It’s fresh pear season around here, although my favorite variety—the Comice—arrives a bit later. No fruit is a better friend to cheese, in my view. The juicy, honeyed flavor and melting texture of a ripe pear is so compatible with pecorino, blue cheese, and fresh cheeses like ricotta. Italians even have a proverb about the pairing: Al contadino non far sapere quant’è buono il cacio con le pere. Don’t tell the farmer how good cheese is with his pears. Like most proverbs, there’s more to this saying than meets the eye.
Read morePecorino & Favas Last Call
Fava bean season is winding down where I live. Time to make one of my favorite salads before the beans vanish. Favas and sheep cheese, sweet and salty, in the soft folds of butter lettuce. A sharp shallot vinaigrette brings it all together. Choose a sheep’s milk cheese you can shave with a plane. If it has peppercorns in it (like Bellwether Farms’ Pepato), so much the better.
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Autumn duo: Jasper Hill Farm Whitney with apple chutney
Americans didn’t pioneer the practice of pairing cheese with condiments, but we have certainly embraced it. When I teach cheese-appreciation classes, I can count on being asked, “What should I pair with this cheese?” I’m Old School and believe that good cheese is perfectly complete by itself, yet the condiments keep coming and I have to admit that they make a cheese platter more beautiful and, to some, more enticing. While sampling some new American-made mostarda, I flashed back to some of my earliest experiences with the cheese course, as a 22-year-old in France, where I encountered some firm “do’s and don’ts” about the plâteau de fromages.
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