appellation d'origine contrôlée or blessed are the cheesemakers

Though I will be the first to admit that I am a woefully inadequate copy-editor and do a poor job proof-reading my own material, this apparent typo on the recently unveiled war memorial in Columbia City, Indiana seems mute testimony to sloppiness and the need for a second set of eyes for those situations where a squiggly underscore isn’t there to help.
But I say apparent because perhaps there’s an outside chance that the engraver is making a statement. Protections for regional—sometimes very, very specific locations, artisanal produce and delicacies are quite different than raging nationalism, but that difference is nonetheless by degrees and not in kind, I suppose. It’s still a dichotomy among vintners, cheese mongers and other specialists that creates an in- and an out-group that holds that there’s something imparted by the land and habitat where the food or drink is sourced. Is it placist and a sign of insecurity to believe so and to believe that those coming from elsewhere are somehow impure and of lesser quality? What do you think? I don’t believe that was the message, but most wars that anyone has prosecuted seem to be justified around the same narrative (land sometimes substituted with blood) and I wouldn’t be surprised if America didn’t enter into a trade war that informs future monuments—but not for those on the losing side.

hapax lexicon

The works of William Shakespeare gave us many nonce words—contrived for that specific occasion only, but later adopted into at least uncommon parlance, but there’s a linguistic form that fairly prevalent contextually but that the Bard only gives us two examples of: what’s called a hapax legomenon.
From the Greek for “only said once,” they are bedevilling instances of words—which may have been common enough in everyday speech but were only recorded in a particular corpus one time and usually very difficult to interpret. Shakespeare’s hapaxes are hebenon, the mystery poison in Hamlet used to kill his father the king and honorificabilitudinitatibus, meaning honourable or merit-worthy—and is in addition to being the longest occurrence of alternating consonants and vowels in annuals of English literature, some anti-Shakespearians take this word as an admission of authorship with one possible anagram being “hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi” or rather “these plays, F[rancis] Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world.” Another from an older medieval manuscript is flother, a synonym for snowflake, and apparently preserved nowhere else. By extension, hapaxes can also be singular occurrences in a given literary tradition: the word for cheese (גבינה) for example only appears once in the Old Testament in the Book of Job, but has become the standard modern Hebrew term.

fromageries occitanes

On this day, as our faithful chronicler Doctor Caligali informs, among other things in the year 1070 according to turophile lore (a highly specific date), Roquefort cheese was accidentally invented when a shepherd stashed his noontime repast in one of the Combalou caves in order to pursue a fair maiden—or what have you. Returning to retrieve his lunch after the appellation d'origine contrôlée standard number of months for maturation, the ewe’s cheese had transformed into Roquefort, which perhaps came in handy after such a dalliance as clinical trials have shown that the mould in the cheese can combat gangrene and venereal diseases.

l'atlas

The Local’s French edition has a rather detailed map of the adult beverages of the various regions and localities of the country, accompanied by an equally detailed key, legend that gives the story behind the various liqueurs, ciders, beers, tonics, brandies and whiskies. The wines of France, however, are deserving of their own cartographic treatment as are the cheeses.

graters gonna grate

Though the soft cheese wouldn’t be the ideal sculpting medium (I can’t claim to speak from experience) and she’s actually made of twenty kilos of English cheddar, the name Brie-oncé is perfect for this likeness of the pop diva created for a wine and cheese festival that took place in London over the weekend. Read more about the intriguing world of competitive (accompanied by groan-worthy cheesy puns—you’ve been warned) at the link up top.

to serve man or six tablespoon lemon turn beans

One computer science researcher, apparently seeking the answer to the question what might be on the daily menus of the future as alternatives to soylent green, spoon-fed an open-source neural network a bunch of cookbooks and food blogs to see if it could learn what things go together and what things do not. This was not the next you-got-peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate break-through yet—perhaps far from it—and the machine’s initial recipes seem to suggest that there’s a bit of a learning curve and that robots might not be welcome in the kitchen, at least not with creative-control:

Beef Soup With Swamp Peef and Cheese
Chocolate Chops & Chocolate Chips
Crimm Grunk Garlic Cleas
Beasy Mist
Export Bean
Spoons In Pie-Shell, Top If Spoon and Whip the Mustard
Chocolate Pickle Sauce
Whole Chicken Cookies
Salmon Beef Style
Chicken Bottom
Star *
Cover Meats
Out Of Meat
Completely Meat Circle
Completely Meat Chocolate Pie
Cabbage Pot Cookies
Artichoke Gelatin Dogs
Crockpot Cold Water

6x6

give me a bouncy c: harmoniously, bumble bees buzz at a specific frequency to coax flowers to open up fully and make it easier to get at hard-to-reach nectar

one does not simply walk into Mordor: a map generator for fantastic realms

compound lens: a pin-hole camera comprised of a bundle of thirty-two thousand drinking straws that provides a rather buggy outlook on the world

that’ll be perfect for our delicious Roquefort cheese: dedicated fans and show emeritus revive Mystery Science Theater 3000

psa: a friendly nudge to visit the weird and wonderful and very risqué world of Liar Town, USA—an old favourite

apple-core, Baltimore: Mister Trash Wheel and cohorts are working to clean up the Delmarva Bay

you are what you eat or hankering for a hunk of cheese

Artist Dan Bannino, seeking and finding common-ground among the powerful and the powerless, has a finely curated gallery of the favourite foods of the world’s influence-brokers. The Pope’s choice repast is pizza and Vladimir Putin is partial to pistachio ice-cream—and these still-lives (not pictured) are something to behold. You can peruse the complete series on Bannino’s Instagram account and find out whose palette matches your own and see the photographer’s other projects.

7x7

bowie.net: prescient 1999 BBC News Night interview with David Bowie regarding the emergent world wide web

urban league: a primer on why cities grew where they did

track 61: an intrepid team of urban spelunkers explore FDR’s custom train car underneath Grand Central Station, via the always marvellous Nag on the Lake

hic sunt leones: the Phantom Atlas chronicles how we filled in the gaps of our geographic knowledge with centuries of fictitious locations

time and tide: beach installation of mirrored poles captures the reflected sunrise and sunset

shyriiwook: woman goes into labour wearing a Chewbacca mask

curds and whey: a dairy factory in the western Turkish province of Afyonkarahisar boasts a circular viewing gallery around its central courtyard that offers visitors a demonstration of cheese-making

blessed are the cheesemakers

Although we’re a little late for this season with first Advent last Sunday already (I suppose that necessitates that we’ll just have to eat extra morsels to catch up) and as the finished kit won’t be ready until next Christmas—via Bored Panda, there are instructions on how to make a cheese Advents calendar of one’s own. That sounds perfectly delectable and preferable—at least to my wizened old palette—to chocolates. I know quite a few fancy delicatessens and fromageries that could pull together some truly gourmet ways to count down to the holidays. What would be your daily treat?

cocktail hour

Discerning gourmand Nag on the Lake had two successive food and drinks posts that paired very well together indeed. First, there were the exquisite still-lives of artist Greg Stroube who imagined how the Renaissance masters might depict a Bloody Mary or a Lime Rickey with all its garnish and the hyper-realistic detail of Bellini (also the name of a cocktail, Prosecco and peach nectar) or Vermeer.
These delights of and for the palette are then served up with a selection of sumptuous recipes from the mind of Salvador Dalí from a cookbook being reissued over forty years after its first and only print run. The surreal and bizarre cult cookbook called Les Diners de Gala has over a hundred illustrated recipes—of the strange and decadent variety, like toffee and pinecones or frog pastries. Be sure to indulge more delectable delights on Nag on the Lake.

smoke-screen or homo habilis

Just as a tolerance for dairy afforded some populations an advantage over their neighbours in more recent epochs, an early mutation in humans may have privileged them over their hominid competition. As Mysterious Universe informs via Strange Company, Neanderthals may have been quite literally smoked out by humans who could far better handle the ill pulmonary effects of cooking and keeping bonfires for warmth, light, staving off predation and perhaps rituals. Our view of our extinct cousins is generally a dim one, but gradually we are being disabused of a lot of these primitive stereotypes, including the discovery that most all modern humans have a small percentage of stowaway DNA fossilised within us as a reminder that we once shared our society.
It strikes me as a little ironic that this respiratory robustness may have been responsible for humans pulling out ahead, while there’s such incapacitation and moral panic over air-pollution, asthma and allergies—external and self-imposed. I wonder if those bits of cavemen genes (though a very small component of our total genetic makeup, the traits that we’ve inherited are different from one individual to the next) aren’t responsible for our collective frailties. Maybe our ancient ancestors got help from other sources as well.

still life with wine and cheese

An interesting meta-analysis from Cornell University of over half a millennium of food and drink in art—without even the need to repair to the food-selfie iteration of the still life—reveals that we’ve always had a penchant for the exotic and indulgent and much more likely to capture that in portraiture—or as a social snapshot, rather than every day fare. With license, certain subtle messages were encoded with the spread that appears on the table and this in depth study is an appetising reflection of how tastes evolved over time and even, through the lens of the Last Supper, how portions have grown. Take a look at the gallery of artfully arranged meals for yourself to better understand what the statistics and trends disclose.

on top of spaghetti

Via the ever-intrepid Atlas Obscura, we find out that American stockpiles of cheese and other dairy-products are at the highest level in three decades, thanks to a coalition of factors that have glutted the market with European imports to the detriment of domestic products.
I don’t feel that this is an imbalance something like the dreaded TTIP would solve to either party’s satisfaction, as you cannot punish an exporter for making (and we’re partial) a superior product, from cows whose welfare is better looked after. Perhaps the US Dairy Council just needs to get more aggressive in their campaigning and make Wisconsin Colby the new bacon, a flavour touted almost as a condiment for all those years, or craft-beers or the backlash against the anti-gluten leagues.

cheese it, the mads are calling!

Although never wholly out of sight and out of mind with projects like Cinematic Titanic and live-shows in the years since Mystery Science Theater 3000 went out of syndication, there has never been a reunion event to get the all the Mads and their hapless experimental subjects back together again. As Mental Floss happily reports, they’ll be on stage late this summer but tickets are going on sale shortly. In case you are curious, the name of this blog is an homage to players of MST3K.

le fromage, la légende

Via the ever-inspiring and inspired Nag on the Lake, we are treated to a very fine monograph on the limestone caverns of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon in the Aveyron region where the legitimate and right-honourable king of cheeses is cured, in accordance with age-old methods.

A particular mould that thrives in the soil of these caves—Penicillium roqueforti—creates the blue veins and imbues the distinctive taste, and prior to the isolation and understanding of penicillin, the cheese was used as a salve by local shepherds to promote the healing of wounds and stave off infections. Although remarked upon by Roman naturalist and historian Pliny the Elder and prehistoric cheesemakers’ sieves have been found in the caves, local lore has it that a young shepherd enjoying a repast of bread and sheep cheese was beguiled by the sight of a beautiful maiden, and stashing his meal in a cave (and apparently abandoning his flock for the requisite months it takes to transform plain ewe-cheese into Roquefort) and pursued her. The shepherd returned empty-handed and retrieved his remembered lunch, eating it in spite of the mould. Reading the article reminded me how back in 1999, le Roi de Fromage was embroiled in a heated-tariff war when the US imposed an impossibly high “Roquefort tax,” duties on French exports in retaliation for the country’s stance against hormonally beefed-up beef and against malbouffe—fast-food culture, in general.

soup-and-sandwich syndicate

For a few years, we’ve had one of those sandwich-makers to take camping with us, but having received a “panini-press” for the holidays, we’ve aspired to create some soup and sandwich combinations for indoors as well. Lately, we tried Cheese and Leek soup with egg and cheese toasts.

For the soup, ingredients for four bowls call for:

• Salt, pepper, parsley, bay-leaves nutmeg for seasoning
• 100 millilitre (about half a cup) of dry white wine
• Six slices of wheat bread for toasting and for the croutons 
• A heaping tablespoon of flour
• Butter
• 100 gram (4 oz) container of heavy crème 
• 1 litre (4 cups) vegetable stock from bullion 
• Around 600 grams (about a pound) of leeks, washed, peeled and cut into thin rings 

For the toast:

• Bread and butter from above
• 2 eggs 
• Sliced cheese (Gouda or Gruyère) 
• Spinach leaves or lamb’s lettuce (Feldsalat) 

There’s no cheese left out of the cheese soup, of course, but that’s where it gets a bit tricky. In German markets, there’s Schmelzkäse that’s made for soup and I suppose it’s like the pasteurized processed cheese food that’s available in the States, but looks some much less estranged from natural cheese and is much more appetising. In any case, use about 500 grams of your local-equivalent. In the soup pot, braise the rings of leek in butter for three minutes, dusting the leek with the flour afterwards. Introduce the white wine, vegetable stock with the bay leaves and allow it to cook on low heat for another ten minutes or so. Remove the bay leaves and breaking the cheese product of choice into small cubes, add that and the heavy crème to the pot and allow to cook for an additional ten minutes, stirring often and making sure that the cheese is melting. In the meantime, cut two slices of the bread into little cubes and braise them in butter in a separate pan (you can save the pan for the eggs) for about three minutes until crisp and set aside on a paper-napkin to dry. Prepare two eggs sunny-side-up and in your sandwich-maker/pie-iron/panini-press, make the toasts with the egg, cheese slice and leafy green filling—sort of like a croque-monsieur. Season the soup with nutmeg, salt and pepper to taste and garnish with croutons and parsley.

rarebit or why do we call them comics

Atlas Obscura presents a really fascinating essay that deconstructs a constellation factors that make up the hallmarks of modernity through the lens of a turn of the century comic strip that centres around midnight-snack, indigestion fuelled nightmares with the blame laid squarely on an “imported” (the focus seems to be mostly from an American perspective as the caricatures were but is surely of a universal character since internationally people were experiencing similar cultural shocks) delicacy called “Welsh Rarebit,” basically cheese-toast soaked in beer as a sort of hair-of-the-dog ballast for late-night revellers.
Assiduously, Winsor McCay, under the consultation of his series “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend,” documents the development of rather Freudian fantasies as carried out in the restive slumber of the indignant, whose psyche and drives might be explained mechanically as an assault by cheese as heartburn. Far from funny, at least to contemporary viewers—much like a lot of the reserve content of the funny pages—McCay portrays secret and vengeful scenes that one would rather not disclose, lest one shows his or her vulnerabilities and suppressed desires. As easily, however, people were willing to adopt a litany of compromise to gain modern conveniences—the electrified dwellings that invited staying up through the night, the logistical coordination that allowed people to live in growing urban-settings (to cultivate such routines and support surplus consumption), I believe that the illustrator though that his readership could recognise that something other was driving this feeling of being unsettled besides just alcohol and cheese, unlike the spectre of Jacob Marley who was initially dismissed as a spot of gravy gone bad. Such fiendish behaviour reflected perhaps made the world more receptive to adopting new customs and paradigms, like the psycho-analysis and other accommodations (and necessary back-lash) that came in its wake. Check out the thesis for further details and panels. Turophiles, what do you think?

6x6

op-art: 8-bit watercolours of classical masterpieces

annual: the year in pictures as captured by the official White House photographer

waschbär: little raccoon wets a piece of cotton candy only to have it dissolve

perfect for beaufort cheese: Alpine village is being powered by left-over whey

expatriate: one American candidacy is becoming awful diplomacy abroad

umschlag: author and illustrator Edward Gorey’s whimsically decorated correspondence

caseus formatus

Although I was quite proud of my handiwork with a periodic table of cheeses, though incomplete, I also find this infographic by Pop Chart Labs to be a pretty keen way of representing the casein continuum as well. A gourmet or connoisseur of cheeses has the funny sounding designation of turophile—from the Greek τυρός (τυρί), cheese, which while sounding different from the familiar formaggio, fromaĝo, fromage, Käse or queso but compare the word for butter, βουτύρου, literally cows’ cheese and suggestive of the turning and churning of the process.