America’s Cheesemonger

When Steven Jenkins visits a food store, he can’t stop himself from checking out the prices.

“Twenty-seven dollars for this balsamic? I get $18,” he says. “And look at that mustard, $3.39. I sell Dijon mustard three times as big at maybe half the price.”

But what really gets Jenkins going is the cheese counter.

“That’s bad, that’s bad, that’s good and that’s a prize flanked by two losers,” Jenkins says, pointing to several different cheeses in a local shop, where the Maytag Blue and Spanish Cabrales get his approval.

Serious cheeses from Europe and small American producers are getting more attention than ever in this country, and many credit Jenkins as a major reason. When he went to work for the brand-new SoHo food emporium Dean & DeLuca in 1977, he organized a cheese counter like none ever seen in New York. In displays that rivaled the best of Paris’ cheese shops, Jenkins collected great cheeses from around the world--Cabrales from Spain, Taleggio from Italy, the great chevres of France.

He moved on to other stores, including Fairway Market on New York’s Upper West Side, where in 1980 he was offered $350 a week take-home pay and thought it a princely sum. He eventually made partner at the market and as a consultant set the style for cheese counters across the country.

Today he runs the Harlem branch of Fairway Market and recently published “Steven Jenkins Cheese Primer” (Workman, 1996; $16.95), a book that tells nearly all of his cheese secrets. A would-be cheese store owner could take this book and easily create a competitive business. That’s exactly what Jenkins seems to want.

“We’re moving to a point in our lives where everything’s going to taste the same,” Jenkins says. Cheese is one of his weapons in his fight against blandness, though he certainly doesn’t limit his opinions to milk products.

He rails against the famous olive oil that its makers pass off as Tuscan but is really Umbrian: “It’s the biggest fraud in the whole business.”

Against the proliferation of fancy jams: “They win all the fancy food shows, so every shop has to have this overpriced nonsense.”

Against the famous cheese maker: “She sold out a long time ago.”

He is equally forceful when he finds something he likes.

“This is the best tomato paste money can buy,” he says, picking up a tube of the product in one local store. “Anything that says Pagani on it, from Parma, you know it’s the best that can possibly be made.”

He realizes that some of his pronouncements make him sound like a preacher.

“That’s what I am,” Jenkins says, “a retail preacher.”

Q & A

Q: You went to New York to be an actor. That was 1973. Then in 1977 you became the first employee of the food shop Dean & DeLuca in SoHo and gave up acting for cheese. What led to your career change?

A: I’d been offered a guest artist contract at the University of Florida and, of course, just before I left, I’d given up my apartment, left my job, lost my girlfriend. So when I came back to New York--this was in ‘75--I had no money, I had no prospects and I’d already been doing this acting for two years, which doesn’t seem like a very long time, but when you’re 22 it seems like an eternity.

The worst possible thing that could have happened would have been for me to say, “I can’t do this. I’m going back to Columbia, Missouri. I’m going to take over my dad’s business.” That would have been: hello, heroin.

So I found a job. I went back to the kite factory I was working at before I went to Florida and they said, “Well, your job is gone, but you’re a good guy and we have some friends on the Upper East Side with a cheese shop. Give them a call.” So I got a job as a clerk. A year and a half later I ended up at Dean & DeLuca, and that’s where it all started.

Q: But what happened in that year and a half that got you hooked on the business? A lot of people work in cheese shops and move on.

A: I was so knocked out that I was getting a paycheck every week and finally getting some responsibility. I wasn’t freaking out every day about what I was going to do for my next anything. So I applied myself. I scrubbed, I rubbed, I swept. I showed up and I stayed late. I was doing everything I could do to keep from turning tail and going back to my hometown.

And by sheer dumb luck I found myself in a situation where nobody was taking the practice seriously. I saw an opportunity where I could be the best at something.

Q: Tell me about your first days at Dean & DeLuca.

A: Well, there I was in this fabulous space with all these hipsters down in SoHo--I was so meek in those days, I’d never even been to SoHo--and I thought, this is pretty neat. But I didn’t know anything about anything; I’d never been to Europe. So I read everything about food I could get my hands on and I learned.

When I was little, I always loved to clean up my room and put toys in all these specific places, and I did the same thing with the cheese counter. It just evolved and I ran a beautiful department.

Then I began to travel because I realized that none of the good stuff from Europe was available here. I began to smuggle in all these good cheeses that no one had ever seen here before. And that just lit me up. I began to regard myself as more of a curator than a retailer. I wanted to show New York, this is the most perfect selection of cheeses that can be found anywhere in the world. And 20 years later, here we are.

Q: In your book, you talk about your first trip to Paris, especially your visit to the cheese building at Rungis, the wholesale market just south of the city, as a milestone. Describe what you found.

A: It was a great adventure. I was beginning to have some maturity and understand a little bit about the realm of food, the realm of cooking, certainly the realm of cheese. That first trip in ’79 I was there for only a week and a half. I would get up at 3 in the morning, drive myself out to Rungis, to this cathedral-high cheese building, and walk up and down the aisles writing down the names of the coolest makers of the coolest-looking cheeses I could find and talking and talking and talking with the broken French I had.

When I got back, I took the names of the villages that were on those labels and I found them on the maps. I’d already become a map freak--I love the idea of spending time at a table with my maps, smoking cigarettes, reading the maps. Later, I would rent a car and go visit all these little places all over France. What could possibly be more fun than that?

Q: But you didn’t limit your travels to France.

A: Well, there were no decent Italian cheeses in the city, so I went to Aosta because I wanted to get Fontina. Every third person who came into the store wanted Fontina,and I would have to sell them this flabby, ersatz nonsense. It wasn’t Fontina and I knew it. So I arranged to have the first shipments of serious Fontina d’Aosta. That was a coup.

Then I ended up in Milan just to have fun and explore after Aosta and I ran smack into Peck’s La Casa del Formaggio, which is the most famous cheese store in the universe. There it was, right before me. You would have thought I would have done some homework. “Is there something I ought to see in Milano?” No. I’m so stupid, I literally came around the corner and found this incredible altar. This cathedral of cheese. I spent six hours in there the first day, just writing down every brand name. I ultimately didn’t have to do that because I worked up a relationship with the Stoppani brothers and had them fly big orders for me into New York. Those shipments were the first time New York had ever seen real Italian mascarpone, mozzarella di bufula, great Robiola cheeses of Piedmont, all the Lombardian cheeses, and on and on and on.

With that first shipment of Italian stuff, I got a bunch of publicity. Mimi Sheraton wrote about it--that was the first time I got my name in the New York Times--and I consolidated my reputation for being a real nut case about cheese.

Q: What cheese regions attract you these days?

A: Spanish cheeses--the Cabrales of Asturias and others--are the rage for me because they’re cheeses made by people, not machines. My last six trips to Europe have been to Spain. Not because I’ve burned out on Italy and France but because Spain has the most exquisite foodstuffs of anyplace in Europe and they deserve the attention of Americans. Concurrently, I continue to champion American artisans. And we’ve managed, because of our buying power, to help rejuvenate the farmhouse cheese industry of the United Kingdom, which is a tremendous accomplishment. The great cheeses that date back to the Roman era of the U.K. are available once again because we’ve provided a market for them. They’re very expensive but very very wonderful cheeses.

Q: Why is it that cheese doesn’t get the care and respect it deserves in many stores?

A: It’s just ignorance and the fact that most American retailers are mouth breathers--they don’t have a clue. They’re not passionate about what they’re offering their customers. They don’t care that they’re selling this thing that goes back thousands of years. And unless some hoity-toity chef is ringing the phone and asking them to get something for them, they’re not going to go to any trouble.

It’s understandable. You’ve got to make a living. But your performance as a retailer suffers. People just don’t accept the peasant virtue of making sure you have the very best stuff in the world at the best price you can muster. As a retailer, you’re responsible for the most important part of your customers’ lives--their leisure time.

Q: Some people feel it’s elitist to obsess on a bunch of fancy cheeses.

A: It’s reverse snobbery to look at it that way, and it’s very difficult to break through that perception. We’re talking about peasant food. The world’s most honest people have produced cheese for generations. In our country, we all want to hit the big time. We all want to make tons of money and be famous. But the artisanal cheese makers are going to be making cheese all their lives. They don’t have that kind of expectation to be MTV with their careers. It’s that kind of peace and solidity within their lives that I find so appealing. They want to make sure that their product represents them, that it’s as good as it can possibly be. And the Europeans have retailers who are of the same mettle. They appreciate that their role in this gastronomic chain is to bring these things to their public--because their public won’t settle for anything less. Of course, Italy and France are now as modern as America and everything is being mass-produced and knocked off. That’s a reason I find Spain so appealing; the food industry is still a very artisanal thing.

Q: In your book you say that artisanal American cheese making has entered a period of rebirth and you catalog some of your favorites. Where do you think artisanal cheese making is headed in this country? And what’s missing?

A: I think we’re at a point where California wines were 15 years ago. Cheeses are getting the attention they deserve and the serious artisans in so many states are finding a ready market for their stuff. What’s needed is a soft, ripened cheese that can stand up to the great Merlots and Cabernets and Zinfandels that are available to us. No one in the American cheese-making industry has addressed that most important category--the raw milk, washed-rind cheeses. By that I mean the Epoisses of Burgundy, the Pont-l’Eveque of Normandy, the Munster from Alsace, the Taleggio from Lombardy--those unctuous, cosmic cheeses that reek, that have excruciatingly delicious, huge flavors. We don’t have that in this country yet.

Q: That brings up the issue of raw milk in cheese. You’re not allowed to bring in what many consider the world’s best cheeses. Why?

A: Well, that whole bugaboo goes back to the ‘30s. People were getting sick from fluid milk that hadn’t been transported properly. We learned via Louis Pasteur that if you heat milk and kill everything in it you make it safe. But that’s the worst possible thing you can do to milk if you’re going to make cheese from it--you kill all the flavor. Still, the Food and Drug Administration decided that if we allowed raw-milk cheeses into the country, they were going to have a lot of liability problems because people were going to get sick and die. Well, the truth is, every single listeriosis case I know of that has occurred here or in Europe has been traced to pasteurized milk. Listeriosis is a post-pasteurization problem that occurs at low temperatures and is provoked by factory conditions.

But the FDA remains myopic in regard to the great cheeses of Europe that are now and always have been made of raw milk. The only exception: if they’re aged 60 days. That means the great Roquefort that we get and the great Emmental and the great Gruyere are made of raw milk but aged at least 2 months so they’re perfectly legal. What we can’t get are real Brie, real Camembert, farm-made French chevres, Epoisses from Burgundy. They’re not meant to be 60 days; they’d be dead by that time. But the fact is that those are the safest, most delicious cheeses in the world.

Q: But you used to sell some of those cheeses in New York.

A: That’s true. I smuggled them in for years and years until Bryan Miller wrote an article in the New York Times that told people I was flouting the law. Customs immediately clamped down on us and I got busted. No more of that stuff. I had to destroy lots of cheese with borax right in front of some government employee. It was like killing puppies. We’ve been clawing our way back from there for the last 10 years,and we got exquisite cheese once again. The cheese makers in France are learning how to put back the flavor when milk is pasteurized. [Milk is pasteurized when it’s heated to 144 degrees for 30 minutes, a slower method that cheese specialists use; most mass-production companies pasteurize at higher temperatures for shorter periods, a process that gives milk a cooked flavor.]

Q: What do you tell people to look for when shopping for cheese?

A: You first look for rustic rinds as opposed to rinds with garish paraffin. If you can’t find that in the store, leave the store. It’s very easy to tell by sight whether something deserves your attention or doesn’t

Q: Is it gratifying to see cheese being taken more seriously in some circles?

A: Finally, wine aficionados are taking cheese seriously, which is very gratifying. But cheese is becoming hip, which is so offensive to me. That something as timeless as cheese can be relegated to a trend is ridiculous. I see an onslaught of false artisans, of foodies who are putting themselves up as producers of an artisanal product, when really it’s just sort of a hobby.

Q: How do people tell the difference between real and false artisans?

A: It’s very hard. I’m much happier if they just recognize the difference between factory cheese and serious cheese. To draw a distinction between fake artisan cheese and real artisan cheese is more than I can ask the public to do.

Q: Is trendiness a necessary step for serious cheese to become an everyday habit for Americans?

A: It will be beaten down by the fact that these cheeses are so fine that most people with enough of a brain will never go back to mass-production cheese, that silly stuff. People are spending quality time with the people they love at restaurants these days. That means there’s more likelihood that they’ll put a great artisanal cheese on the table with specific accompaniments that make sense. Once that’s accomplished, a pattern will be set for them and they will become part of the solution and no longer part of the problem. Once they’ve tasted the real thing, the lights will go on.