For Christmas my cousin Diogenes gave us an assortment of really good cheese, the kind you just don t buy for yourself when you have a big family. I kept the little round green label with the adorable goat to remind myself what it is that I truly want when I think of cheese.
Good cheese is made from raw milk unpasteurized milk.
I say up until now because there is a movement afoot to ban all raw-milk cheese, on the grounds that even aged cheese can harbor bacteria that present a problem, such as listeria and salmonella. Now, officials admit that they do not have any studies that show that dangerous bacteria are present, or that anyone has been made sick by eating the cheese in question. However, maybe people could get sick, so the thinking is that the cheese ought to be banned. By the way, Crottin de Chavignol is a funny name. It seems, for those of you who haven t brushed up on your idiomatic French lately, that crottin means, to be polite, road apple i.e. just the sort of little brown round object you might find in the road up there in the goat country in the middle of France.