I have deep feelings about cheese. It used to help when I fretted about Brexit. Not any more
On holiday in Corsica, I ate a lot of cheese: le niolo, which is made from goat’s milk and so addictively delicious I would sometimes eat a slice at breakfast, lunch seeming too far off; and brocciu, a fresh, ricotta-like cheese made from ewe’s milk that is excellent with bread and salad and rosé, but which we also ate in the form of a rich but pleasingly unsweet ice-cream. Naturally, my dreams grew worse with every day that passed; cheese gives me nightmares. But my consumption grew exponentially. And even when I wasn’t eating it, I was talking about it. Beside the pool, my friend S and I would describe the characteristics of our favourites out loud to one another, two crazy voluptuaries with pink shoulders and sun-frazzled hair.
I love cheese. It came into my life when I was nine, and my parents took me to France for the first time – we ate oozing supermarket camembert in some long grass by the side of a country road, and I knew in an instant that Dairylea triangles would henceforth no longer quite do it for me – and there it has remained, centre stage, ever since. Lately, though, it has begun to play an even more vital role in my life. When, not so long ago, my worries about Brexit threatened to take over my waking hours – if I wasn’t picturing the 13-mile lorry park that will be the M20 some time quite soon, I was thinking about medicines and which ones, if any, I should try to stockpile – cheese stepped in, acting as a kind of proxy, a repository into which I could hurl all my other anxieties. What I mean is that I now fixate almost exclusively on what supplies of brie and chaource will be like next spring – and the rest is just so much noise.
I now fixate almost exclusively on what supplies of brie will be like next spring – and the rest is just noise
Related: Europe made foodies of us all
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