Default Cheese

Captain's bLog: 12 weeks.

So far we've spent four weeks in Italy and eight in France. Observation: there is a nearly endless variety of cheeses available, at a nearly endless variety of cheese shops, counters and market stalls. The variety in cheese is matched only by the varieties in bread (France), pasta (Italy) and wine (both). These meltable multitudes come in nearly every shape, size, smell and flavour imaginable - honestly, it's rather intimidating. I have no clue what I'd like to buy, or even to try, so I mostly grab something I've heard of before and scuttle away in gastronomic shame. (Chevre again? Tsk tsk.)

Would you like to know what I haven't seen here? Electric-orange cheese. And according to the 10,000 or so cheeses I have seen, electric-orange is not actually a normal colour profile for cheese. Blue, yes; grey, sure; and anything from winter white to bloomy beige to creamy yellow, absolutely. Does anyone know how it came to be that SO many of our cheeses/cheese-adjacent, dairy-derived food products (in Canada and the States, anyway) are so incredibly orange?

I honestly didn't know that I felt this way until about a month into our trip, and if you had suggested it to me I would have denied it and supported my argument with a tour of the typically well-stocked cheese drawer in our fridge, but in my heart of hearts I believed that cheddar was the default cheese. The perfect, all-occasion, stand-alone or pair-with-anything, One True Default Cheese.

I also thought it was... well, usually way more orange than I now know it really has any right to be.

I was wrong on both counts. 

This has taken a bit of getting used to. (Not the 'wrong' thing, but the 'orange' thing.) (Okay, fine, also the 'wrong' thing, just a bit.) Small Fry is obviously missing some things from home, and Default Cheese - in all its many applications - is one of them. Its orangeness is part of its homey appeal; it just doesn't feel the same to eat white mac & cheese or white grilled cheese. (Or, as he calls it, girled cheese, which we have never bothered to correct 'cause it's so darn cute.) And non-orange nacho cheez?! I just can't even.

Honestly, of all the things we could be missing from home, I would not have guessed it would be orange cheese/cheez products. I might have guessed Slurpees, or maybe peanut butter, but I would have missed the mark because les sirops and Nutella have handily replaced those important kid commodities. If I don't find some secret French source of KD soon I plan to buy food colouring and try my hand at producing a pot of properly orange mac & cheese as a nostalgic treat for Small Fry. And perhaps a pot of properly orange nacho cheese as a PMS treat for me.