On Food and Cooking

cheesemaking had progressed enough by late
medieval times to inspire connoisseurship.
The French court received shipments from
Brie, Roquefort, Comté, Maroilles, and
Geromé (Münster). Cheeses made near Parma
in Italy and near Appenzell in Switzerland
were renowned throughout Europe. In Britain,
Cheshire cheese was famous by Elizabethan
times, and Cheddar and Stilton by the 18th
century. Cheese played two roles: for the
poor, fresh or briefly ripened types were
staple food, sometimes called “white meat,”
while the rich enjoyed a variety of aged
cheeses as one course of their multicourse
feasts. By the early 19th century, the French
gastronome Brillat-Savarin found cheese to be
an aesthetic necessity: he wrote that “a dessert
without cheese is like a beautiful woman who
is missing an eye.” The golden age of cheese
was probably the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, when the art was fully developed,
local styles had developed and matured, and