Flor di capra is an organic, aged goat cheese from Italy. I bought it at the Rainbow the other week in part because I had some Capricious (organic, aged goat cheese from California) at home and wanted to compare how they taste. Leslie participated in a similar tasting last week at Buffy. Flor di Capra is very tasty, but it smells and tastes amazingly like grass. It literally taste how lying in a field of grass smells. And at the rind it tastes like dirt, the way grass at the root tastes of dirt. And the Capricious, as noted here elsewhere, tastes like salty sea air. This made me think a lot about the concept of terroir, and how I wish there was a word for this in English, both because saying something in French always makes it sound pretentious and stuck-up, as opposed to a sound and true principle, and also because the fact that there's no word for it in English points to the fact that we don't think it's important. And it is. Isn't it a piece of basic common sense that things taste like where they are grown, or made? If goats live by the ocean and eat grass that grows in salt air, and then their milk is made into a cheese that is then aged in a cave by that ocean, doesn't it make sense that it tastes like the salty sea in a creamy milk-based form?
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