My Testimony of Cheeses

Forgive the blasphemous title, Gentle Reader, but I couldn't resist. While working my way through a sliver of Roquefort this evening, I was reminded just how beautiful gastronomy can be sometimes. Among blue cheeses (and I mean this in a good way) Roquefort is like eating a razor blade. A delicious, life-giving razor blade. However, as gorgeous as it is, one cannot eat it without thinking of that noblest of milk-based marvels: Stilton. Oh, Stilton! What I feel for thee is nearly lust. Where Roquefort is a razor blade, Stilton is a sledgehammer to the face. A sledgehammer of ecstasy. As a British sitcom chef once declared: "Halle-bloody-lujah! Cow and bug in perfect harmony!"

Well, any paean of praise I might compose would fall short of the mark, so I'll leave that task to my betters. Enjoy, then, G.K. Chesterton's own Ode to Stilton:

Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour
And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby;
England has need of thee, and so have I--
She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour,
League after grassy league from Lincoln tower
To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen.
Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men,
Like a tall green volcano rose in power.
Plain living and long drinking are no more,
And pure religion reading "Household Words",
And sturdy manhood sitting still all day
Shrink, like this cheese that crumbles to its core;
While my digestion, like the House of Lords,
The heaviest burdens on herself doth lay.