Publisher's Synopsis
"Four things in life are the older the better: wine, cheese, rug, and friendship." Cheese is more than a rich food, an iconic or cultural object. Cheese is information, an authentic element of heritage that brings people together. What's in the air, water and soil of a particular region, influences the flavor of cheese. Touching our palates cheese informs us about the place it was made, about people mastering it, and about the grass the cattle has consumed. The business of judging a crumb of cheese has been taken with a great seriousness over the centuries. The 'abracadabra' of a cheese-fancier and connoisseur is comparable to that of the wine, tea, sumptuous sauce or caviar tasters. Each type of cheese is ripened by a certain microflora which then interacts with lactobacilli in our intenstine. These lactobacilli are the 'white knights' that enhance our health, immune defense, appetite and sense of fullness. But their own requirements and outputs change every moment. That is why today you may wish a hard Gouda, tomorrow light Feta, the next day an extra-nutritious Saint André. But you will not wish eating them all together in one meal. With unique stories and illustrations, this book intends to entertain both the junior and adult, with the whereabouts, descriptions, and content of the 37 world-class cheeses. Designed as a pourquoi tale, it involves two scavengers, raccoons Maître Fromager (cheese masters), who help the residents of the fictitious Alpine town Cheesebaden to improve their cheesemaking technology, by sharing with them their natural secrets of cheese aging inside the oak-logs, Käselagerung.
