In cheese lies beauty -- and hope

My meanderings lead from time to time to what has become a mecca of sorts for gourmet food shopping in Delaware -- Greenville, in the stretch of Lancaster Pike that includes Janssen's Fine Foods and (at least for now) the Food Source. While I generally favor Janssen's (out of local loyalty and better prices), Food Source can be a fairly entertaining way to whittle away an hour or so, especially amid the stellar oil-and-vinegar section and at the meat counter, where the massive slabs of dry-aged beef inspire some inventive rationalizing about what I can justifiably spend on dinner. Their house-made sausage is among the best around, and while I admire their diligence at providing offbeat cheeses, I inevitably find myself schlepping on to Janssen's for those treats.

Partly, that's because the folks at Janssen's are so well-informed and inclined to help us indecisive cheese-browsing foodies, and because a trip inevitably leads to a few revelations in taste. This week that included the discovery of a remarkable California-made artisanal cheddar, crumbly and crystalline and so far beyond most cheddars that it almost deserves a new name. An old friend also rested on the shelf: A "Swiss" cheese that possesses the capacity to forever alter your perceptions -- Cave-Aged Gruyere, turned and washed meticulously for months (perhaps by gentle monks?) in sandstone caverns.

Within its nutty, buttery, ineffably deep flavor, it proves how such a "humble" and "rustic" product as cheese can also be so refined and effortlessly elegant, raising amazement (once again) that the human race, through all its ugly guises, is still so artful and perceptive, so sensitive and creative, so attuned at times to what beautiful things can be achieved with simple elements -- milk brings cheese; brush and canvas bring art; pen and pencil open realms of the imagination too dense and fulfilling to believe.

Perhaps we are not doomed after all.