Culture Magazine

2 culturecheesemag.com C O O K I N G W I T H C H E E S E 202 3 I n a former life, I owned a restaurant, and while I'm glad to be out of that challenging business, I still love to cook and to feed people. I don't always use recipes, but I'm an avid reader and collector of them, and I was astonished when I first realized how many culture has in its archives— great recipes to boot, crafted by the top-notch recipe developers and chefs we've had the good fortune of working with over the years. Perusing back issues and combing through the website to read them has become my favorite way to procrastinate (in fact, I just did a little recipe recon before buckling down to write this letter). All of this is why I'm so thrilled to introduce Cooking with Cheese as our first issue of six for 2023 (and a surefire keeper). Many of the recipes we've included are from the longstanding "One Cheese Five Ways" column, which will continue in the next issue. They cover the gamut from starters to sweets, and of course they have one ingredient in common: cheese. A whopping 23 different cheeses are represented in the more than 240 recipes on the following pages, some in ways that might surprise you. For example: Smoked Cheddar Ice Cream (p. 57), Neapolitan Pizza with Mascarpone, Speck, Arugula, and Figs (p. 40), Comté and Kimchi Melt (p. 30), and Aged Gouda Sandwich Cookies 9p. 60). It was this recipe-and-curd-nerd's dream task to compile them all. Every good cook needs a foolproof, versatile cheese sauce in their back pocket, and one of my favorite recipe developers, Christine Burns Rudalevige, provides an excellent one—plus five exciting variations—for this issue (p. 74). Finally, because who among us hasn't had a cheese plate for dinner, we offer eight fine examples to take you from Valentine's Day to New Year's Eve (p. 66). I hope these pages become dog-eared and splattered—always the sign of a beloved cookbook. Here's to a year of cheesy deliciousness in the kitchen and around the table! SUSAN SHERRILL AXELROD, EDITOR F R O M the E D I T O R PHOTO: Heidi Kirn

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