1. Coupole with Spiced Carrot Chutney (p. 131)
2. Thin Red Line with Sweet and Spicy Red Pepper Jelly (p. 133)
3. Pawlet with Bacon Molasses Mustard (p. 134)
4. Mad River Blue with Lemon Roasted Asparagus (p. 136)
If you know a little about wine, you know that where a wine comes from, often referred to as terroir, makes a huge difference in how it tastes. Grapes come from the ground, and what that ground is made up of affects the flavor of the grape, and the wine that comes from the grape, immensely. The weather in a particular region determines which grapes are planted there, and the weather in a given year affects how the grapes, and therefore the wine, turn out.
Cheese is no different. Dairy animals eat the grasses, herbs, and flowers that come from the ground where they live, and those all affect how the milk and subsequent cheese will taste. Weather has an effect, too. In California, the animals live outside and graze for more of the year than the animals in Vermont or Switzerland do. In regions with harsh winters, animals live though the winter on hay, silage, grain, or alfalfa, causing some cheeses to taste different depending on when in the year they were made. That’s seasonality (page 108), but it’s also regionality.
Environment affects the end result, too. When a French affineur places a new cheese in the aging cave, molds settle on the cheese, and as they grow and age they create the rind and impart flavors to the cheese. The same things happen in North Carolina and Oregon, but the molds in those environments are different, so they have a different effect on the resulting cheese. Different nutrients and flavors in the diets of the animals, different bacteria in the milks, and different molds and yeasts in the environment all lead to subtle, or not so subtle, differences in the cheeses.
Regional differences can be concealed. When a milk is pasteurized, most of the good bacteria are killed, along with any potentially dangerous ones. They are then replaced with commercial cultures. The commercial bacteria grow and multiply and create all kinds of flavors and aromas in the cheeses, but they aren’t unique to their locality. Cheese makers have many options; they choose the commercially available cultures that bring about the flavors and other characteristics they want. The result is that a cheese from California and a cheese from Virginia may be made with the same cultures. Regionality foiled!
In the United States, in the twenty-first century, we have embraced the fact that most of us have access to hundreds of cheeses from all around the world. We can procure cheeses from specialty food stores, cheese shops, Whole Foods, Central Market, co-ops, and other cheese sellers all over the country. And for those not lucky enough to live near a good source of international cheese, we have the Internet and overnight delivery. This is both a blessing and a curse because, to a large extent, we have lost touch with regionality.
There was a time when regionality was everyone’s reality out of necessity. You ate what came from the farms around you because that was what was available. You found lots of Gouda in Holland, Emmentaler in Switzerland, Cheddar in the UK, and so on. Regionality in most of what we call the Old World remains important, in spite of the convenience of international food-distribution systems, because farmers choose to maintain their traditions. With cheeses, in many cases, laws and regulations require it. So you still find fresh and bloomy-rind goat’s-milk cheeses from the Loire Valley and blue sheep’s-milk cheeses from Roquefort in France, Robiola from Piedmont in Northern Italy, and Idiazabal from the Basque region of Spain. In the United States, by contrast, we don’t have much of a cheese tradition, so we are not bound to regional styles as they are in the Old World. There is great mozzarella being made in Dallas, Texas, and Brooklyn, New York. Fresh chèvre is everywhere. There are dairies that make Swiss-style Emmentaler, British-style Cheddar, French-style Brie, and Greek-style feta, along with their own “American originals.” In Europe, you can guess where a cheese is from based on how it looks. Not so in the United States.
Regardless of tradition, it’s good to eat foods that are local because getting them from farm to table often leaves a smaller carbon footprint than procuring foods from far away. Furthermore, by buying local you support your local farmers, which is great, and the foods are fresher, tastier, and more nutritious. If you are lucky enough to live in New England, in Wisconsin, or on the West Coast, you have an abundance of cheese choices. But define local as best you can. In San Francisco you have plenty within a hundred miles. In other places, you may have to define local as five hundred miles in order to have enough to choose from. But no matter where you live, there are at least a few good, local cheese makers.
We think it’s fun to mix up the regions on a cheese plate so that your guests can have the opportunity to experience the differences, but occasionally we like to focus on a particular region. There are so many different styles of cheeses from places such as Wisconsin or the Pacific Northwest—not to mention most of Europe—that it’s easy to create a regional cheese plate of great variety, like we have done here with a simple all-Vermont plate (page 126).