Cheese lovers just got a new bible.
The Oxford Companion to Cheese (Oxford University Press) provides details ranging from the technical to the trivial and is, predictably, well-stocked with Wisconsin references. Of the book’s 325 worldwide contributors, at least 10 have state connections, primarily with the Center for Dairy Research on the UW-Madison campus.
That doesn’t mean the book is all science. There are also entries for “cheesehead,” for “Monty Python” because of the British series’ famed “Cheese Shop” sketch and even Cheez Whiz. The 244 cheeses that merit mention range from pljevlja of Montenegro to Pleasant Ridge Reserve of Dodgeville. Cheese people of note cut a wide swath from Roman general Pliny the Elder to Myron Olson of Monroe’s Chalet Cheese Cooperative, the sole U.S. manufacturer of limburger.
“This is like the new Encyclopedia Britannica of cheese,” says Jeanne Carpenter, who is the cheesemaker liaison for Metcalfe’s Markets and is founder and director of Wisconsin Cheese Originals. “We now have this reference book where you can look up words like ‘acidification,’ and a person with a degree in dairy science has written about it.”
Cheese curiosity has advanced to a point where an 849-page book that sells for $60 and includes words like “acidification” can target a general audience. Carpenter has seen the hunger for more information grow for the past five years with the sold-out classes she teaches. She’s added a series of more technical “cheese geek” classes this year, and some that are months away have already sold out.
“People want to go down a rabbit hole of one style of cheese, they want to know why a cheddar tastes like a cheddar,” she says, adding that other classes take closer looks at topics such as sheep or goat cheeses or cheese grading.
Carpenter wrote 11 entries in the book, including the one on Wisconsin, as well as specific cheeses (brick, limburger, curds, Pleasant Ridge Reserve) and cheesemakers (Carr Valley, Cedar Grove).
Pat Polowsky, a former Center for Dairy Research staffer now in graduate school at the University of Vermont, also sees the Oxford guide as a welcome entry into the cheese library.
“It definitely fills a gap,” says Polowsky, who penned two entries. “It had to be written so anyone off the street could pick it up and make sense of it.”
Polowsky knows people are in search of cheese details. He created a site, the Cheese Science Toolkit (cheesescience.org), that provides entertaining answers to many cheese questions for (and from) cheesemakers, cheesemongers and even consumers.
Oxford guides have been go-to books for other food topics. This one differs a bit by the sheer amount of contributors. Beyond scientists it includes well-known cheese writers such as Gordon Edgar, Janet Fletcher, Laura Werlin and former Isthmus editor and writer Tenaya Darlington. It was edited by Catherine Donnelly, a professor of nutrition and food science at the University of Vermont.