With the ever growing cheese connoisseurship in America, many terms are sneaking into everyday cheese parlance. Luckily many well established wine terms are very applicable to cheese, thus shortening the learning curve of a new turophile[i]. Terms like terroir[ii], nose, and finish are very familiar to us already. But some terms are new; at least they were new to me, like pâte.

In French, pâte is a slightly archaic way of saying paste. Since the interior of a cheese is often smooth and uniform like a paste, I can see how the word pâte stuck around in cheese lingo. The term hopped across the pond and American cheese people also refer to the “paste” of a cheese. But “paste” isn’t so sexy sounding and evokes many pre-school memories of eating glue. And when you are asking a customer to fork over $30 – $40 per pound of cheese, those memories aren’t the most persuasive.

So many cheese counter specialists will use their very best sexy French awk-sawnt (accent, in my regular voice) and talk about the “pâte” of the cheese. However, most of us it seems (including me until it was pointed out) don’t remember much from high school French and pronounce pâte as pâté. Once I got home and looked up the terms online and saw the 2 spellings side by side… 9^th grade French came flooding back. An accent aigu (´) above an E is always pronounced as a long A, like in lay or say. Pâte does not have an “ahk-sawnt AY-goo” so no long A sound at the end. For a side by side comparison of pronunciation of pâte and pâté, click here. I was happy to see a note under the definitions “—Can be confused:…, pâte, pâté.” I’m glad I’m not the only one who was tricked by those sneaky accent marks!

Also on that page, there are formal pronunciation guides for pâte and pâté. I don’t know about you but I never could figure out what all those fancy symbols were supposed to do – though I have a fun time saying umlaut when I see those 2 little dots above vowels (apparently the dots can also stand for a diaresis or a trema but those aren’t as fun to say) – but anyway.

On occasion in cheese books and articles, I see a simplified pronunciation guide using basic everyday sounds. Which would make pâte = paht, like yacht, and pâté = pah-TAY, like the delicious goodness slathered onto my Vietnamese sandwich. With this method you can get a reasonable facsimile of the original pronunciation. Ok, maybe not so accurate to the original language but definitely good enough to make yourself understood at cheese counters in the US and in the end don’t we all just want to go home with some nice cheese?

And since writing this entry, I’ve been inspired to add a page to my blog with a simplified pronunciation guide of cheeses that I run into and have a hard time saying. Click here or on the page navigation (“Cheesy Talk” page) to check it out. Also, feel free to suggest alternative pronunciations to any cheese name – you say “toh-MAH-toh,” I say “toe-MAY-toe” – or submit challenging cheese names to add to the list! It’s a pretty simple page for now. It’ll probably get fancier (searchable) down the road. I still need to find a web page designer!

Happy cheesing!

---

[i] turophile – TUR-row-FILE
(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/turophile)
Pronunciation: \ˈtu̇r-ə-ˌfī(-ə)l, ˈtyu̇r-\
Function: noun; Etymology: irregular from Greek tyros cheese + English -phile
Date: 1938
: a connoisseur of cheese : a cheese fancier

[ii] terroir – tair-WAHR
(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terroir>)
Pronunciation: \gü-də-te-rwär\
Function: foreign term, Etymology: French
: taste of the earth