LOVING THE BABY CHEESES

  

Well no, not babyish at all but quite small, and it’s hard to resist a good (or even a feeble) cheese pun.  On the right is Boursault, ‘Fromage Extra Cremaux:’ 

 

According to my schoolboy-level translation of the packaging, it says it has a ‘velvety crust’ with ‘fruity aromas’ and ‘slightly refined notes.’  Nothing to disagree with there.

 

The other is Village Maid Cheese, Waterloo: 

 

It came without much packaging so I had to look online.  It’s made from Guernsey cows’ milk, and the Village Maid website has this picture of our current king with the Duke of Wellington on one side, and with Anne Wigmore, the begetter of Village Maid, on the other.

 

Anne Wigmore made a cheddar-like cheese with milk from the Duke’s herd ofGuernsey cows – and named it Wellington.  Production ended when the Duke retired.  (Who knew that dukes retire?) And in due course Village Maid created Waterloo, not exactly cheddarish - washed curds, quite solid, quite sweet.

It’sa very good cheese indeed though I imagine an English cheese named Waterloo might be a tough sell in France. Wellington would surely have been even harder.

 

 

CHEESE ZOMBIES

I realize, with a certain surprise, that I eat a vegetarian breakfast most days of the year.  Sometimes it’s cereal, sometimes it’s something smeared on toast (cream cheese, marmite, jam, that kind of thing).  But I never think to myself “Oh my, I’m having a vegetarian breakfast.”

But on Saturday I thought exactly that. I went out to brunch in Brixton with my friend Mariette from Berlin, who in fact is in fact firmly (if not fiercely) vegetarian and we ended going to the Lounge Brixton in Atlantic Avenue.  My friend likes cake for breakfast, and possibly for other meals too.  So she had a sort of cheesecake thing with apple and caramel and I had this:

Which is plantains, fried halumi (lurking under the plantains), of course a big old mushroom, and some beans, which the menu no doubt identified but which I can’t.

Afterwards we walked around and I was look for a suitably gritty urban spot to photograph my Berlin pal, and we found a place in front of a rolling door with “street art” on it, and I swear we both thought it said Cheese Zombie, which would have been cool enough in itself, but as you see, in fact it says Cheese London. I can decide if this is better or not.

BUTCHERY

About a million years ago I worked in Harrods.  I didn’t work in the food hall, though I’d have liked to, but I spent a fair amount of time there, skiving off from the furniture department where I supposedly didwork.   I hung around looking at food.  The fish fountain was pretty amazing, a lot of fish arranged into a kind of sculpture. I always wondered what happened to the fish at the end of the day.  I always suspected it just got thrown away, which seemed very wasteful, but maybe the staff got to take it home with them.  

That, in an inverse sort of way, was what happened in the cheese department. If you went there first thing in the morning, before the store was open, the guys were preparing the displays, trimming pieces off the big slabs of cheese, making them neater, so they looked more presentable and desirable.  Then they’d put the offcuts in a bag and sell them to staff for next to nothing.  If they liked you, they’d even cut off big chunks of perfectly good cheese and put them in the bag too, and sell them to you for the same low price.

I don’t know if any of this still goes on. I went into Harrods at the weekend, and I didn’t see the fish fountain but the place was so packed I was lucky to see anything at all.  The cheese department had changed out of all recognition but it looked pretty good. 

However there was one new development that we’d have laughed at back in the day, and I’m still prepared to laugh at it today – the Vegetable Butchery.

I know I'm not the first to observe the absurdity of this, but you do have to wonder what thought processes were employed to arrive at that name.  And what names did they reject? Vegetable Monger? Vegetable Brokerage? Ludicrously Overpriced and Fussily Arranged Greengrocery Department? 

          The girl behind the counter had the decency to keep her eyes downcast.

THE PROVERBIAL CHEESE

My recent mention of ant-infested camembert got various people talking about casu marzu.  That’s the traditional Sardinian sheep’s cheese containing living maggots.  Thus:

It is, I understand, made by taking a full pecorino cheese, and punching a hole in the rind, thereby allowing Piophila casei (otherwise known as the cheese fly) to get in and lay eggs. The eggs hatch and the newborn maggots start to eat the cheese, excreting “acids” (as the more euphemistic literature describes it) which break down the hard pecorino and turn it into a soft cheese.  The lore states that you have to eat the cheese while the maggots are alive and kicking, resulting in a flavor (according to reports – I have no personal experience) that tastes like a peppery cross between a pecorino and a gorgonzola; which, if true, doesn’t sound like a taste worth all that trouble.

As for the law, well there’s considerable debate and contradiction about where and whether casu marzu is legal.  You’ll find plenty of sources that tell you it’s banned under US and EU regulations.  Nevertheless, the interwebs are pulsing with people who’ve eaten it and written about it, often under titles like “My Lifelong Search for the World’s Most Dangerous Cheese.”   

And of course some people have eaten casu marzu at their local Italian restaurant.  Below is a friend of Bradley Hawk (who runs the website Amuse Bouche) eating it at Ornella Trattoria in Astoria, Queens.

And will you be surprised that the likes of Ramsey and Zimmern have been filmed eating it?

 Would I want to eat casu marzu?  Well yes, of course I would, for the experience, although I don’t know how pleasurable it would be.  There seems to be quite a psychologically barrier to eating live maggots, presumably because the presence of maggots is a pretty reliable marker that food isn’t fit to eat.  Also it also seems unnecessarily hard on the maggots, but I suppose I would (in some sense) find it “edible.”

The only inedible cheese I’ve confronted in living memory was this: Organic Bob’s Knobs, a Lancashire cheese. 

I’m not sure if the problem was with me or with it. It does have a warning on the label saying its their strongest cheese yet, but I’m no wimp in these matters, and in reality it smelled and tasted of nothing but ammonia.  It had come a long way, and as you see, it was encased in wax and maybe that was the real issue, because I can’t really believe it was meant to taste the way it did.  A couple of slivers was as much as I could eat.

Poking around online, researching casu marzu, I discover, and I suppose I’d have realized this sooner if I’d ever thought about it, there are more cheese blogs out there than you can shake a stick at, some very corporate, some very personal, though the latter tend to have short lives.  I was intrigued by a site titled Cheese Poet, but there hasn’t had a post since 2012.  Without it, I’d never have been aware of the existence of the From Girls (as in fromage) and their calendar:

The supermarket nearest to where I live is a Gelson’s – “really high prices when you can’t be bothered to go anywhere else” - but they do have a pretty decent cheese selection.  So, full of cheese-based enthusiasm, I went in and bought myself some Melkbus 149 Truffle Gouda – “contains truffle and truffle flavor” according to the label. 

And you know it’s pretty good – tangy, little bit sour, the truffle flavor is well back in the mix, and it it’s much softer and creamier than most Gouda which is a plus in my opinion.  Edible?  You bet.  See, this cheese blogging is as easy as falling off a log.

It's a visual pun, OK?

PUMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE

I was thinking of the opening line of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this ..”

I was in Beverly Hills – and I always feel like I’m an illegal immigrant when I slide over the border into Beverly Hills. Everyone there is (or at least gives the impression of being) so slick, so moneyed, so untroubled by the realities of existence, so veal-calf-ish, that I think the secret police are going to ask for my papers, find I don’t have the right ones, and then, if I’m lucky, they’ll give me 30 minutes to get out of town.

In this case I was there because I’d been to a wedding at the Beverley Hills Courthouse (congratulations Elina, congratulations Anthony) and this was the post-reception drink.  We were in Wally’s, which sounds like a modest kind of place, but this being Beverly Hills it isn’t.  You want to read their blurb?

“Creating a space that allows Wally’s to elevate its core mission of providing quality, value and service – with the inclusion of a restaurant under the same roof – has spawned a unique environment in which to enjoy both an elegant dining and a unique shopping experience.”

Well it’s not untrue.  The cheese counter in the back is hard to resist.  And as you can see, the walls are lined with bottles of wine, which seems a very reasonable design choice, though I couldn’t help thinking that once in a while somebody must grab one of those bottles and try to stick it in their bag.  Maybe there are security cameras – and I’m sure if they catch you they beat you up very discreetly, if very thoroughly.

Anyway, this cocktail is the main reason to blog about the Wally’s:

POMP IT UP - Belvedere vodka, Pamplemousse liqueur, grapefruit juice, up - $14

     Personally I’d have squirted some lemon or lime in it – but that’s me all over, never quite sour or acidic enough.

These days I also find it impossible to hear the word pamplemousse without thinking of the song, “Foux Da Fa Fa” by Flight of the Conchords, currently being used in a TV commercial for milk:

And I did wonder why the drink was pinkish – pink grapefruit I supposed, which it is, but channeled (I’m now pretty sure) through pamplemousse rose liqueur, there are quite a few of them apparently and I can't swear this is the kind they use at Wally's, but you get the idea:

And the fact is, Wally’s do serve some kick ass charcuterie and cheese plates, almost worth the risk of crossing the border:

 

THE SORTED SANDWICH

News just in from a website named  “The Local: Spain’s News in English” with the headline “Police arrest man over cocaine sandwich.”  It came with the above photograph released by the Policia Nacional.  The contents of the sandwich, apart from the cocaine were, apparently, cured ham and cheese.

         It happened in Benidorm, the sandwich carrier was a 29 year old Columbian and he had 100 grams of coke in his sarnie.  The subsequently found a kilo of coke when they searched his home.  “We’re gonna need a bigger baguette!”

Elsewhere on "The Local" site another headline reads “Cocaine-filled pineapples seized by Spain.”  The story is that police in Algeciras found a shipping container full of pineapples stuffed with 2,500 kilos of cocaine.  “According to Spanish online newspaper El Confidencial, the seized cocaine would have had a street value of €150 million.”  That must be one very fancy street. 

Here’s the accompanying photo (by Tony Ratcliff) of a masked man with a lot of pineapples, who may or may not have anything to do with the case.

THE ROTH SETS IN

As Mark Twain might very easily have said, “Those who love art and sausages should watch neither being made.”

Now, for one reason or another, these days I tend to see both being made, and just so you know, I’m continuing with my career as a thoroughly amateurish smoker  and sausage maker.  Here are some merguez I made earlier, which of course don’t need smoking.

And the fact is, now that I’ve learned a bit more, I realize that the smoked sausage is a potentially risky proposition.  The big problem is botulism, a form of food poisoning, actually pretty rare, but nevertheless sometimes lethal, so not a thing to be messed with.  I discover that it was originally called sausage disease, but then the name was classed up to botulism, because botulus is the Latin word for sausage.  Wiktionary says the word is “Probably a borrowing from Osco-Umbrian,” which somehow makes me feel better.

Apparently the way to prevent botulism is to use a “cure” containing sodium nitrite, some of which I’ve now ordered.  I went for Prague Powder No. 1 – how can you beat a name like that?

Of course spoiled food is no laughing matter, although one man who seems to have found it fairly risible, if also a medium for profound meditations on the nature of decay and transience, was the German artist Dieter Roth (1930 -1998), who currently has a big exhibition in New York at Hauser and Wirth.

Back in 1970 Roth had a show at the Eugenia Butler gallery in L.A., for which he filled some cases with cheese and left them in the gallery to see what happened.  

Well, nature being as it is,  the results probably weren’t really all that surprising; except perhaps for the arrival of health inspectors.  There are images around of the end result but I can hardly bear to look at them, much less post them.

Roth also made sausage art - he called it Literaturwurst - for which he took books or magazines he disapproved of, put them through a grinder, and turned them into sausages, using actual sausage recipes, replacing the meat with the pulped up book, and adding water instead of fat.  One book was enough for a limited edition.

The culmination of the series came in 1974 using the 20 volume complete works of Hegel, one sausage per volume, which looked like this:

These works are sometimes, hilariously it seems to me, referred to by po-faced art galleries as “artist’s books.”  Yeah right.

I think this is great stuff, but let’s face it these aren’t really sausages, they’re pieces of paper mache, and I don’t suppose anyone is ever likely to eat one of them, given the auction prices of Roth's work, though it would be pretty cool if some contemporary art provocateur did: Jake and Dinos Chapman perhaps.  At least there’d be no risk of sausage disease.  Might need a beer with it though.