Now, I can handle a mature cheddar. But I'm making a stand against cheese funk. Those mouldy, pongy, specimens that seem to strive and writhe for sentience. The ones that reach off the plate and grab your nose and squeeze it like Gripper Stebson on a bad day. Now I know there's a bit of eau de testosterone in those adventures among the high peaks of cheese funk and for all I know, brie is – in fact – congealed gallic jizz. That would make perfect sense.
First off, if food is mouldy, don't eat it. You wouldn't send your tongue galloping recklessly through the black forest of aspergillus on a wall with rising damp so don't think eating mouldy cheese is alright. If something smells like old, sweaty socks, chances are that it's to be avoided. You'd not ask for a second helping old tramp sock broth. Even Oliver Twist would have snuck out for Pot Noodle.
Goat cheese is definitely funky. I once ate a goaty babybel (they're green, be warned) in Buttes-Chaumont park in Paris. The shock made me roll down a hill and into a wall whereupon blood (red) fountained out of my head in quantities that threatened to make a me new tourist attraction. My wife 'apparently' didn't know green was cheese code for toxic-death-cheese. She tells the biggest, fattest lies every known. She's the Mistress of Lies.
But that's nothing compared to the Cheese Dalek. It's like if the French invented an evil robot to store the worst cheeses they could fathom, monuments to funk that even full-on-Frenchies realised were a bit too much, and then decided to dispose of it in space using some kind of primitive rocket-powered trebuchet. For several centuries it patiently orbited the Earth until the day it fell and landed in twenty-first century Montreuil-sur-Mer. Not knowing what to do with it and fearing for the world, the owners of a nearby restaurant decided the very best place to hide a cheese-filled robot horror machine from the middle ages was in their cellar dining room. Maybe, they thought, someone would just think it was antique furniture or somesuch, the kind of thing that lies around restaurants pour character.
That just happened to be the restaurant we'd booked. Now there was a bit of a smell, but the building had been around working up a sweat since the thirteenth century, and look at the all that period furniture, how utterly charming. But the smell got worse and worse. First I assumed that maybe they'd embedded plague victims in the wall, or that someone had inadvertently opened a hell portal and then invited all the demons to a all your-can-eat Jerusalem artichoke and asparagus festival.
I soldiered on till the dessert course. The waiter pulls out the cabinet behind me. I realised then that it was no cabinet. It was the Cheese Dalek. Within, o the horror, the horror. Even the waiter made an involuntary 'eugh' noise.
Subsequent research would seem to indicate the beating heart of the beast was Vieux Boulogne.
