Sunday, July 27, 2008

BATTLE OF THE STRING CHEESES!!!

Dun-d-duh-dun-duh-d-dun-dun-dun-dun, d-d-dun, d-d-dun, d-d-dun, d-d-dun, Dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun, Dun-nuh-nuh-dun-nuh-nuh-nuh... aw, fuck it.

The contestants! And, um, extras. (Have I been eating these cheeses for the past two weeks? WHY DO YOU ASK?)

CONTESTANTS:

WaWa String Cheese
365 Brand (Whole Foods) String Cheese
Trader Joe's Light String Cheese
Kraft String-Ums
Penn-Maid String Cheese
Maggio String Cheese

Kraft likes to advertise its cheeses with an insane cow.

Which totally looks ripped from Chicken Run, no?

Maggio, meanwhile, is the *fun* snack.

Whose bag looks like it was designed by me, circa 1995. On a Mac.

Okay, enough blathering. LET THE GAMES BEGIN.

CHEESE FIGHT!


(I'd like to thank Chung May Grocery, right here, for the toothpicks. TAKE THAT WHOLE FOODS AND RENEWABLE RESOURCES.)

So I have to say that the outcome of this match surprised me. But I have never eaten six string cheeses back to back to back -- in fact, I feel kind of ill right now -- and there you go.

(Midway through the carnage.)

The loser, I think, is Penn-Maid. And not only because I hate Penn-Maid cottage cheese -- it is sour and *wrong* -- though that may have handicapped the cheese a little. But this string cheese also tasted... sour. I can't describe it beyond "sour." Oooh, or "like you licked the back of the refrigerator."

The next-loser turned out to be 365 Brands. Also slightly handicapped, maybe, by my feelings about Whole Foods, but also just... bland. Bland and kind of without any chewy bite to it. Which, I guess if you want your string cheese to be all melty right off the bat that's fine with me, but that's not how I roll.

So that leaves WaWa, Trader Joe's, Maggio, and Kraft. Trader Joe's, I think, suffered for being a diet cheese; it's good for a diet cheese, and also had a nice bite to it that the others lacked, but in the end it just didn't taste as good. (However, I will probably keep buying it, because for 60 calories it's not bad.)

So. Maggio, Kraft, WaWa. I was surprised Maggio made it this far, honestly. Both Maggio and Kraft had a little bit of this... aftertaste thing going. *Like* Penn-Maid's aftertaste, but not... really. See, they also had *flavor,* which made them not as bad as Penn-Maid. As for WaWa, WaWa lacked the icky aftertaste, but did this weird thing where in its final moments before the swallow it got a little gritty.

Soooo to conclude: WaWa in first place by a hair, Maggio and Kraft tied for second, trailed by TJ's Light in fourth (a decent finish for a diet cheese, right?), 365 Brand in fifth, and Penn-Maid rolling into last place.

ALL HAIL WAWA.

I still feel vaguely ill.

Fulvi Crotenese

Fulvi Crotenese
Comes from: sheep
Purchased at: Whole Foods
$14.99/lb

So a warning on this one, too: Try not to eat the rind. You can gnaw at the rind, the way you should with all hard cheeses, but I am pretty sure that the rind itself is made of something that is not cheese. Something like... well, wax. Or rennet, as the label says. YAY RENNET.

So I started eating this cheese on Friday, and after I'd consumed most of it I put a touch back in the fridge because, eh. And I couldn't figure out what I wanted to say about it, because, eh. It is a sheep's milk cheese, which is a negative, but it is a hard cheese that flakes right, which is a positive. It doesn't taste too sheepy, which is a positive, but then it doesn't taste strongly of anything, which is a negative.

(We might have... *issues* with mild or gentle flavors over here at Litvak Palate. Y'all can analyze as you see fit.)

So I put this tiny bit of cheese back in the fridge for two days, and then tonight I pulled it out because, eh, hungry, and lo! The cheese tastes much better now. Less... boring. Still unsheepy (hooray!) but with a nice... aged-ness to it. Or something.

In conclusion, then, this is a cheese you might want to sit uncovered in your refrigerator for two days so it can soak up your fridge-scent and replace it with its own vague sheepiness.

Yeah.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Rustico Red Pepper & Bel Paese Traditional

Rustico Red Pepper
Comes from: sheep
Purchased at: Whole Foods
$12.99/lb

Bel Paese Traditional
Comes from: cows
Purchased at: Whole Foods
$9.99/lb

So the Rustico. Smells vaguely sheepy but not overly so. Softer than muenster, though it holds its shape better than mozzarella. The peppery bits are large (relatively) and crunchy and surprisingly spicy, and the cheese itself is not too sheep-heavy. Overall, I think the pepper kinda overpowers the cheese flavor a bit too much -- and the cheese flavor, as I mentioned, is good and not sheep-y -- but it'd be a good cheese to cube and set out at a dinner party with a bunch of toothpicks. (Unless your guests are vegetarians, because this cheese? Also contains rennet!)

And the Bel Paese. Okay, first? The rind really is made of wax. DO NOT TRY TO EAT THE RIND. (On the other hand, this one is rennet-free, for all your cow-enslaving-but-not-killing buddies.) Smells... like... cardboard? First bite: Oooer-um. So... Okay, second bite... See, this cheese is... It doesn't taste like feet, as I feared at first, and in fact it tastes better the longer you push it up against your palate, though that could just be my tongue-cells dying... Also a softer cheese, this one; like the other, it holds its shape but you can crush it against your palate with minimal effort. It reminds me... a little of Robin Eggs, for no reason I can describe, and a little of regular muenster. This cheese is *confusing.* And, um, kinda bland overall. Not a party cheese, this cheese; I'd save it more for, um, baking. If I ever baked with cheese, I mean.

As a mini-review, Whole Foods had set out what I believe to be Unikaas something or other tonight, and for the second or third time I had a chunk and thought, Oh, this is *good.* But then there were no small sad single-person pieces, and so you got these reviews instead. Voila!

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Arina Goat Gouda

Arina Goat Gouda
Comes from: goats
Purchased at: Whole Foods
$13.99/lb

So this cheese. You -- and here you are me, or, um, I; ugh -- anyway, you grab this cheese out of the sad-single-people-portions basket at Whole Foods, thinking, "Hey! I like gouda! I like goats! What could go wrong?"

But this cheese is the most un-gouda-like gouda I can imagine. It's a pale yellow color (see above) and, according to the packaging, it contains eggs. Does real gouda contain eggs? I have no idea.

(No, says Wiki. No, it does not.)

(Okay, from that Wiki entry: "Some say that the best Gouda cheese is in Iceland. But the location of the 'cold island' is still in debate." Dear anonymous editor: Of all the entries on Wikipedia, you picked the *gouda* entry to vandalize? With an obscure joke about Iceland? I am so confused.)

(Also from that Wiki entry: I would totally be banned from this place. TOTALLY.)

(This cheese also contains everybody's favorite, rennet! "Animal rennet," in fact, not mere cow rennet. Yum.)

Also surprising, there is a... hidden crunch to this cheese. The cheese itself is rates with American muenster on the hardness scale -- not soft, not hard -- but evvvvvvery so often there's some... grit to it. Which, not unpleasant, just surprising. And again, I was expecting gouda, which... is hard, right?

So, point is, this cheese is calling itself a "gouda," and I'm not sure why, 'cause it's not. At least to me. On the other hand, the Dutch would know, I guess. (Dear Holland The Netherlands, okay, I get it, stop having two names already: Why?)

BUT THE POINT IS. This cheese is pretty good. There's a nice acid kick at the sides of your tongue when you start chewing it, and a good sour taste (no, *good* sour) at the back of your throat when you swallow. Also, a strong goat-ness throughout; if goat's cheese ain't your thing, stay away.

As for pairings (lookit me, gettin' all fancified with my cheese-speak!), I'd say... um... dunno. I'm sure it'd be good with apple butter, but I want to pair *everything* with apple butter, so that's no help. I'm sure it'd be good with nice crispy bits of baguette, but again, I want to put *everything* on a baguette. I'm wondering if this cheese would be fun to do something really (comparatively) scary with, like... olive oil and rosemary. I have no idea why I'm saying that, because I am not that fancy, but...

(Hang on, I have a bite of cheese left.)

Okay, yes, olive oil and rosemary. You're welcome.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Seaside Cheddar

Seaside Cheddar
Comes from: cows
Could have been purchased at: Whole Foods
Instead sampled for: Free

You know, the last fancy cheddar I tasted almost put me off fancy cheddars for life, because why spend bazillions (okay, not bazillions) on something that is not quite as sharp as that nice, pre-sliced, bright-orange stuff I can buy over in the cheap aisle? Yeah, why?

But this cheddar is different. This cheddar is *good.* It's pale yellow and very soft for a cheddar -- at least at room temperature -- a sort of sticky-softness that clings to your teeth. But what's weirder is the crunch; despite being soft, this cheese crunches like parmesan. I can't explain it. Oh, and it tastes strongly cheddar-y, nice and salty and, you know, cheddary. Is good.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Kraft Fat-Free Singles

Kraft Fat-Free Singles: Cheddar
Comes from: cows (I think)
Purchased at: ... Acme?
$... your soul?

Did you ever notice how disgusting food appears in photographs? I think I read somewhere that the animators of Ratatouille actually had to work to make the food look *less* lifelike, and therefore more edible.

We are not cheese snobs here at litvak palate. We do not shy away from adjectives like "socks" or neologisms like "melty." And we are not ashamed of artificial coloring!

[Thought: If one says, "We are not snobs," but in that same sentence is referring to the "royal we," is one automatically disqualified from the sentiment?]

Anyway. Moreover, we here at litvak palate recognize that there are times in a girl's life when she maybe finds it necessary to cut back on some calories. Maybe she has a wedding coming up, or a television appearance, or a fabulous beach vacation, or maybe it is all part of a complex plot to catch herself a millionaire. Or maybe she has just bought into the industrial self-hate complex that is American femininity today.

(Or maybe she has just started a cheese-blog.)

Whichever. We at litvak palate are here for you.

Now, *some* of you may be sniffing in my general direction, falling all over yourselves to instruct me on that French method of weight loss, that theory that if you eat real food with *flavor,* food you can enjoy with each bite, you'll fill up faster and you won't blow up like a balloon even though le chef has incorporated an entire bâton de beurre into your chicken. And sure, food with flavor *does* satisfy you in a way that diet food does not. However, if you, like me, were born with a bottomless pit of a stomach that defies your actual physical size, you know that all the flavor in the world can't make a mountain out of a molehill. (Hi! Mix metaphors much? I do!) You need to pack some *volume* in that bitch. And that's where diet food comes in. (Also, salads. Lots and lots of salads.)

This cheese ("pasteurized cheese product"), then. 30 calories a slice. (A slice is 21 grams or three-quarters of an ounce; most cheese is about 110 calories per 28 grams or one ounce, though your string cheeses and diet cheeses will have less and your delicious, buttery cheeses will have more.) The slices themselves are bright orange and, even taken straight from the refrigerator, have a soft, tofu-y quality to them; they're so soft that they roll rather than fracture when you fold them, so soft that they have to be individually wrapped. I'd rank these slices at about mozzarella level on the hardness scale, though of course they're nothing *like* mozzarella. They're also remarkably nothing like cheddar, which they purport to be. In fact, I've had both the American and cheddar varieties of Kraft's fat-free singles, and they taste... exactly the same. *Exactly.* Except the American cheese is lighter in color, and so it kinda-sorta-maybe triggers something in my brain, like "Oh, this cheese is not that cheese." But it's a placebo effect.

But then, for a placebo effect, this cheese isn't *terrible.* I mean, it's edible. It doesn't have much flavor, but as a corollary, the plastic after-effect taste that accompanies so many diet cheeses (I AM LOOKING AT YOU, FAT-FREE PHILADELPHIA CREAM CHEESE.) is mostly absent. And this cheese melts very well, as you might be able to see had I taken a picture just before I consumed that bowl of... stuff, up there.

(Diet dinner! Spray pan with Pam. Fry up a quarter of a large onion with garlic; add ten or so baby tomatoes, sliced, some crushed olives, and a handful of frozen sugar snap peas. Add oregano, basil, and Jane's Krazy Mixed-Up Salt. Rinse off a package of tofu shirataki pasta, cut it into manageable chunklets, drain well, and add to pan. When there's only a little liquid left in the pan, turn off the stove but leave the pan over the heat. Crack two eggs into the mix; stir well. Allow the heat of the ingredients to cook the eggs to just-past-runny done-ness. Dump contents of pan into bowl; add two slices fake cheese. Wait for cheese to melt. Mix. Total calories: 40 from pasta, 140 from eggs, 60 from fake cheese, plus however you count your vegetables.)

See, the thing is this. I have a certain... theory of diet food. And my theory is that so long as you don't expect the diet versions to taste like the real thing, you'll be okay. Diet pasta does not taste like real pasta; I'm not really sure it has any taste at all, though it does have a certain seaweed-like musk. Diet ice cream does not taste like the full-fat, actual-sugar kind. Diet cheese does not taste like real cheese.

Overall, though, this cheese product isn't terrible. If you let it melt onto your fake pasta for long enough and then take a bite, for a minute it clings to your palate in just the right way, and you can pretend you're eating something you're happy with. Truthiness is to truth as fake cheese is to real cheese.

God bless America.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Idiazabal

Idiazabal
Comes from: sheep
Purchased at: Whole Foods
$19.99/lb

When I unwrapped this cheese I was immediately confronted by a certain... odor. An odory odor. A singe-ing of the hairs up in the front of my noise odor. A smell that reminded me of the way the back of your thighs stick to a car's plastic seats on a hot day.

Not a good odor.

And so I steeled my stomach and taste buds, and slowly cut off a thin slice of the Idiazabal, wondering why I hadn't picked something else out of the Whole Foods sample bin. Something nice and boring, like cheddar or gouda. Something not made from sheep.

And then, the surprise: This cheese tastes far better than it smells.

Is that even *possible*, I ask you? No, really: Aren't smell and taste one and the same? How can this cheese smell awful, or at least significantly unpleasant, and then undergo a metamorphosis of taste when it hits your tongue? Perhaps this is the x-men (x-man?) of cheeses, a shape-shifter indulging its talent only somewhere past one's lips.

(But not *the* shape-shifter, because I have seen that costume at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I can safely report that there is No Way in Hell that she eats dairy. Or anything.) (Hee, all those poor Midwestern tourists taking their four-year-olds to the superhero costume exhibit, expecting wholesome and being confronted by supermodel nipples.)

Anyway. This cheese. Hard to classify on many levels, besides "smell is assy but taste is delicious!" It's a hard cheese in that it holds its own shape, though I wouldn't even call it as hard as muenster. It's got these air pockets, see, this cheese:

And so when I cut it of course the cheese yields easily. Of course. The cheese is even kind of naturally flaky, like parmesan. Weird.

The taste is a pleasant salty-sour, if you can imagine that; it's a sheep cheese, but not the sheepiest of sheep cheeses, like it's pushed all its sheep-ness into its odor leaving room for another taste.

So that's this cheese, then! I would buy it again, which is saying a lot, because -- JUST IN CASE I DIDN'T MENTION IT BEFORE -- sheep's cheeses are not my favorite thing ever.

(A pause, now, for Gene Wilder and the sheep. I have no idea how it's relevant.)

The internet suggests you eat this cheese with jam. I say, sure, why not?

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Moliterno

Moliterno
Comes from: sheep (huh)
Purchased at: DiBruno Brothers
$14.99/lb

(No, that didn't take long.)

Did you know pecorino comes from sheep? I had no idea. I just always thought of pecorino as parmesan's saltier, grittier cousin, excellent on a rosetta or pasta aglio e olio. But parmesan comes from cows, and pecorino comes from sheep, and suddenly I don't know how I feel about pecorino anymore.

Anyway.

So this cheese is pretty good, though not quite as good as I'd hoped when I sampled it yesterday or when I finally freed it from its shrink-wrapped tomb a little while ago. Oddly, in texture and taste and odor it reminded me more of parmesan than pecorino, and more of your American, cheap-o parmesans than the good stuff. You know how, if you've bought the right kind of parmesan, the cheese fragments along its own fault lines as you cut it? And if you've bought the wrong (geometrically perfect) kind, the cheese totally *doesn't* fragment, but just yields moistly to the knife like a slightly-harder sharp cheddar? This cheese doesn't fragment.

Which doesn't automatically make it wrong, of course, because it's *not* parmesan, and it's only a cousin of pecorino, but I thought it worth mentioning. Mostly because now you know that parmesan should fragment, according to me.

Anyway. So this cheese is softer and wetter than your traditional pecorino, is what I'm saying. Less salty, too, which -- because I am a salt fiend -- to me also means less tasty. I'm accustomed to some kind of bite from my pecorino, and this cheese is more mild than that.

DiBruno's packaging reads:
A pecorino cheese aged incanestri (in baskets) to drain whey and give a distinctive marked rind, rubbed with olive oil and suet, moliterno retains moisture as it ages and takes on a pleasant meaty and substantial flavor without overwhelming sharpness or salt. Excellent tossed in olive oil or grated over fresh pasta and greens.
[Okay, so I corrected some comma errors.]

Which is more or less what I said, only I recommend you *not* fall down the internet rabbit-hole of googling "suet," then wondering, "hey, so is rennet different from suet?" and *then* thinking, "hey, so can kosher Jews not eat good cheese?" and following *that* with a search that sadly, does not reveal which cheeses do and do not contain suet/rennet/other animal bits.

In other news, the olive oil surprised me when I first opened the packaging; most cheeses don't leak, so I was a little bit concerned.

Anyway. So that's this cheese. It's not my favorite item in the firm cheese family, but it's good, and would probably be delicious on really crusty bread. (But then, almost anything is delicious on really crusty bread.) Or! Or actually it would probably be a good cheese to pair with your saltier meats, because it's not so salty itself. Sadly, I don't have any deli meat in the house, and also, I have eaten all the cheese.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Fontina Val D'Aosta

Fontina Val D'Aosta
Comes from: cows
Purchased at: Whole Foods
$18.99/lb

So I get home tonight, and I'm hot and sweaty and hungry and I just want to *eat.* And so I pull this cheese out of the fridge.

Meh.

Sadly, I don't have much to say about this cheese. It's not a *bad* cheese, exactly, but it's not an *astounding* cheese, either. It's not unusual-looking, and it's not unusually-textured; it sort of ranks with swiss on the hardness scale. It does have an unusually... pungent odor, kind of like sweat or that muenster-cheese sandwich you left in your locker overnight as a kid. It vaguely tastes of muenster, too, but again, more pungent and simultaneously blander. Hard to explain unless you've ever had French muenster, you know, the melty bad kind (RayRay?). This cheese is both less melty and less bad than that, but not enough.

-----

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I tried three other cheese today at DiBruno brothers, Abbaye de Belloc, Piave, and Moliterno. I *bought* the Moliterno, which should give you some idea of how I felt about it (and also should give you the idea that it was the only cheese of the three sold in reasonable single-person chunklets), and of course a full review is to come. But as for the other two, here are the recaplets:

Abbaye: I am not sure how I feel about sheep's milk cheeses, which should make it interesting when I review the sheep's milk cheese I already purchased at Whole Foods. About equal to the Murcia Curado D.O. Raw Goat in hardness. Did I mention it was sheep-y?

Piave: Num?

(Actually, in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I've had some string cheese this week too, but if you need a review of 2% skim mozzarella string cheese you're an idiot.) (Translation: I am saving the Battle of the String Cheeses for a rainy day. Sorry.)

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Murcia Curado D.O. Raw Goat

Murcia Curado D.O. Raw Goat
Comes from: goats
Purchased at: Whole Foods
$19.99/lb


So if you're looking at these photos and thinking, "Hey, that looks like one of the cubbies at Healthyman Library," you're right. If you're looking at these photos and thinking, "Hey, there's no eating allowed in the Healthyman Library!" well, you're a jerk, and also, you have never been to the Healthman Library, have you? Because there is food *everywhere.* I had to clean the remains of someone's breakfast out of this cubby before I sat down. This cubby is *mine* and I will eat here if I want to.

This cheese is a paler shade of yellow/white than it's looking in the photos, I think. It's about the same color as pecorino, but much softer and not at all grainy. I'm eating it at room temperature, so it might be a little softer than fridge-cheese, but on the hardness scale I think it'd still fall well below muenster but well above your liquid cheeses like brie. Soft enough to explode with your tongue against the roof of your mouth, if that makes any sense. About a 3 on the cheese hardness scale I just made up right now:

1-----------2------------3----------------4------------5-------------6
brie-------feta------mozzarella------muenster------cheddar-----parmesan

(The cheese hardness scale clearly needs some work. Gouda, for example, and Armenian string cheese: both 5.5? Is Gouda a 6, like parmesan? And Armenian string cheese is *chewier* than chedder, but does that make it *harder* than cheddar?)

First bite: Mmm, goatiness. I don't know how to describe goat cheese to those who've never had it, and it's not like goat cheese is exotic, really, so maybe I don't need to, but on the other hand I feel like everything in life should be able to be described with words, and possibly I have modeled myself after Nan in Witch Week just a little bit. You know, Nan in Witch Week?

Anyway.

For some reason goat cheese makes me think of a quiet, wood-paneled room that's not used much. Not musty, just... quiet. And wooden.

Okay, so maybe not everything can be described with words. I will just call this cheese "goaty, in a good way." Definitely a non-cow cheese, but not overpoweringly so. There's a nice tang, too, when I do that thing I just mentioned and tongue-burst the cheese up against my palate. A pleasant deeper-goaty after-effect.

In other news, the rind is edible (I always eat the rind, because IT IS MADE OF CHEESE (and wax) AND I DO NOT WASTE THINGS MADE OF CHEESE.), if you care about such things.

Overall, then, I'd call this a very good basic goat cheese. Would probably be delicious with fig or apple butter, but again, I wouldn't know because I -- wait for it -- have already eaten it all.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Long Clawson Huntsman

Long Clawson Huntsman
Comes from: cows
Purchased at: Whole Foods
$15.99/lb

[first photo on the new blog, and it's astoundingly out of focus, hooray!]

So this cheese is sort of exactly what I do with cheese when no one is looking, and I'm amused that someone else had the idea. See, cheese is great, right? But sometimes, cheese is also *boring.* Because you've had a particular type of cheese a million times before, or maybe you've just eaten a brick of it tonight. Anyway. If you're a normal person, you're probably mixing bread with your cheese, which I heartily recommend but I only do sometimes, because my other addiction (besides to cheese, grapes, pumpkin seeds, beef jerky, pineapple, and nova) is to bread, and if there is bread in the house -- even in the freezer! even *still frozen*! -- I will eat it all in, like, two days. And now that y'all have a clearer picture of my lack of self-control, I will continue on about this cheese.

So there are times, anyway, when you've got a ton of cheese in front of you, and maybe no bread, and you're kinda bored with *individual* cheeses, and so somewhere in your cheese-drowned mind the thought forms that maybe you should *mix* the cheeses, you know? Maybe *combining cheeses* would allow you to finish the cheese you can't finish right now.

(And that second person is actually *you*, because I can always finish the cheese.)

That's what this cheese is, this "huntsman." Someone in England decided, hey! Why don't I combine a cheddar-like cheese (that's the Gloucester part) with a blue cheese (the Stilton part) and see what happens?

And actually what happens is quite good. The Gloucester is nice and sharp and chewy, the Stilton is salty and stinky and a little crumbly, and voila! You have yourself a Frankenstein cheese that actually works, that doesn't go around killing people in order to make them love it. (Or is that the guy from Of Mice and Men? I can't remember.)

I think this cheese would probably taste really good on an apple -- something more sweet than tart, red delicious over granny smith over pink lady -- but I only just thought of that and I've already eaten all of it so I wouldn't really know.

Another blog?

So here's the thing. I like cheese. I like cheese a lot. I like all cheeses, with the possible exception of French muenster and I guess some equally-rotting-gym-socks-like cheeses I haven't tried yet.

Anyway.

Problem is, I like cheese so much that I'll eat whatever kind is in front of me, and more importantly, I won't remember its name later. I can't remember whether it's mahon or manchego I'm more fond of, whether I do or don't like gruyère, whether there's really any difference between camembert and brie. And that's unacceptable to me, because obviously I feel the need to catalogue everything (see: my other blog). So in this here blog, I'm going to try and diary my cheeses. I don't know big fancy words like... I don't know, what words do you use to try to describe cheese? "Airy"? "Sun-kissed"? "Malodorous"?

Anyway.

I can't find "Litvak palate" explained or even mentioned anywhere on the internet, but a doctor I once worked with told me that the Litvaks were known for their great affection for dairy products. (And then he blamed me for his mother's heart attack, and we laughed merrily at the joke.)

Annnnd since I am somewhat Litvak, and as a child my parents had to establish a "three licks" rule because I used to lick the butter off my melba toast in diners and then reapply and repeat, annnnnnnd since my great-aunt is approximately two divisions more Litvak than I am, and once, at supper with us at a fancy-pants restaurant, proceeded to decimate a stick of butter with only her knife and without any bread involvement at all (slice -- move knife to mouth -- slice again), well, I am declaring it true.

Welcome to Litvak Palate, kids. We'll see how long this lasts.