There are a few substances I am irrationally enamored of. Tea is one of them. Cheese is another. My history with cheese obsession began in France and has endured for over two decades. When I first went to France I had already learned to appreciate cheese as the comforting white stuff that covers your pizza. What American pizza restaurants lack in crust-making acumen, they compensate for in copious toppings.
My cheese horizons were expanded while living for a summer with a family in Normandy, the home of Camembert. I learned to love wedges of this small, round wheel, covered in a velvety white rind. This was the default cheese for this family, as it was the region’s most popular cheese. Madame Mallet, mother to three biological children and a succession of foreign students like myself, taught me to choose a ripe one by removing the wooden lid and pressing on the middle to see if it yielded to the touch. If not, it was not mature enough and needed more time to ripen. The ripe ones had a smaller firm core and a larger ripened portion that became runny at room temperature. I learned that it was OK to trim the crust or not. Sometimes I ate it, but knowing that it consisted of mold made me inclined to trim it most of the time. Most men seemed to prefer eating the rind, perhaps because trimming was too fussy and girlish.
On occasion, Madame would serve a goat cheese, usually a chevre frais that had high moisture content and a light zing rather than the earthier wank of aged goat cheeses I later came to know. We also sampled an occasional buche de chevre, in the form of a log, which ripened like a Camembert–a firm core surrounded by a ring of creamier, more flavorful cheese that begins to liquify at room temperature.
Sometimes for Sunday dinner Madame would serve a special cheese, also from Normandy, that was more of an acquired taste. Pont L’Eveque was a small square that came in a wooden box. Its rind is orange, I was told because it was brushed with beer as it aged. It was much stronger than the Camembert, and a bit disconcerting at first. Since I was raised on the typical processed cheeses one found in the US in the 60's and 70's, this was very strong stuff indeed. I learned that once you get past the smell, the flavor was quite agreeable.
On a later stay in France, my husband and I lived around the corner from the Quatrehomme Fromagerie in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. This was a cheese shop that exuded the smells of ripened cheeses even when it was closed up tightly after business hours. They sold artisanal raw-milk cheeses from all over France. Our budget did not permit many splurges here, but when it did, it was well worth it.
An American friend, Keith, told us that he had tried a lot of French cheeses and there was only one that he could not suffer. It was called "Epoisses" and he described it as as pieces of rind simply floating in the liquified insides, which could not be contained by it. Its smell was strong enough to deter him from approaching.
On a trip from Paris to Burgundy with my husband’s sister Jane and her husband Renn, we happened to drive through the town of Epoisses in our rental car. We normally tried the local specialties while traveling through the countryside, so we purchased a decomposed cake of Epoisses cheese, floating in a container as Keith had described. John and Renn were ready to take on the manly challenge of succeeding where Keith had failed. Managing to ingest this would be a triumph of the will. When we arrived at our rental cottage, we put the cheese in the refrigerator. Jane called out from an upstairs bedroom that she could smell the Epoisses from the bedroom and that it was making her ill. Later, at the picnic table outside it was time for the cheese course. The smell was, admittedly, reminiscent of a rotting carcass. Three of us popped the reeking goo in our mouths along with a bit of baguette. Amazingly, the taste was sweet and fruity. Jane cowered queasily in the distance. We had to tie the trash bag to a tree well away from the cottage because the remnants of the Epoisses were banished from the cottage. We had risen to the challenge–if this was the stinkiest of French cheeses, it was probably the stinkiest cheese in the world.
I fervently hope that the bureaucrats in Brussels understand that enforcing a requirement that all cheese be made from pasteurized milk would be a travesty. The individuality of French regions and of France as a country is tied to the dizzying variety of cheeses it produces. Cheese is the poetry of the French "terroir".
For some time there have been rumblings about restrictions on unpasteurized cheese entering the US. Michael, a wonderful neighborhood cheesemonger here in my Midwestern city, sometimes indicates that his ability to import raw milk cheeses may soon be curtailed--or worse. I have not gotten involved in the legal aspects of raw-milk cheese advocacy, but it is a concern. 
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