Seattle Press on Line - Honest Cheese

Honest Cheese

Jan 31, 2002 -- You can take the boy out of the cheese, but you cannot take the cheese out of the boy... or something like that. James Cook left his birthplace of Scotland in 1979 in search of other, if not actually greener, pastures. After talking to him a bit, it becomes very clear that he has never seen a pasture so green as the pastures of the small dairy farms of his homeland. He grew up with a love for them, and for the wonderful and distinctive cheeses they produced.

Cook has been selling cheese for quite a while. Bouncing from London to Southern Europe to New York to Southern California, then Phoenix, he eventually settled in Seattle in 1990. He bought and sold the world's best cheeses for Pike Place Market's DeLaurenti's for seven years before opening his own cheese shop in Belltown, James Cook Cheese Company, with his wife Jackie in May of 2000.

Cheeses vary from farm to farm, region to region, explains Cook. He gives me a bit of English farmstead cheese to taste. "This is one of the oldest cheeses. It is simple. Farms have made it for thousands of years. No two are exactly alike. You could go 10 miles down the road to the next farm, and their cheese would be different, because each farm has its own unique cultures developed over many generations. This is the cheese the Romans took home with them." Cook tastes every cheese before he will carry it. He deals directly with the farmers, and they air-ship their cheeses directly to him.

He also samples all the small batch wines he sells. He waited for a year after he was issued his wine sellers' license to start carrying it, so he could carefully find the right wines to sell. "Wines vary from year to year," Cook notes. He does not just pick a label and stick with it. He is constantly looking for the best wines, regardless of label.

Cheeses of the world at the James Cook Cheese Company. Zachary D. Lyons photo.

"Cheese doesn't lie," says Cook in his thick Scottish accent. Cook specializes in raw milk, artisan cheeses from throughout the world, but very few from the United States. That has a lot to do with our country's obsession with pasteurization, he says. "Cheese is ancient food. It is self-preserving. Pathogens cannot live in active cheese cultures. Note that while 250 people in the U.S. get sick every year from chicken, only eight have gotten sick from raw milk cheeses in the last 50 years--and all of those illnesses could be tied to dirty hands, not the cheese."

Have you ever noticed how domestic pasteurized cheese can upset your stomach? Raw milk cheeses still contain the cultures which our bodies learned to digest when we were breast fed, Cook points out. Pasteurization destroys those cultures.
Families in Scotland have been raising cows on the same pastures for thousands of years, Cook adds. They know exactly what goes into their cows, and they know what comes out. Organic certification is a foreign concept to this kind of old world farmer, Cook says. What else would it be?

Stop in and visit the Cooks at their shop in Belltown. They will be more than happy to give you samples of some of the best cheeses you have ever tasted. Pick up some wine while you're there. They also offer a selection of European butters and other dairy and food specialties, like clotted cream, pate, and biscuits.

James Cook Cheese Co., 2421 2nd Avenue, 256-0510, www.jamescookcheese.com, open Monday - Saturday, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.

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John	Aug 27, 2002	Belltown
The cheese shop is closed.

Good Food

Honest Cheese

By Zachary D. Lyons

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