Brie log

When I was living in France, I discovered that there is an etiquette to serving/eating cheese that is rarely observed in this country. Each cheese, depending on its shape, is served differently. And the one shape that always presents problems is cheese served in wedges, like Brie.

The first thing to know is that it is considered extremely bad form to cut the "nose" (the pointy end) off a wedge of Brie. Instead, you should take a kind of sideways swipe at the wedge to remove a slice, not a chunk. This of course gets harder and harder to do as the wedge gets whittled down.

So Président, the French cheese company, has decided to make a Brie in a log shape (something that no doubt horrifies cheese aficionados). The virtue of this shape, however, is that it gets you around the ticklish issue of how to serve. The cheese slices also fit very nicely on a cracker. This does mean foregoing the runniness of a perfectly ripe Brie (because you wouldn't be able to slice it), but I'm pretty sure your guests won't complain.