The New American Cheese: Profiles of America’s Great Cheesemakers and Recipes for Cooking With Cheese

by Laura Werlin

Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 280 pp., $35

The Cheese Course: Enjoying the World’s Best Cheeses at Your Table

by Janet Fletcher

Chronicle Books, 108 pp., $19.95

The New American Cheese is Laura Werlin’s first book and it is a total success. She spends the first 54 pages giving an excellent primer on cheese, covering how to pick, taste, and store it. Then she gives us 80 mostly easy recipes that display the cheeses in their best light. Interspersed among the recipes are profiles of new American artisanal cheese makers. This is what sets her book apart from the competition. Many books regale us with stories of cheese we’ll never be able to taste in America due to the excessively restrictive importation laws on cheeses. Werlin, however, focuses on domestic product that you should be able to buy or order locally. My recommendation is to buy this book, find some descriptions that appeal to you, and go to your local cheese-monger to try them out (my plug for the best cheese-monger in Austin goes to Barbara Hoover at Central Market Westgate). Let me go one step further: Buy both New American Cheese and Steve Jenkin’s Cheese Primer (Workman Publishing, $16.95), and you will have a library with just about all the average person will ever need to know about cheese.

Janet Fletcher is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle specializing in food and travel. She has devised a book aimed squarely at the home entertainer who would like some stylish and complex presentations for the after-dinner cheese course. Fletcher provides little specific information about cheese. Instead, she focuses more than 90% of the book on medium to difficult recipes. For example, her Grape Focaccia With Homemade Goat Fromage Blanc requires not only a two-day process for making the bread, but the desire and talent to make your own cheese. Her Fresh Sheep’s Milk Ricotta With Peaches and Pistachio-Currant Biscotti sounds delicious, but will need several hours of prep time. The pictures are uniformly attractive and show the final outcome of the 46 recipes. Strictly for people who think Martha Stewart just isn’t finicky enough.

This article appears in December 15 • 2000.

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Wes Marshall is the author of What's a Wine Lover To Do? (Artisan) and The Wine Roads of Texas (Maverick), as well as the Executive Producer of the PBS television series of the same name. Wes has written for The Austin Chronicle since 1999, covering wine, cocktails, food, and travel.