What a friend we have in cheeses: Wyn Drabble

Wyn Drabble reckons if you find an old fondue pot in your kitchen cupboard, leave it there. Photo / NZME

Opinion

Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, writer, public speaker and musician. He is based in Hawke’s Bay.

Those of you who are longer in the tooth will know just how far we have come in the matter of cheeses.

I’m talking both manufacture and appreciation here.

My childhood memory says there was only mild or tasty. The range was expanded with the appearance of ... you probably guessed it ... medium.

An early memory of cheese in a starring role involved a piece of fruit cut in half. For small dos, it might have been an orange, for large dos, a rockmelon or even a watermelon.

The cheese (mild, medium or tasty) was cut into uniform little cubes, speared on toothpicks and inserted into the chosen fruit, creating a triumphant table centrepiece. A cheese hedgehog!

A little later came the fondue fad. The strongest memory for many will be trying to locate their piece of bread, which had detached itself from its dipping skewer and become lost in the murky, melty depths of the cheese lake.

If you look in the very back of one of your kitchen cupboards, you may find a relic of this age, a fondue pot with its little burner underneath. It could be made of orange enamel. Just leave it there.

I also remember a phase of soft, creamy cheese having chopped dried apricots and other atrocities folded through it, then being shaped into a log and rolled in desiccated coconut or ground almonds. It could have been worse, I suppose; it could have been rolled in hundreds and thousands and called fairy log!

Such memories are flooding back because the New Zealand Champions of Cheese Awards have just been held and the winners list shows how far we have come. The overall winner may have been a cheddar but it was not tied with any of the epithets mild, medium or tasty. The Whitestone cheese company’s sheep milk cheddar was described by one of the judges as “complex, waxy, balanced with a beautiful ivory paste”.

None of the judges said: “This would be delightful cut into cubes, speared with toothpicks and jabbed into an upturned grapefruit half.”

Others on the winners list included blue brie, Maasdam, smoked gouda, triple cream blue, artisan ash rind white, Canterbury red, and parmesan. I’m picking that none of the parmesan entries came pre-grated in little packets. Again, how far we have come!

The wider world has also embraced cheese with more passion. Last year, for example, Nashville Zoo in Tennessee named its six new baby skunks Cheddar, Feta, Havarti, Brie, Fontina and Munster. None was named Mild.

In France (where they should know better) two chefs overdid things by creating a pizza with 1001 different cheeses on it! Yes, there are that many different varieties. I must add in the chefs’ defence that it was simply to create a Guinness World Record. Which it did.

But cheese is not always what it’s crackered up to be. It can kill. Sadly, a 74-year-old Italian cheesemaker was killed when a shelf collapsed, creating a domino effect that brought down thousands of 40kg parmesan wheels from as high as 10 metres on top of him.

A raccoon who was “visiting” an American backyard barbecue was a little luckier. It stole a piece of cheese that had been discarded in the trash but then began to choke on it. One of the men at the barbecue managed to slap the raccoon on the back and the offending cheese was eventually dislodged, leaving the raccoon free to wander off in search of more trash cans with smaller bits of cheese.

I’ll leave this week’s final cheese word to Willie Nelson (and others): “The early bird gets the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.”