This is a book about cheese. I’ve wanted to write it since about – oh – October 1980. That was the year I helped open the Oakville Grocery in San Francisco. We had nearly everything a passionate modern cook might want – free range chickens, organic produce, cream top milk in bottles, hand-gathered wild mushrooms and fresh goat cheese lovingly handmade in Sonoma, California and as good as any in France, or anywhere.

I was hired as the cheese department manager. Then they discovered I could merchandise. That means making things look appealing in a way that made people grab and spend. Abundance to go. They sent me to Manhattan to see how the big city folks did it: the late-lamented original Balducci’s the early, highly stylistic Dean & Deluca, some major Parisian players trying to conquer the states, the ill fated Bloomingdales Food Halls. I came back and immediately reverted to my California roots. I’d grown up surrounded by orange groves, lemon blossoms and watermelons piled on wooden racks (Dad would wait until they dipped to 6 cents a pound before he’d cave and buy). Night blossoming jasmine and heady garden roses gave me an inkling as to how things from the earth might look and smell, even in the soon-to be-awful San Fernando Valley. So mostly, I put things in bushels and baskets. It seemed to work.

Two weeks after we unlocked the doors, I was doing all the buying and all the selling. Two months later I was running the store. In my mid-twenties, I was really in a post-post graduate course of all things good to eat and drink, and learning from some of the great talents in the food world.

Those months before we opened, while I was madly gathering my cheese collection, I’d also be chatting and tasting with a group that might, from time to time, include Alice Waters, Marion Cunningham, Ruth Reichl and of course, our boss Joe Phelps. We’re talking some major palates.

Once we got going, my learning took a slightly different course. Every week we’d take delivery of what could mount to dozens, and sometimes hundreds of foods. Jams, mustards, sauces, raw meat, truly frightening snacks, wild greens nobody could identify, hand-gathered wild mushrooms. But rarely did I have the offer of a new American made cheese waiting on the tasting table. We’d decided that fresh mozzarella was a must have. But there was nothing in the Golden State resembling that magical pasta filato (pulled curd) ball I’d first seen floating in a pool of whey in the famed Formaggio Peck cheese emporium in Milan. I’ll admit that the marble fountain with the carved figure of a boy spewing milky fluid up and into the carved scallop shell below may have muddled my senses. But the nutty fragrance and tender give I clearly recall somehow tasted of warm sunshine.

At that time I was unable to find fresh mozzarella being made out west so I burned up the phone lines trying to have some sent from somewhere. Finally I was able to convince some poor sales person at Polly-O Cheese company in Brooklyn, New York, to send me a forty pound block of frozen cheese curd. Up in the little apartment we’d rented as an office on Russian Hill, overlooking San Francisco, we broke off bits from the major lump and dumped them into hot water. We kneaded and pulled and tried to use a wooden paddle to get a balanced, regular motion going. We achieved a sort of white rubber. But it taught me something. It taught me to look for benchmarks.

Since about 1983, I’ve led hundreds of tastings – cheeses, oils and vinegars, wild mushrooms, herbs and spices. I always ask people what they do first when they set about to taste something new or try something they’ve had before, with a focus on better understanding just what it’s all about. These are professionals – sometimes teachers, chefs, retailers, writers. Some say they sniff. Some poke and pull.

I say what they do, what we all do, is quickly and unconsciously run whatever it is by our internal computer of everything we’ve ever tasted, loved, hated or fantasized about eating. This visceral, physical and emotional experience is universal, and it is connected to a pretty useful set of instincts – some obviously related to survival.

If a new food is vaguely reminiscent of something unhappily ingested in youth, a quick tummy turn can ensue. If it’s vaguely reminiscent of a magical trip through Spain, it’s something else again. And who knows what responses we inherit at birth. I always encourage people to be mildly aware of such reactions, while maintaining a sort of calm innocence in the experience. Don’t try to be too hyper-aware. See how it feels. Let yourself react.

For most everyone who will admit it, food is quickly yes or no. I like it or I don’t. We can change that view, acquire a taste – they call it, but I will always find it helpful to start where I really start, to let my body lead my mind. For me, it was cheese that lead to understanding how I could taste and enjoy what I might eat and drink, staying just a little bit innocent, and how I might keep my palate, and my experience of food, real, fresh and deeply satisfying.

Before the Oakville Grocery I had opened and managed a little cheese shop at the base of Nob Hill in San Francisco. The company that owned the shop went head first into Chapter 11 two weeks after I hired on. That place lasted as a neighborhood cheese and wine shop for more than 20 years then switched to antiques, then switched back to fancy foods not long ago. Such is the power of foodways.

Every day I lugged several hundred different kinds of well wrapped cheeses out of the walk-in refrigerator and piled them artistically on the wooden counter top in front of two open cases of yet more well stacked, mainly international cheeses.

I’d been quickly trained in the world and ways of cheese shop living, but I still had a powerful need, a twenty five year old’s mixture of pride – and pressure to meet the rent. Simply put, I needed every story they told me, every legend proffered by salesmen or customers (and some I just made up or embellished) to sell those pounds of wheels and blocks and the crackers to hold them.

I was visited every week or so by a Santa-in-training sort of fellow called Jim Sebastiani who would pull up in his little refrigerated van and sell me too much gorgeous French cheese. Seduced and sold, I somehow managed to get those highly perishable treasures out the door, at a profit, in time for his next visit. It taught me nuance. I had to be able to describe and distinguish, and I learned the value of cheese gossip. I spent hours on the phone with importers and distributors trying to separate rumor from fact, marketing from history. But if it helped me tell the story of one cheese or another, helped me connect a person to a specific world of taste, it was a keeper (the story), at least until I found a better, sometimes even more authentic tale.

Through it all there was precious little in the way of really good American cheeses. Being in San Francisco, we sold plenty of good Jack –“fresh or dry”. We’d occasionally score some wonderful four or five year old Wisconsin Cheddar (that the salesman claimed had been “lost in a warehouse someplace”). There was a creamy Oregon Blue, a crumbly Wisconsin Blue and something called New York Sharp. Otherwise, what we got from the U.S. was mostly a collection of lower-priced, lesser quality knock-offs we cheerfully referred to as “domestic”. I still just don’t much like that word. It always makes me feel as if something has been neutered or at least reigned in. Local, regional, American are all more currently appealing terms, although ‘domestic’ is literally defined as produced in or indigenous to a particular country. In those days, from around here meant that it normally didn’t have the history or the gastronomic gravitas of European foods.
We were beginning to crave those goods dripping with what seemed like depth, class, charm and quality, even then rebelling against the post war of industrially fabricated plenty of the American market basket.

Finally, just a quarter century later, demand for, say, organic milk is exceeding what’s available. Cool. Is it a tipping point? I certainly hope it marks a sea change, to a more balanced world where we can take real pride in not just how much food we crank out, but how good it is and how connected we feel to both the foods themselves and the people who make or grow them. James Beard is known for a lot of things, but mostly he was a master teacher of home cookery who deeply valued and regularly promoted the very good foods from every corner of this country.

Against doctor’s orders, I suspect he’d be pretty thrilled by what’s going on in the craft of American cheesemaking. I hope you are too.