The Cheese Chronicles: A Journey through the Making and Selling of Cheese in America, from Field to Farm to Table

by Liz Thorpe
HarperCollins, 400 pp., $15.99 (paper)

Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge

by Gordon Edgar
Chelsea Green, 256 pp., $17.95 (paper)

It’s not surprising that these two books hit the market at about the same time – cheese is cool these days, knowing cheeses is cooler, and working in the world of cheese is coolest of all. As the country’s love affair with food continues to diversify, the interest in eating, making, and purveying nonindustrial cheese is definitely on the rise. United States Department of Agriculture research indicates that Americans’ cheese consumption increased threefold between 1970 and 2000, to more than 30 pounds apiece per year. Not all that goes on pizza, either. The American Cheese Society boasts 1,200 members, and the organization’s 2009 artisan cheese competition (held in Austin) judged more than 1,300 entries. It stands to reason that cheese books are expanding to include cheese memoirs.

Neither of these books is a cheese encyclopedia or primer. Rather, each relates a very personal, chatty, and somewhat rambling journey – from cheese ignorance to cheese bliss via tasting epiphanies, boundless enthusiasm, and hard work. Both dispense interesting and useful information along the way – about cheesemakers and dairy animals and cheese history (particularly American), about savoring and learning cheeses, about what it’s like working in the cheese business.

The two writers are coming from very different places – Gordon Edgar is a quirky, irreverent, punk rock political radical who runs the cheese department of Rainbow Grocery, the largest food co-op in San Francisco. Liz Thorpe is an articulate, adventurous, and chic young Yale graduate who’s now second in command at the renowned Murray’s Cheese in New York City.

Different perspectives aside, both authors tell entertaining stories about interactions with cheesemakers, restaurateurs, and customers. They discuss the politics and intricacies of producing cheeses, and they wax poetic about the visceral joys of a carefully crafted cheese. Primarily, though, both are dedicated to cheese education and expanding readers’ horizons about what Clifton Fadiman called “milk’s leap toward immortality.”

This article appears in March 26 • 2010.

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MM Pack is a food writer/historian and private chef who divides her time between Austin and San Francisco. A regular contributor to The Austin Chronicle and Edible Austin, she’s been published in Gastronomica, The San Francisco Chronicle, Oxford Encyclopedia of Food & Drink in America, Nation’s Restaurant News, Scribner's Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, The Dictionary of Culinary Biography, and Southern Foodways Alliance’s Cornbread Nation 1.