1. Bread. Baguette is France’s most neutral bread but not your only option. Stronger cheeses can go head to head with darker, more rugged breads. We’ll even go so far as to indulge in bread with walnuts but try to stick to real bread with a strong, crispy crust and irregular, fragrant dough.

2. Condiments. The French don’t do jam, sun-dried tomatoes and all that jazz. Nuts are acceptable as many cheeses have hazelnut notes to begin with. Walnuts and pears are also good accompaniments to Roquefort. But hey, never let the French tell you what to do.

3. Roquefort is made from ewe’s milk (a female sheep). It’s the strongest cheese on this plate—a sharp, complex king of cheeses. Apart from Brin d’Amour, all the other cheeses on this plate are made from cow’s milk, but goat’s milk makes great cheese, too.

4. Reblochon. Most French cheeses don’t like getting cooked, unlike this Alpine favorite. Put on potatoes, bacon, cream and onions, bake, enjoy, gain 10lbs.

5. Camembert raises the essential question of aging. Cheese is not always ready to be eaten when you buy it and your fridge is too cold to let it mature. Like wine, your cheese needs to breathe at cellar temperature (12-16 degrees). Make sure your Camembert is in a near liquid state before you eat it. Otherwise, it will have a floury texture and less flavor.

6. Coulommier is not an AOC cheese, which is rare. AOC, which also works for wine, is a French standard that ascribes a particular food to one region. Bordeaux can only be made in the Bordelais region, Champagne can only be made in Champagne, Brie, in Brie, etc. Coulommier’s taste lies somewhere between Camembert and Brie.

7. Although cheeses have very different flavors, you can still broadly categorize them from mild (a fresh goat’s milk cheese) to extremely strong (a mature, delightful sticky and stinky Epoisses). With this plate, we’d start with this Corsican Brin d’Amour, made from Ewe’s milk and rolled in juniper and rosemary, as it was still a bit young.

8. This Brie has truffles in it. All kinds of stuff get stuffed into cheese but, frankly, it’s silly. Cheese is great to stuff food, not the other way around.

9. Mimolette is a flavorful cow’s milk cheese from Northern France that resembles Dutch cheeses. It’s a hard cheese and can get rock hard as it ages, taking on a increasingly sharp flavor with hazelnut accents.

Where to get good cheese