Like many Americans, I grew up eating Cracker Barrel Cheddar, an aspirational purchase for my family. Cracker Barrel was real cheese, made from milk, cultures, and salt. This was a significant distinction back then, in the dark days before the artisan cheese revolution of the past twenty or so years, when “American cheese” was synonymous with processed cheese, not clothbound cheddar from Vermont or goat cheese from California.
I’d never heard of Boursin—everyone’s favorite “fancy cheese” (After all, it’s French!)—until college. Those “little herb-spiked, foil-wrapped, popular dollops that cost over $1 in most stores [but] go for 98 cents at Zabar's,” as New York Magazine noted in 1973, weren’t in my refrigerator. My working class town on Long Island didn’t have a Zabar’s. My grandfather did the food shopping at Food Town, where he regularly scored our Cracker Barrel (and Wheat Thins crackers, to eat it with).
In college, as the master of my own grocery list, Boursin became my “splurge” item, a self-designated entry into the creamy, salty, herbaceous world of adulthood, a way to celebrate the success of bringing home my first paychecks. I defined my burgeoning independence and striving worldliness through the sophistication of my grocery store purchases. My choice of Boursin, smeared on pita bread and topped with arugula (another exotic item that left me feeling au courant) was a symbol of how far I’d travelled beyond Cracker Barrel to fulfill my own aspirations.
Boursin is the brain cheese of Frenchman Francois Boursin, a cheese maker and marketing genius who decided to sell a commercial version of a simple French dish, fresh cheese with herbs. Boursin is essentially a fast-casual version of a popular party snack, sixty-plus years before “fast casual” entered the lexicon. (To grasp the forward-thinking marketing savvy of Francois, it’s worth noting that Boursin was the first ever cheese advertised on French television, in 1968).
If there are a set of fixed characteristics that make a cheese universally appealing, the original Boursin Garlic & Herbs flavor has almost all of them. First, the texture: creamy and light, it’s like a bar of cream cheese got high on nitrous oxide. The soft-serve ice cream of cheese, its lightness delivered in a cloud of whipped butterfat. How can something be so airy and so dense at the same time? The mystery is part of the allure.
And then, the flavor: Boursin is the ancestral predecessor of ranch dressing, with its garlicky foundation taken to the edge of too salty. The herbs—astonishingly only chives and parsley—act as the level-headed friend who tells everyone to chill out when the party gets too wild. Boursin also comes in Shallot & Chives and Pepper flavors, but they just seem silly to me. Why pass over an icon for an update? It’s ill-advised.
I’ve wondered if Boursin is bona fide delicious, or if it’s nostalgia that keeps me reaching for those little foil-wrapped dollops, even after years as a cheese professional, eating some of the finest cheeses in the world. But does it matter, really? Our tastes and preferences are informed by our personal history, and when I look back at that little kid who loved Cracker Barrel, or that anxious college student seeking savoir faire in a puck of cheese, I realize there’s nothing wrong with trying to be something more, even if only on a sandwich.
It still amazes me that I make a living from cheese as an author and chef. Our own particular passions are sparked in their own particular ways, and mine is certainly a unique little niche. I’ve been lucky that my love of and knowledge of cheese grew as American interest did. Boursin was my gateway to knowing that cheese could be something more than just a meal for me, and thanks to good old-fashioned American aspiration, and a little French inspiration, it is.
Tia Keenan is the author of The Art of the Cheese Plate: Pairings, Recipes, Style, Attitude (Rizzoli)
Louise Neumann is an illustrator in Tennessee. Check out more of her work here.
Boursin belongs in Ludo Lefebvre's omelet:
You’re not going to get this right the first time. After five, maybe six attempts, you’ll start to feel like a pro.
