CHEESE BOARDS TO SHARE; how to create a stunning cheese board for any occasion, by Thalassa Skinner

CHEESE BOARDS TO SHARE; how to create a stunning cheese board for any occasion (Ryland Peters and Small, 2019, 160 pages, ISBN 978-1-78879-148-9 $19.95 USD hard covers) is by cheese professional and cheese educator Thalassa Skinner. This is a short introduction to the "world of cheeses" plus material on how to create 25 themed cheese boards with international cheeses. Themes include wine, beer and cocktail pairings, as well as kids, picnics, and camping trips. Each cheese has a detailed description and some suggested global alternatives if you cannot find an elusive cheese. She has accompaniment ideas and many tips and tricks, including a bibliography of books and magazines and websites for further reading. A typical board is the Alpine, an all Swiss cheese board. Four cheeses are described, 12 more are listed as substitutes, and she gives us the idea of doing more regional boards for other countries. Suggested "boughten" accompaniments for the Swiss board include rye bread toasts, salted almonds, pickled cornichons, and fresh apricots. Also, she has a tomato and smoked pepper jam for you to make from her recipe. I would have liked an all-blue cheese board for the sake of comparison, but she does have one board with two blues on it. In fact, cheese boards can also be instructive if there is the opportunity to compare and contrast very similar cheeses. Indeed, a few days ago I prepared a cheese board with four different Tommes (circular round shape, earthy gray-brown edible rind, and intensely nutty taste, made from skimmed milk: hence low-fat, high-protein) from four separate milk sources (water buffalo, cow, sheep, goat) from the same Ontario dairy – Monforte. Hey – that way I created a three-fold cheese board of regionality, Tommes, and milk sources! The book could have been improved if it had also used more metric in the recipes to include equivalents to teaspoons and tablespoons, or at least had a metric conversion chart. Quality/price rating: 90.

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