use gingerbread as a mouth-freshener; and I, too,
that sunny day among the Edams, kept my gingerbread handy and made my
way from one fine cheese to another, trying out generous plugs from
the heaped cannon balls that looked like the ammunition dump at
Antietam.

I remember another market day, this time in Lucerne. All morning I
stocked up on good Schweizerkaese and better Gruyere. For lunch I had
cheese salad. All around me the farmers were rolling two-hundred-pound
Emmentalers, bigger than oxcart wheels. I sat in a little cafe,
absorbing cheese and cheese lore in equal quantities. I learned that a
prize cheese must be chock-full of equal-sized eyes, the gas holes
produced during fermentation. They must glisten like polished bar
glass. The cheese itself must be of a light, lemonish yellow. Its
flavor must be nutlike. (Nuts and Swiss cheese complement each other
as subtly as Gorgonzola and a ripe banana.) There are, I learned,
"blind" Swiss cheeses as well, but the million-eyed ones are better.

But I don't have to hark back to Switzerland and Holland for cheese
memories. Here at home we have increasingly taken over the cheeses of
all nations, first importing them, then imitating them, from Swiss
Engadine to what we call Genuine Sprinz. We've naturalized
Scandinavian Blues and smoked browns and baptized our own Saaland
Pfarr in native whiskey. Of fifty popular Italian types we duplicate
more than half, some fairly well, others badly.

We have our own legitimate offspring too, beginning with the
Pineapple, supposed to have been first made about 1845 in Litchfield
County, Connecticut. We have our own creamy Neufchatel, New York Coon,
Vermont Sage, the delicious Liederkranz, California Jack, Nuworld, and
dozens of others, not all quite so original.

And, true to the American way, we've organized cheese-eating. There's
an annual cheese week, and a cheese month (October). We even boast a
mail-order Cheese-of-the-Month Club. We haven't yet reached the point
of sophistication, however, attained by a Paris cheese club that meets
regularly. To qualify for membership you have to identify two hundred
basic cheeses, and you have to do it blindfolded.

This is a test I'd prefer not to submit to, but in my amateur way I
have during the past year or two been sharpening my cheese perception
with whatever varieties I could encounter around New York. I've run
into briny Caucasian Cossack, Corsican Gricotta, and exotics like
Rarush