by Eric LeMay
Most tastings are tragic. Wine tastings, cheese tastings, I’ve even been to a rhubarb tasting, but for all the carefully sliced samples, polished stemware, and pudgy cheeked participants, tragedy looms over the scene, as if Poe’s raven perched above us, croaking, Bon Appetit! We may be eating the Cheshires of merrie olde England or sipping the heartiest Barolos of Northern Italy, but we’re less merrie than muttery, and rarely do we clink glasses, except as an unhearty afterthought. Said rightly, “Cin cin” can sound downright sad.
I’m overstating things of course. Still, tastings do often have a Poe-like pallor about them, one which isn’t merely the result of throwing together strangers around a wheel of Brie. I suspect the reason lies in tragedy itself, because whatever else tragedy is about, it’s about isolation—the lone soul cut off from the social body, Dido left on a distant shore, Hamlet clad in solemn black, a blind Oedipus stranded in his own darkness. In tragedy, you’re all alone. And at most tastings, so is the food. You try your Pecorinos or your flight of Rieslings, each taste as ordered as test tubes or tissue samples, each offering up its isolated flavor. Sure, you compare them. You swish and chew your way to their relative merits, but that further isolates them. You note the saltiness of this Cinerino and that Paglierino, and as you do, you make distinctions, divisions, and you ultimately drive each cheese to its own lonesome end on your palate.
Tragedy doesn’t leave a nice aftertaste. It lingers insidiously on the tongue and works on you the way Iago’s words work on Othello. It taints your once peaceful mind and shakes your once steadfast faith until one night you find yourself staring at the shadows on the ceiling, questioning what you once held most dear. Is gourmandizing, you wonder, all that great? Is cheese, you fear, all that great? And what about God? Does God exist or is the cosmos just a cold black void in which we all die cold and alone?
Taste enough tragedy and you start to search for God in a chunk of cheese.
In scale, the storm felt Old Testament.
After ravaging The Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba, Hurricane Noel had at last hit Cambridge and, though no longer lethal, shook the branches above us with 50-mph gusts and pocked the streets with ceaseless rain. The leaves it had blown down had turned to a pulp that lacquered the bricks along which we stumbled as we tried to keep ourselves and, more importantly, our cheese upright.
“I don’t slip on purpose!”
Chuck was with me, in a cloche hat and wool coat buttoned to the collar. Earlier, when we’d first set out, she had embodied autumn with her red hair and rust scarf, but at the moment, she was a dark shade of storm. Her arms were clamped around mine because her feet kept slipping. She was worried we’d fall, and I had suggested she was only pretending to slip because she didn’t like that Noel was getting all the attention.
“Besides,” Chuck continued, as I strained to hold her up, “I’m not that fat.”
Even blasted with rain, I could see that if I showed any effort the next time Chuck slipped and suddenly clawed at my arm in her attempt to prevent her hundred-odd pounds from falling, yes, I could see that if I showed any effort at all—as I supported her, as I carried our cheese, as I steadied our umbrella—she’d think I was calling her fat. I didn’t dare gasp. I didn’t dare grunt. I didn’t dare observe that the brim on her cloche hat kept her from seeing where she was stepping.
“Fat?” I said instead. “You’re not fat.”
I thought this a fairly good response, but I could sense Chuck cogitating. (I hadn’t, you see, given the preferred response: “Fat? Are you mad? You’re thin! So very thin! A mere feather on my arm!”) So I quickly changed the subject.
“Your hat looks great.”
Chuck stopped and looked up at me. “It does, doesn’t it?” Her eyes were bright.
“You look like Zelda.”
“More like Katherine Hepburn.”
“Much more like Katherine Hepburn.”
There was Chuck, upturned lips, rain-wet cheeks, tendrils of hair sticking to her skin, and there was the world, wild with wind and water, and what did I do? Instead of leaning in for that unspeakably romantic kiss, I succumbed to the unexpected backwards-yank of our umbrella as it snapped inside out.
“Maybe we made a mistake,” Chuck sighed, glancing at the plastic sack dripping from my other hand. “Maybe the cheese isn’t worth it.”
“Maybe,” I said.
We gave up on the umbrella and stuffed it into a nearby trash bin, where it stirred like a mad tulip, then we lurched, arm in arm, toward home.
The cheese was worth it.
The cheese was a Vacherin and it came in a wooden box the size of a small cake. We smelled it the instant we shut the door. A whiff of grass and hay rose around us as we peeled off our clothes. I decided to make a fire, Chuck went after a towel, and by the time she was fluffed and the fire was lit, our studio smelled like a field.
“Or a wet cow,” Chuck sniffed.
We were sitting on the floor, the box between us.
“I’m going to open it,” I said, not entirely sure I would.
We’d wanted to taste this cheese since we’d starting tasting cheese. We’d read about Vacherin in Paris, where Chuck had made the mistake of asking for it out of season. (“That, mademoiselle” the fromager had spat, “is a winter cheese,” and Chuck felt the steely eyes of a shop-full of Parisians turn on her.) Along with learning Vacherin is seasonal, we learned it’s made in the villages of the Jura, a region just north of the French Alps, and that it’s aged from three weeks to a month, which means it’s illegal to import unpasteurized into the United States. That should have meant we’d have to go back to France before we could taste it, but a few months later, we got lucky. We heard where we could score an illegal Vacherin, and that’s what had sent us into the hurricane.
No violent rain or crashing branches were going to prevent us from tasting a cheese singled out and celebrated by a nation that, as Charles de Gaulle observed, has at least 264 cheeses. (Some counts go as high as 500.) Vacherin Mont d’Or was its full name, a cheese from the Mountain of Gold, and the mountain had come to us.
“Go on,” whispered Chuck. “Lift the lid.”
I lifted it. I lifted it and I felt the air fill around us with the scents and stirrings of another world. On the Mountain of Gold, a clean wind blows across the rocks and bends the stiff, metallic grass. On the Mountain of Gold, wildflowers spot the slopes. On the Mountain of Gold, time stills. Late winter and early summer happen at once, and you sense the dormant earth rustling to life and you hear the new calves bleat inside the dilapidated barn and, in the distance, you see the path your herd will take past the tree line and into the snow-capped heights. On the Mountain of Gold, you long to be nowhere else, because you belong here, you’ve always belonged here.
I was impressed. Inside its box, the Vacherin looked insignificant. It was pure white at arms length, as though it was covered in eiderdown, and when you bent over it, you saw its gray dimples and butterscotch underbelly. But its smell was magical. Suddenly, I understood those tales about genies in bottles and keys to fairy kingdoms. I understood Pandora’s box. And as I watched Chuck nosing it (“I almost feel it fizzing on my face”), I understood how something so large as my love for her might fit into something so small as a heart or how a soul might fit into a body.
The cheese, it seemed, was making a case for God.
I’m not the first to spy divinity in coagulated milk.
“Cheese does most gloriously reflect the multitudinous effect of earthly things, which could not be multitudinous did not they proceed from one mind.” When Hilarie Belloc, one of the more eminent men of letters in Edwardian England, looked at cheese, he saw an argument not just for God, but Roman Catholicism:
You can quote six cheeses perhaps which the public power
of Christendom has founded outside the limits of its ancient
Empire—but not more than six. I will quote you 253
between the Ebro and the Grampians, between Brindisi and
the Irish Channel.
I do not write vainly. It is a profound thing.
Since cheese flourishes only where the Holy Roman Empire once thrived, Belloc concludes that God —giver of cheese and all good things—must be Catholic. Belloc was famous for his faith as well as his titanic character (H.G. Wells once said, “Debating Mr. Belloc is like arguing with a hailstorm”), yet you can see from his protesting that he feels a little vain, a little cheesy, arguing for the profundity of cheese.
Not so with his fellow Catholic, Mother Noella Marcellino. Known to her public as the “cheese nun,” a name which irks her, Mother Marcellino lives in the Abby of Regina Laudis, a Benedictine cloister in Bethlehem, Connecticut, where she and her community not only make a version of Saint-Nectaire, but also where she studies Geotrichum candidum, a mold which grows on her own and other cheeses, such as Camembert and Reblochon, and helps give them their inimitable flavors. “St. Benedict had a vision,” said Mother Marcellino, “just before he died, in which he saw the world in a ray of light. For me, that’s what it’s like to see through a microscope. You look at the rind of a cheese and there’s a whole world there.”
I’m happy to report that the Catholic Church has not burned Mother Marcellino for her views on cheese. The Italian miller named Menocchio wasn’t so lucky. In 1584, he faced the Inquisition for spouting—apparently to anyone who would listen—his theology and he used cheese to illustrate it. He told his inquisitors:
I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth,
air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk
a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and
worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. The most
holy majesty decreed that these should be God and the
angels, and among that number of angles there was also
God, he too having been created out of that mass at the
same time . . .
In the beginning, there was milk, and out of this milk amassed cheese, and out of that cheese emerged worms, and one of those worms was God. It’s an odd analogy. The inquisitors didn’t get it either (who is “the most holy majesty” if not God?), but they didn’t like it, and after more reports of Menocchio’s heretical views and a second interrogation fifteen years later, they sent him to the stake.
Maybe Menocchio would have found comfort in knowing that men much wiser than he also used cheese to understand God and creation. The dejected Job, surrounded by his comforters, asks of his Creator, “Hast thou not poured me as milk, and curdled me like cheese?” And that pagan Aristotle likened conception to cheese-making. He thought that semen “acts in the same way as rennet acts upon milk,” that it contains a “curdling principle.” For Aristotle, semen causes a “coagulation” of blood in a woman’s womb, and those curdles eventually form a fetal “cheese.” To this day, Aristotle’s fourth-century analogy lives on in the villages of the Basques Country, where men make a rugged mountain cheese as they drive their flocks through the Pyrenees and women who are newly pregnant get met with a joyous shout: “You have been curdled!”
Zoroaster, Virgil, Pliny the Elder, Hildegard of Bingen, the great gastronome Brillat-Savarin, all of them, perhaps even the Buddha, fathomed what G.K. Chesterton called “the holy act of eating cheese.”
Cheese is cheesy, but it is a profound thing.
And we had yet to eat the Vacherin.
I tentatively jabbed at it with a kitchen knife (you have to cut off the top to get at the cheese), and it felt firm but membranous, the way a lung might give if you pushed on it with your finger. I inhaled, Chuck exhaled, and I cut in. Outside, the wind shrieked. With small sawing motions, I worked the blade around the band of spruce bark that encircled it. The top, sticky and flapping, came off like a milky scalp. We peered into the Vacherin’s innards. The pâte was the color of freshly churned butter and had a sheen that caught the firelight.
“I can still smell barn,” said Chuck, eyelids aflutter, “but the shit’s gone.”
The shit was gone. The Vacherin smelled clean, green, how a cow should smell but doesn’t. Chuck plunked a spoon into the pâte and pulled up a gob. We argued for a moment about who should go first (“You.” “No, you.” “No, no, really, you.”) and then, together, we tasted it.
Simultaneous orgasm comes to mind, of course, but that’s too easy. So does the Kantian take on aesthetic experience, in which Kant claims that only through art can you be sure other human beings have an interior life that resembles your own, because how can anyone else not feel as you do when you stand upon an alpine peak and cast your eyes over a sublime vista or when you shudder beneath the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and succumb to the terribilità, the overpowering grandeur, of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, as Raphael was reported to do when he looked up, saw, and fainted? But Kant’s too German. Chuck offered up her experience of reading Heidi at nine, but that didn’t do it for us either.
“You almost feel coked out on it after the fact,” said Chuck, who’d never tried coke, but we agreed that the cheese was too earthy and unpretentious to be compared to a narcotic. Its taste escaped our metaphors.
Here’s why: As soon as it touches your tongue, the Vacherin diffuses, creamy and clean, as much glass as grass, in a flavor so encompassing it pulls a note of metal from the spoon. Then it moves to a sharp tang, a buttery richness that owns your mouth and claims anything else in the air—the fire smoke, the cool rivulets of storm and rain that blew through the cracks in our shoddy windows. Until, at its end, it returns to the grass. It leaves you where you began, basking in a field on the Mountain of Gold.
As Chuck repeatedly dunked the spoon, I tried to describe the way it united so many flavors (and who knew hurricane had a flavor?) into one.
“The cheese,” Chuck finally said, “gives you the experience of what it’s like to grow old with it. You can sit with it in a room for hours and not talk, because you both already know.”
If most tastings are tragic, the best of them are comic. Not comic in the sense of a knee-slap or clown horn, but comic in the sense of celebrating community. So instead of Phèdre in agony, you have the fairies, misfits, and lovers romping together through A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and instead of Ajax’s suicide, you have the weddings of Gwendolen and Jack, Cecily and Algy, just as soon as those dandies get rechristened Earnest. The best tastings don’t separate tastes and create tragedy; they join them in comedy.
“Pairing” is the word experts use, but it’s a bit stiff. Edward Behr notes as much in his review of the laboriously titled What to Drink with What You Eat: The Definitive Guide to Pairing Food with Wine, Beer, Spirits, Coffee, Tea—Even Water—Based on Expert Advice from America’s Best Sommeliers. Of pairing, he says, “the subject begins to be taken too seriously, if you consider that the main point of a drink, after all, is to provide refreshment.” And Max McCalman warns us in The Cheese Plate that pairing, for all its seriousness, remains “an inexact calculus. Anyone who says otherwise is not telling the truth.”
I believe Max is telling the truth, which is why I prefer comedy to calculus. Because comedy is inexact and easy, drawn more to joy than calculation. And because comedy unites us, usually in laughs, sometimes in love, and maybe even in the way Dante believed all souls will unite at the end of that great journey he called The Divine Commedia. In a comic union, we become a little more than we’d be by ourselves. Dante and Beatrice, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Abbot and Costello—one can’t exist without the other. What’s poet without a muse, a knight without a squire? And a straight man without a fat sidekick in a bowler hat? Well, he’s just sad.
In the best tastings, as in comedy, things unite, like the flavors of grass, cream, rock, and breeze, like me and Chuck, like the hurricane and the Vacherin.
