Choosing, Storing, and Serving Cheese

It has always been a challenge to choose a good cheese, as Charlemagne’s instructor admitted. A late medieval compendium of maxims and recipes for the middle-class household, known as Le Ménagier de Paris, includes this formula “To recognize good cheese”:

Not at all white like Helen,

Nor weeping, like Magdalene.

Not Argus, but completely blind,

And heavy, like a buffalo.

Let it rebel against the thumb,

And have an old moth-eaten coat.

Without eyes, without tears, not at all white,

Moth-eaten, rebellious, of good weight.