Cathy Donnelly and The Oxford Companion to Cheese!!! Cathy brought me along as her date, and it was a thrilling and memorable night. (Memorable despite the dangerous ring of cocktail and wine stations that we circulated around during the cocktail hour, and the attentive waiters that filled our glasses during the awards.) The Reference & Scholarship award came unbelievably quickly, sometime during Chef Maricel Presilla's excellent shrimp ceviche appetizer, and there wasn't tim

The Oxford Companion to Cheese has been nominated for a James Beard Award in the Reference and Scholarship category. Here are the three nominees: French Wine: A History Rod Phillips (University of California Press) I Taste Red: The Science of Tasting Wine Jamie Goode (University of California Press) The Oxford Companion to Cheese Catherine Donnelly (Oxford University Press) I haven't read either of the wine books, and I am sure they are both eminently worthy. But are

The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, has published my favorite review of The Oxford Companion to Cheese to date. It begins with the above picture of a man's armpit and cheese tattoo, and only gets weirder from there. I'm not entirely convinced its author, Ian Brown, actually likes cheese - this paragraph in particular raises doubts: In other words, there is a distinct lacto-cannibalistic element to eating cheese, which then returns to the ecosystem (though not always eas

Congrats to all 325 authors who contributed to The Oxford Companion to Cheese. It looks like ours was the only edited volume, and what a collaboration it was! Here's the full lineup of shortlisted titles. I don't envy Bee Wilson (food) and Fiona Beckett (drinks), whose job it was as judges to narrow down from 200+ worthy submissions. FOOD BOOKS The A-Z of Eating by Felicity Cloake (Fig Tree) Flavour: Eat What You Love by Ruby Tandoh (Chatto & Windus) Fresh India by Meera Sodh

The Spectator has published a glowing review of The Oxford Companion to Cheese: "The wonderful new Oxford Companion covers ever aspect of cheese — in sex, war, the Bible, Shakespeare, diplomacy, superstition and magical thinking." I love everything about Hawtree's thoroughly British review, except this: in the entry I wrote on the Congress of Vienna, I certainly did not claim the Congress was resolved by a cheese competition! Talleyrand’s proposal for each nation to submit th

On November 10th Oxford University Press launched The Oxford Companion to Cheese at Murray's Cheese in New York City. I wrote the proposal for this book in 2012, and then chipped away at it for four years, working with a truly excellent editorial board and a huge team of 325 authors. So the celebration was a long time coming, and well worth the wait. I caught up with Cathy Donnelly (the Editor in Chief), Mateo Kehler (who wrote the Foreword), and my former colleagues in marke