Cheese Book Review: The Curious Cheese Eater

A New Book for Cheese Lovers

There are plenty of books about cheese. But The Curious Cheese Eater feels rather special to us at the Academy of Cheese because its author, Hero Hirsh, has been part of our story from the very beginning, As one of our first Training Partners, she played an important role in helping shape the Academy’s approach to cheese education and the development of a community of knowledgeable, confident cheese professionals and enthusiasts. She went on to become the Academy of Cheese’s first Fellow, recognising her exceptional contribution, expertise and influence within the world of cheese.

Making Cheese Knowledge Accessible

Beautifully illustrated by Tom Jay, it arrives at a time when artisanal cheese has become more than a niche interest: as Hero Hirsh puts it in her introduction, the recent renaissance has “turned pairing into an art form, farmers into household names and brought unutterable joy to millions of people.” Few people are better placed to guide us through that renaissance than Hero herself.

Most importantly, this is a book that sounds like Hero. Anyone who knows Hero will hear her voice in its pages: knowledgeable, direct, occasionally dry, and entirely without pretension. It is the first book of what I suspect will be a plural collection of titles.

Hero has an extraordinary depth of knowledge, built through years of industry experience, study, CPD, deployments across continents and oceans, and her pioneering achievement as the first Fellow of the Academy of Cheese. Yet one of the great strengths of this book is her ability to resist making that knowledge feel intimidating. Cheese can be a remarkably technical subject, but Hero has an instinct for stripping away the jargon and explaining complicated processes in everyday language.

This beautiful book is a must have for any cheese fan … Hero’s passion and expertise oozes off every page.

Juliet Sear

Learn How Cheese Is Made — Without the Jargon

Her explanations of processes such as curd cutting are clear and accessible, while her descriptions of goats, starters, cultures and cheesemaking manage to introduce genuine technical knowledge without losing the reader along the way.

There is a particular pleasure in recognising Hero’s characteristic humour. She introduces the rather grand-sounding “Culture Houses”, only to remark that she is sure they are considerably less glamorous than they sound. Goats are described in the practical terms of being “quite compact compared to cows”. And when she gets to the cheeses that sit outside the conventional family tree, we meet the Outliers — cheeses that have gone beyond being the black sheep of the family and entered the territory of “hermits and outright pariahs”.

This simplicity never becomes simplistic, though, and certainly never condescending. There is just enough technical detail to satisfy the genuinely curious reader without turning the book into a cheese textbook. Hero knows an enormous amount about her subject, but she also understands that most people primarily want to know whether a cheese is good, how to choose it, how to eat it and, ultimately, how to enjoy it.

This is precisely the kind of accessible expertise that has always been at the heart of what the Academy of Cheese seeks to do. Education should open the door to a subject, not close it. Hero understands this instinctively.

How to Choose, Buy and Store Cheese

The practical sections are consequently among the book’s greatest strengths. How to sniff out a good cheese offers genuinely useful advice for anyone who has ever stood nervously in front of a specialist cheese counter wondering what to ask. How mouldy is too mouldy? Should you eat the rind? How should cheese be stored, wrapped, cut or frozen? And how on earth do you put together a good cheeseboard?

Hero gives us answers rather than commandments. There is no sense that she is waiting to catch the reader doing something “wrong”, with a “you-do-you” quality to it – she isn’t going to judge you. Her advice comes from experience, but ultimately the message is simple: cheese is there to be enjoyed.

That generosity is something those of us who have worked with Hero over the years will recognise. She has always been willing to share what she knows, and The Curious Cheese Eater extends that generosity to a much wider audience.

The chapter on A Day in the Life of a Cheesemaker is another highlight, offering a privileged glimpse into the often intimate, demanding and relentlessly routine world of a small cheesemaker: Urstrom Kaese near Berlin, to be specific. Once again, Hero gives us enough detail to pique our curiosity without overwhelming us. It feels like a window into a world that many cheese lovers appreciate without necessarily understanding.

Her explanation of cheese varieties as branches on a family tree is particularly effective. The book takes us through over 30 cheeses, from the thickest part of the trunk to the spindliest branches — “not just the nearest and dearest, but the great grandparents, the weird uncles and fourth cousins once removed.”

There are plenty of other delights along the way: the wonderfully concise history of cheese, an exploration of the linguistics of cheese, an explanation of what actually happens in a cheese competition, recipes, cheese myths and the entirely important question of whether cheese can legitimately be eaten for breakfast (what do you reckon?). There is even a stink-o-meter.

Hero also demystifies the art of cheese tasting; in an area that can sometimes feel like a competition to invent the most obscure flavour descriptor, Hero makes the process accessible and enjoyable.

At times, you can sense that Hero has so much to say and such a wealth of experience to draw upon that she simply wants to get all those fascinating little nuggets out. Somehow, though, she manages to rein herself in. The result is a book that is generous without being overwhelming, knowledgeable without being preachy, and technical without being geeky for geekiness’ sake.

Why The Curious Cheese Eater Is the Perfect Gift for Cheese Lovers

Ultimately, The Curious Cheese Eater succeeds because it is as interested in the person eating the cheese as it is in the cheese itself. It invites curiosity rather than demanding expertise. You can dip in, learn something, sound impressively knowledgeable in a cheese shop, or simply settle down with a piece of something delicious and enjoy it.

And that feels very Hero: immense expertise, generously shared, with absolutely no fuss — and plenty of cheese.

Order The Curious Cheese Eater by Hero Hirsh