Also known as Vieux Hollande, because of similarities with Edam, mimolette is noted in France for another reason: the role of cheese mites in creating its distinctive rind and flavour. Mimolette mites may be similar to the kind a more recent food blogger saw when visiting a restaurant in St Etienne some years ago. The cheese is Gorgonzola, but it causes Bloom to recall an adage about the digestive benefits of such dairy products in general, viz (as quoted in all early editions of Ulysses): “Cheese digests all but itself. An 1854 cookbook quoted the rhyme, loosely based on a Latin proverb: “Cheese is a mity elf,/Digesting all things but itself”. Responding to a reader’s query about scabies (aka “the itch”) then, our correspondent said that the microscopic insects involved looked like “cheese mites”.

Source: The Irish Times February 07, 2020 18:01 UTC