a cheesy sentiment

Let's talk cheese.

Today I am eating a French cheese called Douceur du Jura (meaning:  Gift of Jura, with Jura being a department in eastern France).

It was pretty good; a little sharp for my tastes, but it provided a pleasant contrast to the salty crunch of the pita crackers I ate with it.

The wife is a fiend for these guys.  I had to hide them from her.

My history with cheese is a little underwhelming.  I didn't even learn that there could be good cheeses until I was well into college (thanks, 57!); before that, I only knew that I was vaguely dissatisfied with the supermarket cheddars to which my family is partial.\

I would rather be set on fire than eat this.

No, I quickly learned that soft, spreadable cheeses are where the true delight lies.  How strange that I once thought brie was gross, but now, I can't live without it.

My favorite cheese is a triple-cream from Normandy called Brillat-Savarin, named after a French food essayist, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (great quote:  "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.").  Somewhat a traditionalist in this regard, I like to eat it with pieces of baguette that I've torn off by hand.

Behold the wonder!

The thing to note about Brillat-Savarin is that the slightly yellowish hue you see above is not what the cheese looks like when first cut; it opens up to a reveal a very light cream collor, and starts with a mellow flavor that's almost sweet.

However, after leaving it out for ten to twenty minutes, it begins to yellow and develop a slightly sour flavor.  If you're very careful with cutting it and cleansing your palate, you can enjoy the subtle transformations in taste over the whole period!  I served it at a party once, and people came up to me asking what the new cheese I'd put out was called; I was overjoyed to reveal that it was, in fact, the same cheese they'd had already.

Brillat-Savarin, like a person, changes as it's exposed to the world.  Some people like the change, and some  don't.  But then there are people like me, who are able to appreciate it no matter its state; people who enjoy the full spectrum of the transformation, people who take joy in the very fact of the change itself.

In the incredible book Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, there is a character named Mr. Motley whose body is composed of a dizzying array of extraneous parts which he has had grafted onto himself.  While that concept is fascinating enough in itself, what really grabbed me about his character was his stated obsession with the in-between:

“Have you ever created a statue of a cactus?” [he asked.]  Lin shook her head. “Nonetheless you have seen them up close? My associate who led you here, for example. Did you happen to notice his feet, or his fingers, or his neck? There is a moment when the skin, the skin of the sentient creature, becomes mindless plant.  Cut the fat round base of a cactus’s foot, he can’t feel a thing. Poke him in the thigh where he’s a bit softer, he’ll squeal. But there in that zone ... it’s an altogether different thing ... the nerves are intertwining, learning to be succulent plant, and pain is distant, blunt, diffuse, worrying rather than agonizing.

“You can think of others. The torso of the Cray or the Inch-men, the sudden transition of a Remade limb, many other races and species in this city, and  countless more in the world, who live with a mongrel physiognomy. You will perhaps say that you do not recognize any transition, that the khepri are complete and whole in themselves, that to see ‘human’ features is anthropocentric of me. But leaving aside the irony of that accusation—an irony you can’t yet appreciate—you would surely recognize the transition in other races from your own. And perhaps in the human.

“And what of the city itself? Perched where two rivers strive to become the sea, where mountains become a plateau, where the clumps of trees coagulate to the south and—quantity becomes quality—are suddenly a forest. New Crobuzon’s architecture moves from the industrial to the residential to the opulent to the slum to the underground to the airborne to the modern to the ancient to the colourful to the drab to the fecund to the barren... You take my point. I won’t go on.

“This is what makes the world, Ms. Lin. I believe this to be the fundamental dynamic. Transition. The point where one thing becomes another. It is what makes you, the city, the world, what they are. And that is the theme I’m interested in. The zone where the disparate become part of the whole. The hybrid zone."

Some days, I feel quite caught between two extremes myself.  It's nice to know that Mr. Motley and Brillat-Savarin are out there, reassuring us that there's nothing wrong with that.