Cheese Fit for a Poet

Editor's Note: There have been some technical difficulties over at Justin's food blog, but while our vacation is still fresh, I'd like to offer the food posts from my "Austrian Correspondence" series. Later, I'll re-post them on the food blog and include pictures.

It's all about dairy, my friends. The Alps, to use a messy example from the good ol' USA, are, as if the state of Wisconsin was dropped into the Rockies. Amazing mountains with a culture of hiking, climbing and all the other mountain sports, combined with the best dairy products I’ve ever tasted. I tasted some good food, here, but it's the dairy that's worth writing home (and blogging) about, starting with cheese.

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” G.K. Chesterton

You can always count on Chesterton for the good one-liners; I found the above quote while looking for a different one in a different context. But he has a point. Cheese is a wonderfully tasty and complex food, and the process of making good cheese is a journey of work and aging, not unlike that poetic beverage - wine. But Cheese gets such a bad rap that I really couldn’t imagine a poem about cheese that didn’t sound just silly. Cheese has so many connotations, from the farm all the way to the kitchen, that are more quaint than poetic. Smelling like cheese is not a compliment, and cheesy humor is associated with kitsch, cheapness and vulgarity.

Here in the Alps, just like other cheese-producing places, much of the culture is kitschy (or cheesy, if you’d like). Oompa music, lederhosen, quaint farmhouses and roaming cows with bells around their neck – I love it, but high culture doesn’t come to mind. But the cheese produced here is worthy of song and sonnet.

To my left, I have two cheeses, fresh from the farm. The first is called Komperdell “Village Cheese,” produced right here in Tirol. The texture is comfortable – moist and delightfully smooth. It has many tastes and would work well with a multifaceted wine, and wine is one of the flavors that jumps out when it touches my tongue. It’s a white cheese, and has many of the properties we Americans associate with good Swiss cheese, but much more savory.

The second sample could accurately be called Swiss Cheese, because we crossed the border and, aside from indulging in some duty-free shopping, visited “Sennerei Samnaun,” where the cheese is produced. The taste is both milder and deeper, as if it has more to say to you the more you eat it. The texture is much more firm to the bite and dry but in a pleasant way.

Both cheese sure beat the heck out of anything I’ve eaten from a supermarket. Naturally, they’re more expensive too, but they'd be even more expensive if we were not so close to the farm. If you’re not in the Alps, it’s worth the effort to take a weekend and visit the closest Dairy Farm, so you can eat this wonderfully complicated and delightful food. Who knows? It may even inspire poetry.