How to eat your way around Europe: the cheese edition

Written by Clare Finney

Read the full article in The Explorer magazine

There are, to my mind, only two ways to see mainland Europe: cycling its roads and eating its cheese. Happily, the two come hand-in-hand; picnic-in-panier.

There is no better way to experience a country’s changing landscape and architecture than by moving at a speed which allows you to cover more ground than you would walking and see more than you would driving.

And there is no better way to experience a country’s changing cuisine, as lush pastures become scrubland and rivers widen into oceans, than by feasting on cheese and wine, which together are so perfect a distillation of terroir, they are like a postcard for the palate.

Just look at Parmigiano Reggiano and Mozzarella di Bufala Campana: both cow’s milk cheese from Italy and yet entirely different. You can taste and see these differences and have them explained to you: the swampy lowlands of Campania were well suited to the rearing of water buffalos, whose richly nutritious milk lent itself to the kneading and stretching that gives Mozzarella di Bufala its unique, pliable texture. It is a fresh cheese, believed to have been developed by monks to feed pilgrims who visited their monastery, and for centuries remained confined to that region.

Parmigiano, meanwhile, was developed in Emilia Romagna by monks determined to find a cheese that could last a long time. The salt came from local mines, the milk from the indigenous Vacche Rosse cows, which have a higher case in content than your average cow breed, and the substantial shelf life of the cheese meant it spread far and wide, very quickly.

As such, it was one of the first cheeses to have its methodology protected: Parmigiano Reggiano is distinct from parmesan, which can be made in any way, in any country. Yet to fully grasp how connected these cheeses are to the land, people, and history that produced them – well, like all good stories, you have to be there.

From the right producer and at the right age, Parmigiano Reggiano needs nothing else, says Luca Dusi, founder of Passione Vino in Shoreditch and curator of one of London’s finest cheeseboards.

“If there is one cheese I can have every single day, it is Parmigiano. Of course, you have those mass producers [those are the cheeses you’ll find in supermarkets] but those small ones up in the hills outside Parma, where you can see red cows grazing freely on the mountain pasture?” For a moment, words fail him. “It is beautiful. 90% of the flavour of cheese comes from what cows graze on, and that quality of pasture makes all the difference.”

So too, of course, does the process by which it’s made: unchanged for millennia, and something you can witness yourself, at any number of dairies. It is an extraordinary sight: cheese wheels larger than truck wheels, ageing in silent formation with nothing more than the climate and the occasional flipping to help them along.

Graviera is a traditional Greek cheese that is made across many parts of the Aegean, but Parasyris’ Graviera is so beloved by locals not one gram of it leaves the area. “It captures the soul of Crete. It’s raw, honest, and deeply connected to the land,” says Gaitanos. “For me there is nothing better than drinking a glass of red (Alexandra, 2019) from Manousakis’ vineyard with a freshly baked sourdough with olive oil and a thick slice of Michalis’ Graviera, still cool from the cellar.”

Gaitanos’ story encapsulates the connection cheese forges not just between land, livestock and place but between people. Cycling through France, some of the most memorable interactions I had were with cheesemongers, using my best ‘Franglais’ to try and understand the different cheeses on display and where they’d come from.

There are many cheeses which Jose Pizarro, Britain’s most beloved Spanish chef, loves and serves at his restaurants; but the one that most tugs on his heartstrings is from his homeland, Extremadura: the pungent and mercurial Torta de Casar.

“When we first started selling it here [when Pizarro worked for the Spanish shop Brindisa] it didn’t really sell.” Torta de Casar is an extraordinary cheese; firm and waxy from the outside, and yet with an interior so gooey, the tradition is to serve it with the top sliced off, with a spoon to scoop out the interior. Unusually, for such a historic cheese, Torta de Casar is vegetarian; instead of animal rennet, the milk is curdled with an endemic wild thistle, lending a bitter edge to the buttery insides.

My favourite wines and cheeses are the unexpected; the ones which unite disparate regions or even countries, like Pizarro’s Palo Cortado or – perhaps most blasphemous of all – Dusi’s Parmigiano Reggiano with champagne.

“Yes, champagne,” Gaitanos says emphatically, when I gasp in surprise. “With the French we argue about everything – food, cheese, wine, heritage, skiing – you name it, we fight over it. But parmesan and champagne is where we meet, sit down and make love to each other.” It’s where the king of cheese meets the queen of sparkling wine.

The world contains a near infinite variety of cheese, and the joy of travelling is seeing that as a reflection of different lands and cultures. But the affinities and similarities that emerge between distant, even divided countries, can be equally heartening to behold. That’s what food, drink and indeed travelling are for, after all: to bring people together and nurture connection, not division.

The more I experience of them, the more I feel that the real wonder of cheese and wine is not their natural differences, but their humanity; the fact we made them, loved them, and spread their inimitable joys to every corner of the globe.

Clare Finney is a food journalist and writer. She is the author of The Times Food Book of the Year 2023 ‘Hungry Heart: A Story of Food and Love' and a contributor to Scribehound Food.