Cheese Quotes
“The king's cheese is half wasted in parings; but no matter, 'tis made of the people's milk.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
“You Banbury cheese!”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
'The Merry Wives of Windsor'
“Cheese has always been a food that both sophisticated and simple humans love.”
M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf (1942)
“Claret, dear, not Coca-Cola, When you're having Gorgonzola....”
William Cole, 'What a Friend We Have in Cheeses!'
“What a friend we have in cheeses!
For no food more subtly pleases,
Nor plays so grand a gastronomic part;
Cheese imported - not domestic -
For we all get indigestic
From all the pasteurizer's Kraft and sodden art.”
William Cole, 'What a Friend We Have in Cheeses!'
"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
"A dinner which ends without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye."
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
"How can you be expected to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?"
Charles de Gaulle
"cheese is the biscuit of drunkards."
Grimod de La Reyniθre
"Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese?"
Job, speaking to God
"Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese -- toasted, mostly."
Robert Louis Stevenson
"A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains, cheese, milk's leap toward immortality."
Clifton Fadiman (American writer and editor; New Yorker book reviewer)
"People who know nothing about cheeses reel away from Camembert, Roquefort, and Stilton because the plebeian proboscis is not equipped to differentiate between the sordid and the sublime."
Harvey Day
Charlemagne was traveling and stopped at a bishop's residence at dinnertime.
"Now on that day, being the sixth day of the week, he was not willing to eat the flesh of beast or bird. The bishop, being by reason of the nature of the place unable to procure fish immediately, ordered some excellent cheese, white with fat, to be placed before him. Charles..... required nothing else, but taking up his knife and throwing away the mold, which seemed to him abominable, he ate the white of the cheese. Then the bishop, who was standing nearby like a servant, drew close and said 'Why do you do that, lord Emperor? You are throwing away the best part.' On the persuasion of the bishop, Charles..... put a piece of the mold in his mouth and slowly ate it and swallowed it like butter. Then, approving the bishop's advice, he said 'Very true, my good host,' and he added, 'Be sure to send me every year two cartloads of such cheeses.'"
From a biography of Charlemagne written by a monk at Saint Gall monastery in the late 9th century. (865? A.D.)
(Both lovers of Brie and Roquefort cheese claim the story is about their favorite cheese, but it was probably Roquefort cheese.)
"To recognize good cheese:
Not at all white like Helen,
Nor weeping, like Magdalene.
Not Argus, but completely blind,
And heavy, like a buffalo.
Let it rebel against the thumb,
And have an old moth-eaten coal.
Without eyes, without tears, not at all white,
Moth-eaten, rebellious, of good weight."
(c.1400) Le Menagier de Paris
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