Picture, if you will, Easy Cheese, a “pasteurized cheese snack” that comes pressurized in a can. Imagine an orange coil of it deposited on a piece of pilot bread. As a kid growing up in Anchorage, this was cheese at its most exotic and forbidden.
This was the ’80s. Food horizons were wider than when my parents were growing up here but they were not yet truly wide. Powdered milk still made appearances. Fruit was almost never ripe. My mother didn’t approve of cheese in a can but she did support mild orange cheddar, bought in a large block at the supermarket. Or, on a fancy occasion, a small triangle of brie. This, to me, was where the cheese world began and ended.
A few years after I graduated from college, I went to dinner at a friend’s house in Juneau. After we ate, he brought out a small parcel wrapped in butcher paper. Inside was soft, pungent cheese he’d carried in his suitcase from New York City, where he grew up. He cut a shiny, ripe-smelling chunk, smeared it on my plate and drizzled it with honey. If I paid attention, he said, I could detect the flavor of salty grass from the seaside pasture where the cows grazed. I tasted carefully. And there it was. Grass and sea salt. Cheese was far more interesting and delicious than I realized.
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