The non-bloggish blog

General cheese observation

The Virtual Portico has a cheese post that I missed. The comments that follow the post – many of which focus on a particular French presidential cheese quotation – set me off on a wild goose chase. A French google search reveals the following numbers:

Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays où il existe 246 variétés de fromage ?
Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays où il existe 258 variétés de fromage?
On ne peut pas gouverner un pays qui offre 365 variétés de fromages
Comment gouverner un pays qui a plus de 400 sortes de fromage?

It seems that 246 is the number most often quoted, but I can't find any firm evidence.

More important information about cheese follows:
Cheese quotes
Cheese novel
Handy one-volume cheese (non-fiction) resource suitable for holiday reading
Pic of a poster for a cheese festival from a hotel lobby in Bucharest:

(Okay, move along now, nothing more to see here...)

Global cheese crime update

Police in eastern France are investigating the theft of 700kg (1,500lbs) of cheese. According to the BBC, a gang broke into a dairy near the city of Besançon in an overnight raid and made off with comte, raclette and morbier cheeses, with a value of 900 euros ($1,800; £600), up to 40kg of butter and two knives.

Police said the investigation would try to establish what kind of criminal would be interested in such a haul.

The BBC's Alasdair Sandford in France says morbier is a soft cheese with what has been described as a slightly objectionable smell.

The owner, Jerome Monnin, said this was his second burglary in a year, after 30 years in the business with no problems.

In Miami Dade county, Florida, a thief took two cases of mozzarella balls from Anco Fine Cheese at 501 NE 183rd St. about 10:05 a.m. Jan. 27. The cheese was valued at $30.

Meanwhile in Kettering, Ohio, Johnny D. Green, 39, was arrested for theft after he was found to have placed a ham, two sub sandwiches, Velveeta cheese and a block of cheese in his pants and exited the store without paying for them.

And finally (crime-free story)...
Stuck inside? Tired of watching paint dry? Try this.

The problem with Cheshire

...the cheese, that is.

Arthur Cunynghame is a former Royal Warrant Holder as cheesemonger to the Queen. In The Cheesemonger's Tales, he explains why most Cheshire cheese these days is crap:

Cheshire is the oldest recorded English cheese. Certainly it was mentioned in the Domesday Book; it is also said to have been one of the Celtic cheeses already made in Britain when the Romans came......

Over the years, Cheshire cheese's popularity increased until it became far and away Britain's most widely eaten cheese in the 19th century, easily outselling Cheddar. So much so that whole 'cheese trains' took the cheese from Cheshire to London......Post war, Cheshire cheese fell out of popularity partly because, being crumbly, it was difficult to pre-pack; partly because a cheese grader called Groves liked thin acidic cheeses, a taste not shared by the public; partly because farmers were slow to start making cheese again as it was far easier to sell their milk as liquid to the Milk Marketing Board; and partly becasue factory production, which took over, produced bland, anonymous cheese, giving all Cheshire cheese an undeserved poor reputation.