Learning About Cheese By The Book
As you might have gathered from my recent post about the local cheese shop Les Amis du Fromage, Barb and I really like our cheese. However, I didn’t say how we managed to find this cheese shop. It came about when I happened to purchase this book on Canadian cheese producers.
At the same time that I purchased The Definitive Guide to Canadian Artisanal and Fine Cheeses, I also bought a second cheese book called Cheese: a Connoisseur’s Guide to the World’s Best (by Max McCalman & David Gibbons).
The major difference between the two books is that a Connoisseur’s Guide to the World’s Best focuses on many different cheeses from around the world (but sadly no Canadian cheeses). The cheese producing countries represented in both books notwithstanding, both of these cheese books are quite different in several significant ways. In the Connoisseur’s Guide book these are several chapters dedicated to specific advice for tasting, purchasing, storing and serving many different types of cheese.
While I haven’t read more than a few chapters of the Connoisseur’s Guide, I have already learned a lot about purchasing cheese like trying to purchase cheese whenever possible that is unwrapped as much as possible. All of the several hundred pages that highlight the different types of cheese from around the world go into specific details of the cheese describing the place of origin, the production type and also giving examples of perfect wine pairing for each cheese type.
I should also say that the pictures of the different types of cheese in this book are absolutely fantastic. If you have even the remotest interest in cheese and want to have a great reference on hand, I would definitely recommend Cheese: a Connoisseur’s Guide to the World’s Best as my current favourite cheese book.
Baden
> The Definitive Guide to Canadian Artisanal and Fine Cheeses
by Gurth Pretty (ISBN 1552857603, published by Whitecap Books)
> Cheese: a Connoisseur’s Guide to the World’s Best
by Max McCalman & David Gibbons (ISBN 1400050340, published by Clarkson Potter)

