Two bits from a busy afternoon

invitations

I’ve written here upon occasion about my Polish high school crush of all crushes, the one that lasted years and years, where the person garnering my greatest affection became a chanter (of PRE-Gregorian music I believe) in later years. Today I got an email from him inviting me to “drop in” on a music festival that he is organizing in a godforsaken town in southeastern Poland next month. And you know, that is just like him to beckon in this way to his own performance. I feel honored, but I think I’ll pass. [The last email I got from him before this was also an invitation: to his son’s wedding. I did not fly down to Poland for that either.]

smells

I asked for my usual latte at the Borders café. The person behind the counter brewed the espresso, frothed the milk and put the two together, fanning the air under her nostrils rapidly and wincing in disgust as she handed me the cup. Naturally, I had to ask: am I ordering something particularly repugnant? Oh no, she tells me. She just hates, positively hates the smell of milk. [They must have forgotten to ask her this during the interview.]

Slapped down on the East Coast

When I first moved to the Midwest people would tell me that they didn’t much care for the singular snootiness of East Coast types who never looked to the Midwest for anything distinctive or worth stopping for. I balked at that. I’d not heard anything slanderous said about Indiana or Wisconsin during years spent living in New York. Paranoid bunch, I thought.

Over the years I revised my perspective. Having lived in Wisconsin since 1979, I am now certain that to those in the East, the Midwest is like a blimp, a hurdle one has to jump over on the way from New York to California.

Of course, one can quibble about whether indeed, apart from Chicago, there is a city that even comes close to some of the coastal greats in terms of cultural and demographic diversity. Fine, I’m not going to enter that discussion. I like New York and San Francisco and I understand their defenders.

But to have Wisconsin slapped down on the subject of CHEESE? In this day and age? Yet sure enough, today in the NYTimes (here) I read about the remarkable artisanal producers of cheese in New England (and they are remarkable, I have sampled their cheeses; even L’Etoile and Harvest occasionally feature a Vermont or Maine cheesemaker). And I read these two charming statements:

New England has become the most important center of American cheese craft east of California. While California has more sunshine, New England has better grass.

Are we forgetting a stretch of pasture land in between California and New England? And:

"The reason there are so many supermemorable cheeses from New England," Mr. Jenkins said, "is these cheese makers, more than those that come from any other state, including Wisconsin and California, are more Europe-oriented. Their cheeses have their roots in a 4,000-year-old tradition. They did their homework and understand the realm of cheese, the alchemy and science of cheese making."

Now that is just so insulting that one really wants to take Mr. Jenkins (who is in charge of cheese buying at Fairway Markets in NYC) and push his face into a goat manure pile. For, if you look at Wisconsin’s Fantome goat milk cheese (Ann, the cheesemaker, travels to France periodically to study the production of chevre at small farms there), or Felix’s sheep’s milk feta (Felix is European born), or Butler’s creamy sheep camembert, or Pleasant Ridge Reserve (which is patterned after the Alpine cheeses of Farnce’s southeastern regions) you would see that the traditions of old world cheese making are very much in places in Wisconsin and have been thus for many years now.

You want to hold our mass produced bricks of tasteless cheese against us? Look at your own processed Vermont cheddar. They’re in the same league.

Darn those East Coast snots.