In Praise of Shepherds and Goatherds

If necessity is the mother of invention, then loneliness and hunger must be the mothers of discovery. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 by a bored Bedouin goatherd named Mazra who was throwing rocks into a cave near Qumran, a dusty spot not far from the Dead Sea. The crash of shattering pottery led him to investigate the cave. Like Mayberry’s Opie Taylor throwing rocks into his fishing pond, Mazra was Palestine’s post-war Opie, doing the arid alternative.

Coffee was legendarily discovered by Kaldi, a goatherd who noticed his goats acting more frisky than usual after eating coffee cherries. Although scholars might consider the former discovery more critical to Civilization, the latter is more critical to my daily well-being.

Having covered boredom, let’s move on to loneliness. Roquefort cheese was discovered by a French shepherd who saw a pretty girl in the distance. Stashing his lunch of cheese and bread in a cave, he set out to follow her. The bad news is that he never caught up to her. The good news is that he eventually found his lunch again, which by this time had become covered in blue mold. In the “mold” of true adventurers through the ages, he took a bite, didn’t die, and actually kind of liked it. Thus an artisan cheese was born. Roquefort cheese, now one of the world’s best loved blues, is still made the same way, in the Combalou caves near Roquefort-Soulzon, just northwest of Montpellier on France’s Mediterranean coast. The only difference is that Lacaune sheep’s milk is purposely inoculated with Penicillium roqueforti and left to age naturally, and neither shepherds nor pretty peasant girls are involved in the process. As far as we know....

I adore blue cheese, yet I have only enjoyed them one at a time. As any professional taster will assert, the true measure of food or drink is how it measures up to its competition. In the spirit of trying to pick a favorite, I lined up Stilton, Roquefort, St. Agur and Gorgonzola. There are many more out there, but I chose four well-known, commonly available cheeses.

Stilton
I started with the most familiar, a wedge of Stilton. This English cheese from the villages of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire (and not Stilton, curiously enough), is recognizable for its tendrils of Penicillium roqueforti the color of spruce needles that weave their way through the parchment-colored cheese like lichen across granite. It has a pleasant, balanced saltiness and nice complexity. Its texture is very solid, a little crumbly and not particularly creamy.

Roquefort
Roquefort was one I had been looking forward to with anticipation. It is the cheese that baffled me when I was a child. Back in my salad days, the dressings I chose were fairly mundane, and my Grandpa Ted’s dousing of innocent iceberg lettuce with Roquefort was fairly-shudder inducing to my Thousand Island sensibilities. I’ve grown to love it since then. This sample didn’t disappoint. Creamy white with pockets, rather than veins of blue, it was the most intensely blue of the four. The texture was crumbly and slightly moist. The flavor was amazingly complex, with a sturdy saltiness and a slightly sweet fruitiness.

Saint Agur
Next up was the newcomer to my palate, Saint Agur. It is a pasteurized cow’s milk cheese from Monts du Velay, a village in the Auvergne region of France. It has a soft white base with blue-green veins of Penicillium roqueforti. Its 60% butterfat content makes it a double-cream cheese, beautifully spreadable. It is milder and less salty than Roquefort, with a subtle blue flavor.

Gorgonzola
Moving from Britain and France to Italy, the last cheese tasted was Gorgonzola. Made from cow’s milk, it comes from the village of Gorgonzola, near Milan in Lombardy region of Italy. Tradition says that the making of this cheese began in 879 A.D., in a process that uses the bacteria of Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus along with mold spores of Penicillium glaucum and Penicillium roqueforti. My sample was smooth and buttery, with a milder blue character than the others. It was also more delicate and less salty than the others.

All four cheeses were delicious, especially for a blue cheese fan. Overall, Roquefort was my favorite. Its intense yet complex flavor won me over. I put Saint Agur second, due to its wonderful creaminess and delicacy of flavor. Gorgonzola was a close third. Surprisingly to me, Stilton came in last, which might come as a shock to my companions in our Friday night dinner group that I have attended regularly for years. One of the merry men, John, has the crucial responsibility of bringing cheese every week. Invariably it is Stilton, his favorite. After this unofficial taste panel, Stilton may have to relinquish its champion’s belt to Roquefort.

Thank goodness for shepherds and goatherds. These bored loners have been responsible for some of civilization’s greatest discoveries (and one of its most delicious). It just goes to show you what a pastoral setting and a lot of time on your hands can accomplish. So after all that dues-paying, getting the pale-pink-coated-little-girl in “The Sound of Music” is certainly their well-deserved earthly reward. And they no longer have to lose their lunch over her.