CHEESY ITEM

[Jerry D Mead]

FROMAGES I love French wine. I love French cuisine. I love French bread.
But I think the thing I love most about France is French cheese and the tradition of presenting the cheese cart between the main course and the sweet dessert. And this is not just at fancy white tablecloth restaurants, it's everywhere. One never leaves any wine undrunk when there is a cheese course.
Recreating that wonderful tradition here is not easy. Restaurants don't sell enough cheese to warrant stocking it and because most of the European cheeses that reach these shores are pasteurized they just don't taste the same. Pasteurized cheese just does not taste the same as naturally fermented cheese made from raw milk, be it cow's, goat's or sheep's milk. If the label on your French cheese says "au lait cru," you've got the real thing.
I recently discovered an Internet website for a cheese company in France that will overnight parcels of natural raw milk cheeses to anywhere in the U.S. It is not inexpensive, with the airfreight and all, but if you get to craving a great piece of cheese as I do some times, then neither is it all that expensive as an occasional special treat. I like to think I'm worth it; my significant other knows that she is.
The order I placed left France on a Thursday, arrived here in perfect condition on a Friday morning around ten, and with a couple of locally produced baguettes and a bottle of good California wine became our entire dinner. (My personal favorite was the Epoisse, a high butter-fat, strongly flavored semi-soft from Burgundy.)
The website is: www.fromages.com, and it has not only an order form, but a directory of French cheeses with basic descriptions of each one, information on how to care for cheese, how slice or cut the different types and more.