The Whole Fromage
Adventures in the Delectable World of French Cheese
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15
Adventures in the Delectable World of French Cheese
Ratings1
Average rating4
An Amazon 2013 Best of the Year Pick The French, sans doute, love their fromages. And there’s much to love: hundreds of gloriously pungent varieties—crumbly, creamy, buttery, even shot through with bottle-green mold. So many varieties, in fact, that the aspiring gourmand may wonder: How does one make sense of it all? In The Whole Fromage, Kathe Lison sets out to learn what makes French cheese so remarkable—why France is the “Cheese Mother Ship,” in the words of one American expert. Her journey takes her to cheese caves tucked within the craggy volcanic rock of Auvergne, to a centuries-old monastery in the French Alps, and to the farmlands that keep cheesemaking traditions alive. She meets the dairy scientists, shepherds, and affineurs who make up the world of modern French cheese, and whose lifestyles and philosophies are as varied and flavorful as the delicacies they produce. Most delicious of all, she meets the cheeses themselves—from spruce-wrapped Mont d’Or, so gooey it’s best eaten with a spoon; to luminous Beaufort, redolent of Alpine grasses and wildflowers, a single round of which can weigh as much as a Saint Bernard; to Camembert, invented in Normandy but beloved and imitated across the world. With writing as piquant and rich as a well-aged Roquefort, as charming as a tender springtime chèvre, and yet as unsentimental as a stinky Maroilles, The Whole Fromage is a tasty exploration of one of the great culinary treasures of France.
Reviews with the most likes.
Kathe Lison explores the world of French cheese. ‘Cheese is more than mere food. Androuet (author of one of the most highly esteemed books about French cheese) famously called cheese “the soul of the soil,” and you can hold it crumbling in your hands, solid and real, like earth.” Further, Lison says, “Cheese...(is) a way of seeing, a way of knowing not only who the French are, but where they came from.” Big statements about a dairy product.
Lison shows us where all cheeses come from (maybe more than we want to know) and takes us to the places where the the French cheeses we love—Camemberts, Beauforts, Comtes, Gruyeres, Roqueforts. We learn that cheese, like all milk-products, is full of casein, a protein that breaks down in the digestive system as an opioid, what one doctor calls, “dairy crack.” Lison tells the stories about cheese that make us cringe, about mites that chew on cheeses during the months they are stored in caves...using pieces of calf stomach to start the cheese-making process...how eating cheese “evokes other emissions, both male and female”...and these are the things we love about a good nonfiction book, I think.
