JasonKoivu

I've watched Monty Python's "Cheese Shop" sketch more times than I can recall, so ya know, I figured I knew my cheese. Then I found this book on the cheap* and figured, what the hell, let's see how much I know about cheese...I know nothing about cheese.

Hell, I didn't even know how to pronounce many of them. Kefalograviera, Kefalotiri, Kopanisti, Ladotiri, Mizithra...and those are just a few from one page of the section on Greece, which besides Feta, isn't even known for their cheese! Yet they've got 15 examples. So, when you get to the heavyweight cheese producers of the world like France, the UK and Italy, you can imagine the mind-boggling amount of choice. Page after page of Pecorinos, Bleus out your backside, and every freaking Shire has their own pride and joy which they've probably been making since before the Roman's invaded a couple millennia ago.

There are over a thousand cheeses listed in the Simon and Schuster Pocket Guide to Cheese and this isn't even a comprehensive book. Since this is a "pocket book," with so many examples, you can be sure the type is necessarily small. We're talking size 8 type small! Not something your eyes will want to read straight through. I kept it on my nightstand and read a nation or two's worth of pages now and then. But even so, Carr was still forced to keep the descriptions short. Here's an example:

Atzmon
Soft, buttery, cows' milk cheese similar to Italian Bel Paese.

(Thanks to Python, I'd heard of Bel Paese, so that made me all excited for a sec.)

Your Cheddars, Emmentals (Swiss), Parmesans, Goudas, all those super popular cheeses get a nice long entry. That's where much of the info comes from. That and the write-up on each country or region before their cheeses are listed. For instance, it was surprising in a good way to hear that Finland, my father's family's ancestral homeland, has a well-estiblished cheese making tradition. And all this time all I thought they did was drink themselves to death! However, the problem with this is that Carr inserts some important stuff within these descriptions that might better have been served within the introductory pages. A simple example like, if a cheese is sweaty or cracked don't buy it, is a general rule of thumb that applies to many cheeses, and so it perhaps should not have been buried in the vast forest of cheeses that makes up this otherwise handy guide.


* Yes, so I bought this on the cheap, as I mentioned at the top. If you live in the Los Angeles area you too can revel in the joys of excellent and incredibly affordable secondhand books by going to the Studio City branch Friends of the Library monthly book sale. Every time I've gone I've walked out of there with at least a few quality, good reads under my arms if not a whole grocery bag full of them, and for under $10! Last time I went it was a quarter for paperbacks and 50 cents for hardbound. It's a bookworm's paradise!