It was a perfectly normal dinner invitation. I sat there, the table full of food: bread of different colors, vegetables of all kinds, a large soup pot and a platter of cheese. It looked fine, but it smelled really bad. Have my socks released their aroma? How embarrassing would that be? I was hoping there was a dead mouse rotting under the dresser somewhere.
What was irritating was that the smell didn’t bother my hosts at all, they apparently didn’t even notice it. Perhaps you have a cold and have lost your sense of smell? Dizzy as I was, I tried my best to finish the soup, accompanied by a piece of bread and a slice of cucumber. When I got home later that evening, the smell had caught in my nostrils. Will this ever come out again?
No mouse had died. The smell resulted from the various pieces of cheese stinking on the table. I had a difficult relationship with cheese at the time. From Syria I knew only one kind that my mother used to make at home: in the yard of the house, where she put milk in a white cloth bag on an inverted bucket and put a heavy stone on it to squeeze the water out of the milk. After a few days, it turned into tasty, mild, non-stinky cheese. It was my mother’s small cheese factory for a long time before a Russian plane bombed this part of the house and destroyed the small factory. I hadn’t touched any cheese since then.
I complimented the woman by trying her cheese…
Here in Bavaria, many people talk about different types of beer, different types of cars, different types of bread and even different types of cheese. Allgäu, Emmental, blue cheese, Weißlacker, Obatzter. All this was served some time later at another invitation, this time on the occasion of my neighbor’s birthday. The cheeses were served on round wooden boards, each platter containing one or two types from each cheese family, arranged clockwise from mild to intense and decorated with fruit.
I sat next to Sandra, who had contributed cheese from her own shop. She started explaining the types and shapes to me and I complimented her by trying her cheese. My hands were shaking and my expression must have given me away: the cheese was hard to bite and bitter in taste. I won’t even start with the smell.
Approaching this form of food took a few years. The Viktualienmarkt helped me. There are heaps of cheeses there. Their manufacturers are like artists. They produce hard cheese, sliced cheese, semi-hard cheese, soft cheese and cream cheese. Although cream cheese is a difficult term. Are all other types of cheese on the shelf rancid rejects? The more I had to deal with the smells, the less it hurt. And eventually I liked it. Sometimes nutty, sometimes mild, sometimes smoky.
I started approaching the stands and voluntarily tasting small bites. And then the time had come: I bought myself an Allgäu cheese, wrapped in parchment paper. Before I knew it, the piece was gone. Or as the Upper Bavarian puts it: The cheese is bite. And so I made my way back to the Viktualienmarkt.