Who cuts the cheese?

Who cuts the cheese?

It is far more complicated than one may think.  Cheese is an important part of Swiss culture. There are different knives and cutting etiquette for specific cheeses. At one point my French teacher made diagrams of the proper direction for cutting. For instance if there is a wedge you continue to slice along the wide edge.  Serving a bit of the softer center along with the less desirable outer edges.  One would never cut the tip off the wedge taking the "heart".  A tube like shape gets sliced across forming circles, again distributing the taste and texture. A circle gets cut like a pie and don't even get me started on a tome (soft, ripe, and runny).

As Americans we arrived in Switzerland thinking Swiss cheese has holes; totally clueless as to any rules and regulations of how to serve it. Laughably, turns out there is not even a type of cheese named "Swiss Cheese". Also there is no "American Cheese" found in their deli displays, touche'.  It's labeled processed cheese and most likely is found somewhere by the miniature European trash bags.

 

Early on we were invited to our neighbor's. Dinner was served, a basket of sliced baguette and a plate with a variety of cheeses.  Monsieur Dominique Tavelle, who had almost as much English as we eventually did French, is a delightful, whistling, ever smiling character.  So dinners together with he and his wife Andrea were fun.  Think charades throughout every verbal exchange. We were seated, and Dominique served each of us the proper shape and proportion of each aromatic cheese.  While he did this there was sort of a mini geography class as to where each cheese came from.  Explaining the reason it looked, smelled, or had a specific characteristic.  Once he told us the cheese walks off the table, or perhaps grows legs, but that is another charade story about the runny cheese.  I'll save that for later.

Seemes to me "who cuts the cheese?" is comparable to cutting honors at Thanksgiving in the states.  I was ever grateful to Monsieur Tavelle for many things.  But if you are lucky, experiencing the head of the house cutting the cheese then serving it to you on a plate is quite common and extremely polite.  They are blissfully ignorant of our amusing idiom.  www.dawsonmorgan.com