Immortal Milk
Adventures in Cheese
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Is there a food more delightful, ubiquitous, or accessible than cheese? This book is a charming and engaging love letter to the food that Clifton Fadiman once called "milk’s leap toward immortality." Examining some cheeses we know as well as some we don’t; the processes, places, and people who make them; and the way cheeses taste us as much as we taste them, each chapter takes up a singular and exciting aspect of cheese: Why do we relish cheese? What facts does a cheese lover need to know? How did cheese lead to cheesiness? What’s the ideal way to eat cheese—in Paris, Italy, and Wisconsin? Why does cheese comfort us, even when it reeks? Finally, what foods pair well with which cheeses?
Eric LeMay brings us cheese from as near as Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to as far as the Slow Food International Cheese Festival in Bra, Italy. In the witty, inventive, and wise company of his best girl, Chuck, he endures surly fromagers in Paris and dodges pissing goats in Vermont, a hurricane in Cambridge, and a dispiriting sense of hippie optimism in San Francisco; looks into curd and up at the cosmos; and even dons secondhand polyester to fathom America’s 1970s fondue fad. The result is a plucky and pithy tour through everything worth knowing about cheese.
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AN EXCERPT FROM THIS BOOK APPEARS IN BEST AMERICAN FOOD WRITING 2009
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It’s a challenge to describe the flavor of an excellent French cheese. Chuck and I were in our tiny rental in the Marais, hovering over a Langres. We didn’t have the funds for Champagne, but we had managed to get tipsy on a serviceable vin de pays, which is also a pleasant way to eat a Langres.
"It doesn’t play well with others," Chuck continued, the thick smack of pâte slowing her speech. "It doesn’t respect lesser cheese."
"It’s like a road trip through Arizona in an old Buick," I offered.
"It has a half-life inside your teeth."
"It has ideas."
"It gradually peels off the skin on the roof of your mouth."
"It attains absolute crustiness and absolute creaminess."
Anyone can read that a salt-washed Langres is "salty," then taste its saltiness, but not everyone will taste in it the brilliant and irascible character of Proust’s Palamède de Guermantes, Baron de Charlus. Yet these more personal descriptions capture the experience of a Langres. It sparks associative leaps, unforeseen flashbacks, inspired flights of poetry and desire. Its riches reveal your own. W. H. Auden once remarked that when you read a book, the book also reads you. The same holds true for cheese: it tastes you.
—From Immortal Milk
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even readers who don't know their comt from their Kraft Single may find cheese enthusiast Eric LeMay's poetic if melodramatic coverage as rich and unctuous as the subject itself. A former Harvard writing instructor with an MFA, LeMay embarks on a quest to learn more about cheese how it's made, who makes it, and why it's so delicious. Taking both the high road (an elegant vacherin) and the low (cheese curds), his egalitarian approach brings welcome relief to an arena known for snobbery. But LeMay's penchant for purple prose irritates as much as it informs; his gift for poetic description is the next best thing to tasting the cheese itself, BUT his literary pretensions can get the best of him ("The curds have no heft, only a tingle of softness, like you've lathed your hand in the warm breath under Salome's veils"). If readers can get past LeMay's preoccupation with Proust, they'll find his linguistic gymnastics and narrative detours (the origin of the term "cheesy;" the science behind taste; charming accounts of halting conversations with fromagers in their native French) to be a warm, even gooey, appreciation of a much-loved and often misunderstood food. (Jun.)