Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published March 13, 2006 Click here for the current edition Matters Of Taste Cheese, Please Seafood rules Lenten eating. For me, however, Lent has always meant cheese. I'm a cheeselover from way back. I had to be. When I was a kid, I didn't touch seafood. Fridays were much stricter for us Catholics then. At school, I prayed that the Friday lunch would not be the dreaded fishstick but the beloved grilled cheese sandwich. (Actually, it was a baked cheese sandwich, on a hambuger bun, with a single pickle slice placed on top.) The love of cheese is widespread. So much so that, oparticularly in mass-marketed restaurants, you'll find cheese appearing in all sorts of dishes where it doesn't belong.  It has been found that, to the average person, a dish with cheese is perceived as being better than one without cheese, period. Especially if it's melted. But melted cheese is almost by definition poor cheese. There are exceptions of course, but they're in a distinct minority. The cheese in a great lasagna, for example. Or in a grilled cheese sandwich. (Wait a minute. That's not an exception. Grilled cheese sandwiches require a poor cheese to be any good.) In the supper club of the cruise ship I've been telling you about lately, cheese was a big deal. Not as big as in the best local restaurants for cheese (Emeril's, Cuvee, August, and a few others), but big enough. At a wine tasting in the supper club one noon, they brought out what looked like ordinary cheeses. They turned out to be spectacular, esepcially the crumbly, very sharp Cheddar. Later in the cruise, I had the cheese plate in lieu of dessert, and was very pleased by the large chunks of four cheeses--one from cow's milk, one from sheep's milk, and two from goat's milk. They even served them at the right temperature--cool room temperature, not ice-cold. You are not about to hear me criticize restaurants for not serving such cheese platters more widely. I understand the problem. To serve cheese well, the chef must throw away (or eat) a tremendous amount of cheese. If they're lucky, they dispose of as much as they sell. It's a total money loser, and is there just to make a statement. This is because hardly anybody orders cheese. And because cheese good enough to bring gourmet restaurant prices has a very limited shelf life. It lives and then dies, changing all the while. That's one of the aspects of great cheese that makes it interesting. The first challenge met by the novice tyrophile is the array of powerful aromas and flavors that the best cheeses tend to possess. Sometimes my wife moves away whilke I go through a particularly good cheese plate, some of whose elements may well be very stinky. But the more you get intyo cheese, the stinkier you tend to like them. This is a good time to start getting interested in cheese. Artisan cheesemakers all over America are making cheeses using methods as good as those used by the great European cheesemakers. Many of these express something about the place where they're made. Every place has different milk, different air, different molds floating in the air, and that makes the natural cheeses as different from one another as wines from different places are. Indeed, for this reason, cheese seems to me every bit as interesting as wine. Locally, the Chicory Farm guys have consistently impressed me. Now John Folse has begun making fermented, aged cheeses. (He's having a dinner with a major cheese exposition tonight, in the company of Duckhorn wines.) The biggest issue in the world of cheese right now is the law. Because of new rules of the European Economic Community, most of the cheesemakers in France and Italy and England and elsewhere have been forced to begin using strictly pasteurized milk for all the classic cheeses. The food-safety issue is important. But the use of pasteurized milk has changed these cheeses, and not for the better. Enough gourmets are willing to take the risk that a few cheesemakers have gone against the market (and the law, in some cases) and continued to make their cheeses the old way. On thing concerns me, though. I have seen the advent of the cheese snob. Recently, I got into an argument with the author of a book on cheese. I said, "All cheese goes with all wine." She said that there are some cheeses she would not eat with some wines. Great. Just what we need: something else to scare the average eater away from the pleasures of the finer points of gastronomy.  We always have a handful of restaurants that excel in serving cheese. The first such was the original grand restaurant in the Inter-Continental hotel when it first opened. It had a fantastic cheese cart. The manager told me they pitched about $200 worth of cheese a day, and sold about $40. The next major effort was by Victor's. They brought in semi-legal unpasteurized cheeses, and so got around the law by giving it away, not selling it. (This also helped the turnover.) Then came the fantastic cheese selection at Marisol, which recently announced that it will not reopen. Some places you'd think would have great cheeses don't. Last time I got the cheese plate at the otherwise great Bayona, it was startlingly poor, old, and chilly. I had one just about as disappointing at Peristyle. I understand the problem, but they should either keep the standards up or ditch the program. It would be nice to have more cheese carts or even plates out there. But don't expect to see it soon. Too few people have a taste for good cheese, or an understanding of how it should be served. © 2006 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com