The Cheese Cure: How Comté and Camembert Fed My Soul, By Michael Finnerty, Read by Michael Finnerty

12/09/2025 3 min
The Cheese Cure: How Comté and Camembert Fed My Soul, By Michael Finnerty, Read by Michael Finnerty

Listen "The Cheese Cure: How Comté and Camembert Fed My Soul, By Michael Finnerty, Read by Michael Finnerty"

Episode Synopsis

‘A wonderful book.' Cathy Rentzenbrink

‘A remarkable tale’ The Spectator

A giant wheel of Comté – a cheese full of delight, a mosaic of flavour – can sometimes become flat. Despite all that’s gone into making it and caring for it, its complexity mysteriously vanishes, its spark dies. Cheesemongers know that. That’s why they regularly test the cheeses: they insert a cheese iron deep into the wheel and extract a sample from its core. Sometimes they can cure it and sometimes they can’t.

A highly successful BBC and Guardian Journalist, somehow Michael Finnerty's life had become flat. His psychological cheese iron told him he needed to make a change, and he becomes convinced his salvation lies in cheese. Michael becomes an apprentice cheesemonger at Borough Market, and is plunged into a world of intense physicality, extraordinary knowledge, and total geeky passion. From learning the cheese's personal nighttime riders – Castillon Frais needs to sit in its box underneath some waxed paper but its box needs to be kept in a plastic sheath, Comté sits unwrapped in a cool cupboard, and has a quick saline bath before bed – to learning intricate ways to wrap their different shapes

More episodes of the podcast HarperCollins Publishers