Our family turns into a pack of cheese hounds on Christmas Eve and New Years Eve. Meals those evenings are typically hors-d’oeuvres-exclusive, with cheesy things being the mainstay (mini-quiches with feta, cheeseballs, sliced cheeses and sausage, spinach balls with parmesan, etc.) – you know, things that go well with a lovely, aromatic glass of wine.
In anticipation of the hounds’ inevitable sniffing around for exotic cheeses, today I stocked up on the following: havarti with dill; soft, unripened goat cheese with herbs, a European aged cheddar, marinaged-and-braided fresh mozzarella, gouda smoked with apple and hardwood, double Gloucester layered with stilton, and TWO BLOCKS of the MOST ADDICTIVE BLEU CHEESE on the face of the planet!
I could write a sonnet about this particular bleu cheese, perhaps one to rival Shakespeare. It would be flattering and yet cynical, for alas, I can be too easily seduced by the bleu’s saliva-inducing wiles.
However, I just discovered that evidently C.K. Chesterton beat me to the punch in his eloquent “Sonnet to a Stilton Cheese” written as a parody of William Wordsworth’s sonnet “London, 1802.” Oh well. I missed my chance.
With my writer’s inspiration temporarily blocked in the wake of this rather odd discovery, I did some more looking around in order to whet my appetite (pun intended) for pursuing the authorship of further poetic descriptions of bleu cheese. I particularly enjoyed this contemporary Ode to Roquefort, which almost-but-not-quite ranks right up there with Shakespeare:
Ode to Roquefort:
O’ Roquefort, how I loathe thee for thy haunting beauty.
Thy taste maketh every ounce of my bod yearn for thy colored specs to be near.
Thou art salty, yet my pallet doeth not long to be cleansed from thy intense yet delicately lingering taste.
O’ Roquefort, thy pungent odor intoxicates both mind and nostrils.
Much like thy coloring, fleeting traces of your crumbles leave my heart blue.
Why must thy leave?
Tis not just.
-anonymous
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