master cheesemonger/grocer

Read this and insert "macaroni and cheese" everytime I have typed "grilled cheese sandwich". I am particularly partial to the grilled cheese sandwich my wife and I raised our boy Max on: Open-faced slice of bread spread with sweet butter or olive oil liberally sprinkled with grated Parmigiano Reggiano, placed horizontally in the toaster oven until the Parm bubbles, cut into triangles. I am equally smitten by the conventional closed-face grilled cheese sandwich using sourdough or rye or whole-grain slices and shredded mountain cheeses such as the following spectaculars: Beaufort from Savoie, Fontina d'Aosta from Aosta, Comte from Franche-Comte, raclette cheese from either of these two regions, any Basque sheep's milk cheese (Erhaki, Matocq, Ossau-Iraty, Etorki, Prince de Claverolles), Roncal from Navarra. Certainly Swiss Gruyere or Emmental or Appenzeller figure, though they're way down my preference list. Also Asiago from the Veneto, Majorero (unlike the rest of these, Majorero from Fuenteventura in the Canaries is NOT a raw milk cow's milk cheese, but is a raw milk goat's milk cheese), Sao Jorge (St. George, a sharp cow's cheese from the Portuguese Azores). Both sides of the bread are spread with sweet butter, occasionally mayo (I prefer butter), occasionally a slice of tomato; the cheese is always shredded, not place aboard in slices, I always add a liberal amount of freshly ground pepper, occasionally I'll dribble some hot sauce atop before closing the sandwich, lifting it via a spatula and placing it into a buttered or olive oiled hot skillet, turning it once and removing it when the bread has nice color and the cheese is beginning to melt onto the hot skillet. Rarebits call for Mrs. Appleby's Cheshire or Mrs. Kirkham's Lancashire or the Keen's or Montgomery's Somerset Cheddar, but they're not really a good choice in this regard. Plus, they're melted and poured over toasted bread as for a proper Piemontese fonduta, so they don't really qualify as grilled cheese sandwiches. I like the smell and taste of melted mountain cheeses much more than melted English cheeses which are a completely different type (recipe) of cheese (cheesemaking). So, you asked me about mac and cheese but my brain read grilled cheese. No matter. These are the cheeses that will give your mac and cheese jones a whole new drug.

Hello ala I got into the cheese business completely by happenstance, serendipity. In 1975 I fell into a job in a cheese shop at 91st Street and Madison here in NYC. I was an out-of-work actor. My unemployment benefits were exhausted. I knew nothing about cheese, nothing applicable about food, nothing about Europe. I just wanted a regular paycheck. I applied myself, worked diligently, became manager, got fired for telling the owner during a telephone call that I was at work when I was really in my apartment. Was subsequently hired by Giorgio DeLuca and Joel Dean as the very first employee at Dean & DeLuca. I was the cheese department manager. This was in the summer of '77. I quickly realized that it was important that I create and operate the very best cheese counter in NYC, so I began to, once again, apply myself. That meant I had to somehow learn everything there was to know about cheese and Europe and European food as soon as possible. So I began to read every food book I could get my hands on. So to this day I have great reverence for MFK Fisher, Elizabeth David, Waverly Root, Patience Gray, Roy Andries de Groot, Madeleine Kamman, Jean Giono, Emile Zola, Richard Olney, etc. It didn't hurt that at that time there were virtually no decent, much less, drop-dead knock-out cheeses available anywhere in the city. So I made it my business to travel to Paris and Milano starting in '79 in order to determine which cheeses WERE important and how I could secure them for import to NYC, which I began to do with great success and with great joy. It's a much longer story that I hesitate to bore you with in this space. Aside from being mentored by Giorgio and Joel, I am a complete auto-didact; there was no "training" to be had. Cheese was my metier, though Normandy butter certainly figured, as did creme fraiche and fromage blanc. I was the first to bring these things to NYC, as was I the first to bring in these scads of now staple French and Italian cheeses. So I'm very proprietorial about all of them; I consider them my babies.