ADVENTURES IN TASTE
Madame Fromage Tenaya Darlington and her love for stories, words and cheese
Madame Fromage: Tenaya Darlington and the Human Side of Cheese
Tenaya Darlington’s cheese life began around a family table.
Every Sunday, her Swiss mother would lay out a cheese board: Appenzeller, Gruyère, Emmentaler, Swiss chocolate and a little red wine. Even as children, Tenaya and her siblings were invited into the ritual.
“It wasn’t just lunch,” she says. “It was culture, memory and belonging.”
Years later, that instinct — that cheese is about far more than avour — would shape her entire career.
Today, many people know Tenaya as Madame Fromage: writer, educator, pairing obsessive and one of the warmest voices in American cheese. But her path into the cheese world was anything but planned.
“I had a degree in ction writing,” she says. “All my life I loved words and stories. It took me a while to realise I could take cheese and my love of words and put them together.”
From Iowa to artisan cheese
Tenaya grew up in Ames, Iowa — not the obvious centre of alpine cheese culture. Yet remarkably, the town had a Swiss cheese shop complete with hanging meats, giant wheels of cheese and annual raclette parties.
“My parents didn’t have a lot of money,” she remembers, “but my mother always splurged on really nice cheese.”
That idea of cheese as something worth gathering around stayed with her.
Later, while working as a food writer in Wisconsin, she encountered the beginnings of America’s artisan cheese movement. A chef pulled her aside to taste Pleasant Ridge Reserve, a cheese that was beginning to rede ne American cheesemaking.
“It was an exciting moment,” Tenaya says. “I realised I needed to pay attention to cheese.”
She also realised something else.
“Nobody was writing about cheese in the way I wanted to write about it — telling the stories of the makers, really describing avour, pulling pairings together and giving people new ways to think about it.”
So she started doing it herself.
Enter Madame Fromage
Tenaya’s blog, “Madame Fromage”, became a place where cheese could feel witty, approachable and alive.
Her gi is not simply knowledge. It is translation.
She takes something that can feel intimidating — a cheese counter, a washed rind, a tasting note — and makes it feel human. She talks about cheeses “winking” at you. She once described Stichelton as “the Barbra Streisand of blues” — theatrical, unusual and unforgettable.
That ability to make cheese feel joyful is exactly what drew Anna Juhl of Cheese Journeys to her.
Anna had heard about Tenaya through mutual friends in the cheese world, including Emilio Mignucci of Di Bruno Bros. She knew Tenaya had led small educational food trips and had a rare ability to connect with people.
So she sent an email.
“A woman named Anna Juhl said, ‘Tenaya, I’ve heard I need to meet you. I have a crazy idea,’” Tenaya remembers.
Anna and her husband travelled to Philadelphia and took Tenaya out for pizza. During the conversation they discovered something unexpected: they were both from the same town in Iowa.
It felt meant to be.
“This girl gets it”
At the time, Anna was building something far more ambitious than a holiday company. Cheese Journeys was never meant to be simply scenic travel with good food. It was designed to bring people closer to the real culture of cheese: the farms, caves, kitchens, villages and families behind it.
For that, Anna needed educators who could do more than lecture.
“She had the ability to personify cheese,” Anna says of Tenaya. “To make cheese fun. To bring everybody together, laugh and learn in a very nonpretentious way.”
Their rst tour together was to England.
Tenaya had recently written about Montgomery’s Cheddar, and suddenly she found herself standing in Somerset, travelling through what she calls “a cheddar odyssey,” visiting the places behind cheeses she had admired from afar.
“Anna Juhl made my cheese life happen,” Tenaya says. “I had the writing skills and the curiosity, but Anna swept me o my feet and said, ‘Let’s go to the Alps. Let’s go to cheddar country. Let’s go to northern Italy and eat Taleggio.’”
Education without intimidation
By day, Tenaya is an English professor, which perhaps explains why language matters so much in her teaching.
She is fascinated not just by avour, but by how people nd words for avour.
For her, cheese education should never feel intimidating.
“It operates in that in-between space,” she says. “There’s not much else in the middle between a home cheese board and professional dairy education.”
That middle space is exactly where Cheese Journeys thrives.
Guests may be highly knowledgeable cheese professionals or simply curious travellers who love food. The challenge is creating experiences rich enough for both.
“For some who want to deep dive, it’s there,” Anna says. “For some who just came along with their spouse, they can catch it here and there.”
That exibility is part of the magic.
The Cheese Journeys way
Listening to Anna and Tenaya talk about the early tours feels less like hearing about a business and more like hearing about a long-running adventure.
There were rental cars, mountain roads, markets, cheesemakers, picnic lunches and many moments of simply saying, “Let’s go and see.”
“There was always this backbone of joy and curiosity,” Tenaya says. “It’s not a top-down organisation. Anna is a fun-maker.”
That spirit matters because Cheese Journeys is built around relationships, not templates.
Anna’s role is part host, part scout and part relationship-builder. She nds the people who may not have websites or polished visitor centres — the cheesemakers up the mountain, the butcher who knows a farmer, the family who might invite guests into something real.
“We’re not ten cities in ten days,” Anna says. “We’re building long-term relationships.”
That is why the tours feel alive.
When the bus gets hot
Of course, real life occasionally goes wrong.
Tenaya remembers one northern Italy tour where, a er a magical day in the mountains eating polenta served by a grandmother, the group boarded a bus whose air conditioning promptly failed.
“A hot bus full of uncomfortable Americans is not ideal,” she laughs.
The mood began to dip. Then Jilly, the tour manager, stood up and calmly reminded everyone that a cheesemaker’s daughter was waiting at the end of the journey with risotto, wine, cows and a beautiful lunch.
“And suddenly,” Tenaya says, “everyone started thinking about warm risotto and glasses of wine.”
That, she believes, captures Cheese Journeys perfectly.
Not perfection. Something better: care, imagination and the ability to turn discomfort into part of the story.
Pairing like a cheese ninja
One of Tenaya’s great pleasures is introducing people to unexpected pairings.
Cheese and wine are wonderful, of course, but she delights in pushing things further: goat cheese with green tea, Trappist beer with funky Belgian cheese, or aged Gouda with chocolate-covered ginger.
A good pairing, she says, should make people feel they have discovered something new.
More importantly, it should give people con dence.
“They leave having tasted wonderful things,” she says, “but they can also go home and pair cheese like a ninja.”
And really, who does not want to be a cheese ninja?
