The Atlas of American Cheese
Melissa and I followed a simple syllabus for our cheese education six or seven years ago. Each week, we would mark a few cheeses in Steven Jenkins' The Cheese Primer, buy them, and eat them that night. One of us would read aloud from the Book of Jenkins or appropriate issues of The Art of Eating, and we would learn something of the history and the people behind each cheese.
That worked for European cheeses. But even seven years ago, The Cheese Primer was riddled with Emmentaler-sized holes about America. Too often, we'd taste a new domestic cheese at a restaurant, go home and look it up, and find nothing. Our industry sprinted ahead as The Cheese Primer stood still.
Other books entered the race — Laura Werlin's All-American Cheese and Wine, for instance — but the cheese industry kept running. New books simply ran out of breath farther on the racetrack than Jenkins' book.
Jeffrey Roberts' The Atlas of American Cheese might have the legs to keep up, if only because of its size. Four hundred fifty pages tell the stories of our country's cheese makers at the rate of one a page, give or take, and in the process tell a larger story of an upstart industry that couldn't exist a decade or two ago, when few American foodies roamed our culinary wasteland.
The book frustrates the hardcore fromagophile. Most of the cheeses get terse descriptions: "Evangeline: Aged three to four weeks; triple cream, soft ripened bloomy-rind, tangy runny; 4 ounce cylinder; ACS," says a typical entry. Pictures tend to feature the people and not their products.
But the atlas hits the locavore or agritourist dead on. Who are your local producers? Thumb through the section for your region. Want to find and taste the cheese? Look up the distribution information for it. Want to tour the farm? Look up its visitor policy and give the cheese makers a call. Want to know who uses their own milk instead of sourcing it? Look for the farmhouse icon on the top of the page. Want organic cheese? Look for the big O icon. If you like information, you'll like this inclusive tome.
The main text on each page tells the story of the farm, such as it is. I don't envy Roberts the work of making each entry unique and interesting — how many different ways can you write "Bob and Joan had goats and found themselves with an excess of milk"? Many of the stories fail to captivate, either because they're not that interesting or because the text itself has a flat, reference-book tone: "Established in 1982, Lively Run is one of the oldest goat dairies in the United States. Located in Interlaken, between Cayuga and Seneca Lakes, it was owned by the Feldman family until 1995. Suzanne, a German citizen, met and married Steve while he was stationed in Germany." Only the not uncommon exclamation points break up the steady pace.
But at least the information is there, which gives this book a hard-to-top advantage. The American cheese industry will keep moving forward, but this book will pace it for a long time.
This book was sent to me as a review copy.
- Coach Farm Cheese Naming & Giveaway!
Would you like a sample of the new aged goat's milk cheese from Coach Farm? I couldn't say no to that offer, and I'm guessing you can't either! The wonderful cheese magazine Culture is hosting a naming contest for the new cheese and invited...
- Cheesemonger A Life On The Wedge
Remember last year I told you about my friend Matthew Amster-Burton's book Hungry Monkey? I told you it was funny and smart and filled with terrific recipes and that even if like me, you didn't have kids, you would still love it. If you read...
- Cheese Shopping
I guess you'd say I'm on a cheese kick. It started with reading about the Annual Festival of Cheeses to be held at the newly remodeled Ferry Building put on by the American Cheese Society. And yes, there really is an American Cheese Society. There...
- The Cheese Board Collective Works
It's easy to imagine that Berkeley's Gourmet Gulch, a four square block chunk on the northern side of town, started when its most famous occupant took up residence. But at least one purveyor existed there before Chez Panisse. A small cheese shop,...
-
Capricious Goat Cheese If you've been wandering Bay Area farmer's markets recently, chances are you've seen Capricious goat cheese stands. I've seen them at the Civic Center market in San Francisco, the 9th Street market in Oakland,...