in our household is now an occasional treat, and it's really sad.

Of course, I haven't gone into all the other wonderful things that can be done with cheese. Baked Brie. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Parmesan sprinkled over... well, pretty much anything. Feta crumbled into salad. Feta mixed in with tomatoes and olive oil and basil.

The conclusion is that, if cheese is involved, I'm your girl. I have yet to meet a cheese I don't like, though I will confess that I have yet to try that Spanish cheese that reportedly has worms in it (to aid the fermentation process, I guess). I may be a little too squeamish for that.

Comments

[miseri.livejournal.com]

I am very fond of Gorgonzola.

Have you ever tried Brunost? I had a block of it once, courtesy of Peter, but ... let's say it's an acquired taste which I never acquired.