A Tale of Two Cheese Books

Once upon a time, I told you about a cheese-themed novel. A novel, which brought both shame to the written word and anger to my eyeballs. The Long Quiche Goodbye was a book that showed me the grave error of judging a book by its bemusing title.

When a friend handed me The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese, I was wary of reading another cheesecentric novel. But by the end I learned another lesson: a book about cheese can be wonderful if it is written by a W-R-I-T-E-R. The latter book was penned by accomplished journalist and storyteller, Michael Paterniti. The former novel's creator, Avery Aames is masquerading as a "writer", parading a multi-novel resume of books and stories. Indeed, she is as much a writer as a paint-by-numbers enthusiast is an accomplished muralist.

The Telling Room traces the rise and extinction of Paramo de Guzman, a cherished family cheese made by a farmer in the Castilian highlands of Spain, exported across the world, and coveted by food lovers from American cheesemongers to European royalty. The cheese itself was destroyed by the business politics of the cheesemaking facility's expansion -- a destruction which the creator of the cheese believed was owed to the machinations of his best friend.

Indulge me with a bit of melodrama when I say the story connected me emotionally to the cheese itself and to the greater tragedy of cheese extinction. I've mentioned the surreal nature of taste transience. A flavor may enter this world and leave it just as quickly if the right people and conditions are not there to help it carry on. I can't help but feel some disappointment to know that I will never taste and experience the cheese in this story.

Paramo de Guzman is also a facilitator in this book. It enables the coming together of family and friends in the Spanish "telling room" (literally the room above the cellar where the wine and cheese ages) to laugh, live and eat. Like all family recipes, the cheese lifts the spirits of the Castilian family and reminds them to enjoy life and all of its stories. Come what may with the failed crops, the sick herds, or the daily rigors of toiling in the harsh Castilian sun, Paramo de Guzman is at the center of the table. That is, until it isn't.

The Telling Room is not without its pitfalls. The author's cheeky homage to the footnote--some of which span multiple pages--quickly traded amusement for exhaustion. If the anecdote or history lesson is important enough to expound upon, it belongs in the text.

Though the cheese and its creator, Ambrosio Molinos, are the subjects, the hidden protagonist is the art of storytelling, of which Ambrosio proves to be a master. The author's insistence on immersing himself in the first-person narrative, closely befriending the cheesemaker himself and moving to the village of Guzman to uncover the story, betrays his journalistic mantra to actually tell the story. We experience a meandering chronicle of the author's experiences in Guzman with his family, but we don't get the factual account of the betrayal or the narrative of the supposed betrayer until the final few chapters.

Cheese stories aside, the point of the book is to remind us to suck the marrow out of life and cherish the pace, fervor, and simplicity of the Castilian way of living. A way of life with which the author is so wholly enamored that he steps into the frame to experience it.  A way of life that would have every reader believing Ambrosio's mantra that "the three highest things in life" are "to eat, to make love to a woman, and to shit." (Because, as he notes, to shit well you have to take the time and care to eat well...don't ask me how the second element fits in.).

Now, I'm not one to casually tear apart someone's creative work. That is, unless the creator wastes my time and stains the collective cultural library of thought with garbage like The Long Quiche Goodbye. I'm especially not particularly comfortable laying criticism on the work of someone I really admire. So, it puts me on the nauseous side of uneasy to classify the third cheese book I read, Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge by Gordon Edgar, in the same canon of books that make me scream "let the writers do the writing!"

Gordon Edgar is one of the pioneers of the American artisanal cheese movement. Like all present-day cheese celebrities who were presented to cheese society decades ago (before cheese was even cool), he paved the way for lowly people like me to really dream of making a living at it. I've seen him speak before at a cheese conference and it was magical. I respect him and his superior knowledge of cheeses, cheesemaking, cheesemongering, and all things cheese. But, if you read his book without that foundational respect, you would get to the last page knowing a little more about raw milk and feeling confident that cheesemongers are definitely not writers.

Cheesemonger tries to link Gordon Edgar's life on the punk rock scene in the 1980s with his entry into the cheese world as it was just emerging in the United States. He does throw in some well-researched facts on cheese politics and a smattering of amusing cheesemongering anecdotes. But like all writers who aren't really writers, he forgets the importance of details. For instance, the loss of farmland to urban sprawl is purportedly a tough and important topic. Telling us that you've "talked to quite a few dairy farmers who are thinking of either moving away from their family's farming region or getting out of the business altogether," gets us nowhere closer to understanding the issue. What farmers? Where? How many exactly? What was their story?

The punk rock dynamic to his attempt at a story arc also fails. An honest examination of the 1970s and 80s musical and political movement alongside a thorough examination of the rise of a fringe food movement like artisanal cheese might have gotten us somewhere. But to draw analogies between the enzymatic reaction of rennet to the angsty atmosphere of the 1984 Rock Against Reagan concert is disingenuous to both topics. The punk rock scene had its poseurs, its nihilists, its anarchists, its straight-edge kids. To lump them all together and use punk as a vapid adjective ("my tight punk rock jeans"), is like telling someone you like cheese because it's milky. The tragedy is that his activist stories could be great. Cast in the proper storytelling framework, the parallel evolution of a punk rocker and a cheesemonger could be compelling. But without the writer and without the story, you're left thinking: We get it dude. You were totally punk rock and now you're totally cheese. Can I get my $20 back?

The number of cheese celebrities willing to contribute blurbs of praise to the back and front of Cheesemonger is sobering. A testament, perhaps, to Mr. Edgar's importance in the cheese world. But I'd like to believe that some successful people out there have principles. And I know mine. No matter how high I (hopefully) climb and whose prestigious cheese ass I have to kiss to win favor, there is one thing I won't sacrifice: my allegiance to the written word.