The Proust Culinary Questionnaire
Aditya Raghavan, Fleur Jaune Cheese In the late nineteenth century, French novelist Marcel Proust participated in an exercise which could be thought of as the Facebook of its era—he answered a questionnaire about himself in a friend’s Confession Album. Proust’s answers have been published, in one form or another, for more than a century. Many have used the questionnaire for their own devices, the most notable being Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire featuring celebrities. The Tomato gives it a culinary twist.
18 March April 2021 | The Tomato
Many people will know Addie from his dinners (in the before time) and classes at Get Cooking. He was an academic, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Alberta in physics. “I was teaching and doing research, but I wasn’t seeing growth. I felt stagnated and lost inspiration for research. I was already dabbling with cheesemaking at
home. I was getting more excited about food and cheesemaking and charcuterie. I worked at The Cheesiry for about six weeks, Rhonda keeps about eight sheep still. I will go again in lambing season to make a raw milk cheese. “I didn’t rip the band-aid off. I took a year to transition. I do miss the intellectual environment yes, but
academia is not meant for me, I need deadlines. In the kitchen there are deadlines—hourly, daily, weekly. No procrastination.” Fleur Jaune cheese is Edmonton-based fresh cheeses made with organic milk. “They are not aged, yet there is so much you can do with cheese up to two months—in ramp season can make something with ramps, for example.” Addie makes cheese on Sundays and Mondays at Meuwly’s in quantities well under the 300 litres per month allowed by his provincial licence. He
