GLOBAL CHEESE
FROM APRIL/MAY 2021 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
The snow was flying on a bitterly cold March morning, so naturally I thought to bicycle to Kensington Market for cheese.
I love cheese. It’s one of the two foods I’ve eaten my entire life, along with Weetabix. I started off with cheddar and mozza – but that is every poor person in a small town in Canada. It wasn’t until I went travelling that I discovered the real thing.
It was another March, years ago, that I ended up in Crete. I was there because I’d seen Zorba the Greek with my mother at Christmas and we both thought the main actor, Alan Bates, looked like Leonard Cohen. I was in London, it was wet and I did what Cohen did – bought a ticket for Athens and a ferry out of Piraeus.
I stayed in youth hostels and we’d line up in the mornings while stout men drove up in Jeeps and chose us to work in their olive fields. I had never eaten an olive before. I thought I’d hate them. But for lunch a grandmother would spread out a picnic blanket and lay out last year’s olives with feta and tomatoes and crusty bread and a tin carafe of retsina. We would stare at the goats that had made the feta, the trees that had provided the olives. I was in love with hard work and food and wine and I thought of Zorba: dance!
Back in cold, snow-blocked Canada, what is cheese but the experience of a distant sunny place? Of youth? Of the conversion of a dull indoor lunch to a Mediterranean fantasy?
That’s what I thought as I opened the door to Global Cheese, windows plastered with names and prices. Eighties easy rock. Two plaster cows in the storefront wore masks, as did the three men in white chef’s coats and dark pants. One of them, a young man with dark hair tied back, asked what I’d like. “Surprise me!” I said. I was being Anthony Quinn.
It’s been my experience that, besides Leyden cheese (cumin and caraway seeds? What are the Dutch thinking?), there is no such thing as a bad cheese.
The young man whipped out a stainless steel shaver and unwrapped a block of something hard, and suddenly, my mood improved as an opaque sliver of Beaufort was manoeuvred around plastic sneeze guards toward my beckoning hand, and I felt a direct connection to the monk and meadow that produced this food out there in the verdant world.
When I eat cheese I think of a roommate I had, a biochemical geneticist, who sliced the mould off cheddar and made a sandwich with the mouldy bits. He was that aggressive in his joy of fermentation.
Oh, and I lie. I did grow up with my father’s Danish blue, a stinky tinfoil wedge in the door of the fridge. I never liked how sharp it was and swore off the stuff. When I came to Toronto a new friend made a lunch with a “French” blue cheese. This cheese had been sitting on the counter all morning. It was room temperature. The taste was tremendous. The cheese was less blue in the mouth, more like a warm red.
There was a Christmas party where my host had an entire wheel of a hard cheese sitting on a thick cutting board, a knife sticking out of its girth, grapes and bread nearby. The pale yellow of this object like a block of old varnish, like something from a Chardin painting. I did not stray far from that wheel, which must have cost eight hundred dollars. I ate that cheese like a starved rat – for when I was young I was frugal and used to shoplift parmesan.
A few years ago I was lucky enough to travel to Vincennes, which touches Paris at the knee. I found a shop to buy cheese. I was going to walk through a forest created by one of the Napoleons and I required a lunch. There was an entire aisle devoted to cheese. Little spotlights on the wax paper packages. I thought I had lucked into a specialized deli but no, almost every shop in France is like this.
You need to be knocked down – like we have been lately – to recalibrate and remember what civilized life is. The world is a hard place. Cheese says, Don’t be so serious.
I chose a Cambozola and a Portuguese yellow and a big block of parmesan (the most expensive – life is too short for cheap parmesan!). “Prosciutto?” Why not. Then I was brought around to the back of the shop past another young man stacking clear plastic tubs of bocconcini. I followed his fluorescent orange sneakers as they moved silently across the terracotta-tiled floor. With panache, he reached into the deli case for a large Italian hock and sliced it on a silent, tilted machine. I recalled a month in Spain where the jamon hung on blunt hooks and we ate this shaved meat with razor clams and pickles and tiny glasses of beer. The prosciutto is so thin the slices wrinkle up when you try to grab them from the wax paper.
I came to Global Cheese last year when the pandemic first hit and the workers here were so concerned about business they would cut you a deal. They weighed your cheese and, with a black sharpie on the corner of the wrapping paper, rounded down the price. They put a tin of Royal Dansk cookies in your bag for free. But things are more settled, less paralyzing now. I’m sure business has dropped – I was the only customer there that afternoon – but they seemed to be getting by. Someone was sent out to get sandwiches at Blackbird Bakery across the road. I heard them talking but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Perhaps they were on a barter system – a pleasing thought. I straddled my old bicycle and returned home, humming a little song as I pedalled. For I had the makings of a good lunch in my backpack and that little island in the Mediterranean in the back of the mind, the one where we are young and warm with spring sunshine, where we learned to taste new things.