I am the Cheese

No, this is not an autobiography.
This is a tribute to a fellow turophile (is that a great word, or what!), the late Robert Carlton Brown.

If you cruise the cookbook aisles at old bookstores, you may have come across any number of his late works, from Let There Be Beer! to 10,000 Snacks. My favorite, though, is his delightful 1955 tome The Complete Book of Cheese, a characteristically playful little book bound in a bright yellow dust-jacket.

Chapter one, "I Remember Cheese," rings with the air of nostalgia familiar to cheese-lovers virtually anywhere. Though hardly Proustian, this nostalgia is no less acute: no sooner has the most wondrous mouthful of cheese passed one's lips, no sooner has the most perfectly ripened, unpasteurized local brie been found and savored, than the sky clouds over. The moment has passed. It suddenly becomes the day after the parade. Ribbons of sorrow drape the world; it's time to sweep up the confetti and start dreaming again.

Bob Brown understands this. Here's what he writes: "I remember another market day, this time in Lucerne. All morning I stocked up on good Schweizerkäse and better Gruyère. For lunch I had cheese salad. All around me the farmers were rolling two-hundred-pound Emmentalers, bigger than oxcart wheels. I sat in a little café, absorbing cheese and cheese lore in equal quantities. I learned that a prize cheese must be chock-full of equal-size eyes, the gas holes produced during fermentation. They must glisten like polished bar glass. The cheese itself must be of a light, lemonish yellow. Its flavor must be nutlike. (Nuts and Swiss cheese complement each other as subtly as Gorgonzola and a ripe banana.) There are, I learned, 'blind' Swiss cheeses as well, but the million-eyed ones are better."

Bob Brown, who in the 1920s and 30s was one of the more interesting experimental poets of his generation, displays his characteristic modesty in this remembrance. Standing in for his own judgment— the experience of tasting these cheeses, impossible to replicate— are the qualifications for prize cheeses. We learn what Emmentalers must taste like, not what they happened to taste like that day, to a passing visitor. Gone is the absurd eye-rolling and tummy-rubbing behavior that forms the food writer's bluntest instrument. We are left instead with the passing memory of a market day, of farmers and Swiss cafés. Through his nostalgia we learn something of the timeless.

Now, I don't place a lot of faith in the timeless, as a rule. It's an effect, a literary trick created by this clever poet-turned-hack-writer of popular cookbooks. All the same, I don't know if there's another way to account for the turophile's relationship to the ever-receding experience of the perfect cheese. Perhaps it's the hack writer who gets it straight, in the end.

The best part of The Complete Book of Cheese, though, is that it indulges this nostalgia only fleetingly. A work of profound optimism, it devotes only a few of its pages to such remembrances; it instead looks intently to the future. With chapters dedicated to recipes for rabbits (rarebits), fondues, and soufflés, the book projects its readers into the future of endless possibility: here are recipes you can try tomorrow; here are lists of cheeses upon which you can base your travels throughout the world. You can enjoy cheeses here, today, at home. And you can enjoy cheeses tomorrow, next year, anywhere in the world, as long as you live. And Bob Brown has provided a glossary of cheese varieties as your Baedeker.

There's more to be said here: Bob Brown, whose circle of intimates included the likes of Gertrude Stein, Nancy Cunard, Kay Boyle, Harry and Caresse Crosby, and Crazy Uncle Ezra, wrote just about everything, from mock-Whitmanian poems of America to professional pulp. Most interestingly, perhaps, he's best known among modernist circles for developing the notion of printing "readies," a literary counterpart to the somewhat better-known notion of "movies." But all this will have to wait for another post.

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In my next post I will see whether it is indeed possible to reconstitute a whole cow from Bovril alone. We shall see.