Say cheese

One of the great things about traveling is discovering local cuisines. With the new emphasis in the U.S. on local production and the rediscovery of artisanal traditions in everything from chicken-raising to craft brewing, a road trip is bound to yield some nice surprises.

Wisconsin is of course famous as a dairy state and a leading producer of commercial cheese. It occurred to me that it would also be fertile ground for artisan cheeses, and sure enough a little googling produced a promising array of cheese producers and markets.

For instance, right in the heart of Madison, on Capitol Square, is a store called Fromagination, a nice pun on the French word for cheese and a store that looks on its website a lot like Neal's Yard in London. There is also something called the Wisconsin Dairy Artisan Network with lists of stores and producers.

We both like cheese a lot (for that matter, all three of us like cheese). Part of our travel equipment is a cooler, which is essential to keep open cans of dog food, limes for our gin and tonics (gin is another part of our travel equipment), picnic lunches, and so on. Our motel rooms generally have fridges for re-freezing our ice packs. In short, we are ready to load up on some cheese.

I discovered in France that cheese often tastes best right where it is made. Even short travel somehow disturbs the product, or perhaps it's just that you get the best, ripest cheeses on the spot. In any case, Pont L'Eveque never tasted so good as it did right in Pont L'Eveque, and local camemberts in Normandy always had an extra nuttiness.

Wisconsin is the center for much of our commercial cheese production -- those unappetizing pre-sliced concoctions wrapped in cellophane. And if artisan cheesemakers are working only with pasteurized milk, it will limit how much flavor they can give their products. But there's every reason to hope that we will be eating a lot of good cheese during our trip.