The following confession may come as a surprise from someone who makes her living as a food stylist and writer: I’m slightly intimidated by the cheese counter.

Or more accurately, I’m intimidated by the wealth of cheese behind said counter. I’ve tangled with homemade tagliatelle and faced off with offal, but when it comes to cooking with cheese, I find myself overwhelmed by the possibilities. On top of that, good cheese isn’t cheap, so even when I cook with a small wedge, I’d like to be able to anticipate how it will behave.

We all know how to crumble a blue on greens or shave Parmesan over pasta, but my goal was to integrate cheese into my daily cooking more often. For help, I turned to my friend Liz Thorpe, a New York cheesemonger and the author of the 2009 book “The Cheese Chronicles.”

Liz divides cheeses into six families — fresh, bloomy rind, washed rind, pressed, cooked and blue — each with its own appearance, aroma, flavor and texture. (There is no set number of families, and cheesemongers may define them slightly differently.) Once you absorb the basics of the six families, you can use cheeses from the same family interchangeably in a recipe with good results.