Review: The Cheese Handbook: Over 250 Varieties Described, with Recipes

Pin It The Cheese Handbook: Over 250 Varieties Described, with Recipes by T.A. Layton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is the first book I've read on the subject of cheese despite the fact that I am an addict. Certainly I'm a newb in the cheese aficionado community but I actively search out new and interesting morsels to indulge my palate. I approached this book with the desire to open my mind to the vast variety of fromage being lovingly crafted across our planet and possibly obtain a bit of history in the process.

This book attempts to hit those aspects of the cheese world plus offer many other tidbits of knowledge but it doesn't do any if it particularly well or in a very useful manner. This book is part history, part reference, part opinion/personal experience with cheese, and part cookbook. Unfortunately it is poorly written and extremely poorly organized. It has the feel of a textbook without the structure to support it.

The most useful part of the book is the section which lists cheese by their country of origin. This is the section I picked up the book for. Some of the info was helpful but not much. I expected some sort of consistency in the material but it really was a mess. Very rarely did the book offer insight into taste, texture or appearance of the many varieties while it often droned on about the inconsequential history of a handful of the author's favorite cheeses. Heck, even that would have been fine if he made the attempt to perform this service for all those he listed, but some cheeses filled multiple pages with poems, references to classic literature, etc while others got one line that often said something like "not a very good cheese."

This felt very much like a book the author simply wrote for himself to read rather than for others. There was a bit of knowledge that I gained which will prove useful in my cheese-quest but not much.

View all my reviews