Europe Map

This is a map of the Mediterranean and the mountains that feed it: the Iberian Peninsula, France and the Low Countries, the Alps, the long boot of Italy with Sicily at its toe, and across the water the coast of North Africa from Morocco to Tunisia. The land shades from the greens of the Atlantic and Alpine north to the yellows of the Spanish interior and the burnt oranges of the Maghreb, and at the center of the compass rose sits a wedge of hard mountain cheese, because this map was made to follow cheese.

Europe’s cheeses follow its grass. Where the rain is steady and the summer pastures are high, as in the Alps around Appenzell and the Allgäu, cows give the milk for big, slow-aged wheels like Appenzeller and Bavarian Bergkäse, cheeses made to last a winter and needing less salt than the cheeses of the hot south. In the dry country of Spain and Portugal, sheep and goats do better, and the cheeses are smaller and sharper. Some, like the soft sheep cheeses of the Serra da Estrela and Évora, are still set with the flowers of a wild thistle rather than animal rennet. The Romans did not invent cheese, but they carried its methods across nearly every country on this map.

At the bottom left, Tangier looks across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain, less than ten miles of water at its narrowest. For most of history that strait has been a bridge rather than a wall, and Berber shepherds, Moorish farmers and Roman legions all crossed it, carrying their animals and their ways of keeping milk.

Travels with an Imaginary Fromager

The towns marked in red are stops on a long journey Jane and I have made in the footsteps of St. Deuberex Montclair, an imaginary maître d’fromage we invented to guide us. It began in the medina, the subject of Tangier and the Imaginary Maître d’Fromage, and crossed into Andalucía, Extremadura and Portugal, to Seville, Badajoz, Évora, Setúbal and Covilhã, in Mission in the Sun: From Andalucía to the Alentejo. Later we went north to Thalkirchdorf in Bavaria and over the border to St. Gallen and Appenzell, in Appenzell and the Constellation Gallia. For the Portuguese leg in more detail, see my Portugal map.