Friend Leigh - Composing the cheese plate: recipes, pairings & platings for the inventive cheese course

2016 by Brian Keyser and Leigh Friend

All Photography 2016 by Laura Volo, unless notes

Page 11, Photo by Cayla Zahoran Photography

Page 43, Photo by Sandra Johnson Photography

Published by Running Press,

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016941583

E-book ISBN 978-0-7624-6110-3

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

Cover and interior design by Josh McDonnell

Edited by Jordana Tusman

Typography: Brandon and Hand Gothic

Food Stylist: Mariana Velasquez

Prop Stylist: Richard Vassilatos

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Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Special thanks to all the cheese makers who are featured in this book. Thanks to Kiran Lovejoy, Sandra Johnson, Jeff Baker, Dimitri Saad, Emily Lindh, Allen Stafford, BR McDonald, Heather Greene, Adrian Murcia, Karen and David Waltuck, Liz Thorpe, Sasha Davies, Max McCalman, Steve Jenkins, Anne Saxelby, Danny Meyer, Jess Perrie, Ryan Foote, Lynne Eickholt, Pam Alexander, Meredith Erickson, Brad Dub, Allison Hunter, Kimberly Witherspoon, Lena Yarbrough, Kristen Carbone, Chris Walsh, Chris Sheridan, Tracy Underwood, Allysun Redmond, Megan Johnson, Roman Ramirez, and Katie Geise. Thanks also to the recipe testers and to our generous and supportive families.

Have you always loved cheese? I get asked this question a lot, and the simple answer is no. Like most Americans, I grew up eating what was available at the grocery store, from the deli, or in the school cafeteria. I didnt think much about what cheese was or where it came from. The only cheeses I knew were block Cheddar, Kraft Singles, and whatever was on pizza. Other than whatever was on pizza, I knew I didnt like it.

In 2004 I went to work as a server at Chanterelle in New York City, one of the first restaurants in the United States to serve a serious cheese course with dinner. Learning to present the cheese selection to the guests was a requirement of my job. It was also a revelation. Under the guidance of Adrian Murcia, the fromager (a fromager is to cheese what a sommelier is to wine) at Chanterelle, I set out to learn all I could about cheese, and before too long I left to become the opening fromager at The Modern, the fine-dining restaurant at New Yorks Museum of Modern Art.

At that time, most cheese plates in restaurants in the United States came with one of three things: quince paste, date cake, or Marcona almonds. Each of those pairings can go with some cheeses, but none of them goes with every cheese. I started to wonder why Americans were stuck in this habit, and I set out to change it. When I opened Casellula Cheese & Wine Caf, in 2007, the idea was that we would have a huge selection of cheeses, even better than the selection at most fancy restaurants, and that each cheese would be presented beautifully and paired with an accompaniment that was actually right for the cheese. Its a simple idea; it shouldnt have been revolutionary. But as far as I know, no one else in North America was doing anything like it at the time.

Early on, most of the accompaniments on our cheese plates were store-bought. Mustards, chutneys, honeys, jams, and fruit curds were readily available and pretty good. Then, seven months after we opened, an angel was sent down from heaven to help Casellula reach its full potential. That angels name was Leigh Friend.

A graduate of the New England Culinary Institute, in Vermont, Leigh had worked as a pastry cook at the famed Gramercy Tavern in New York City. When she was hired at Casellula, she was expecting to make pastries and to help the chef with some savory food. Little did she know that she was about to begin a lifelong love affair with cheese. Up to that point, like so many of us, shed thought of cheese as an addition to food, something to complement the other ingredients. In the Casellula kitchen she saw for the first time that cheese deserved to be highlighted. She found herself thinking about the flavors and textures of accompaniments that would complement or contrast with particular cheeses, and before long she began replacing the store-bought accompaniments we put on our cheese plates with pairings she made in-house.

I hadnt realized how creative, fun, thoughtful, and exciting those pairings could be. Leigh didnt just replace bought product with the same thing made in-houseshe created totally new accompaniments. Over time, I began to see how innovative her recipes were, and how the little things, like adding curry spices to a nut brittle, made a huge difference in the cheese-plate experience. Heck, thinking of serving nut brittle with cheese in the first place was exciting.

Flash forward several years. Late one fall afternoon, I asked Leigh how many different accompaniments she thought she made. She didnt have an exact count, but when we realized that we must serve more than a hundred different condiments with our cheeses, we decided that we should collect some of them in a cookbook. Over the next few months, we worked together to create an outline for what would be a book of condiment recipes, each paired with one cheese, so that readers could just open it up and do exactly as they were told. This cheese goes with this condiment, and here is the recipe. Done.

But something didnt feel quite right because we dont really work that way at Casellula. We work with dozens of cheeses and condiments at any given time, and each plate is a unique creationwith multiple cheese-and-condiment pairingsthat is well thought out by a fromager. Each cheese pairs with multiple condiments, and each condiment pairs with several different cheeses. Each pairing involves many choices, based on the season, the time of day, the beverage being consumed, the other cheeses and condiments on the plate, the mood of the fromager, and the desires of the diner. Sometimes we start with the condiment and pick a cheese, and sometimes its the other way around.

We also have to make a lot of choices for any given plate to ensure that a broad variety of milks and regions are represented by the cheeses, and then more choices so that we end up with a variety of accompaniments. We may pair a goats-milk crottin with passionfruit curd on one plate and with white chocolate fudge on the next. We cant just put together a simple list of pairings, and thats what makes our cheese plates so exciting.

For months we worked on a cookbook that would have been easy for everyone to read and understand, but that sucked the life out of our cheese plates. Other than being a collection of recipes, we didnt really know what the book was supposed to be about. So we threw it out and started over. As frustrating as that was, we are grateful for the experience because it forced us to really consider our cheese plates.