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“So why would you say that?”

“I haven’t said it in print yet. I’m just saying that.”

“Okay. Um, I think you’re very, very wrong,” he said. “I think you’re incredibly wrong. To say that you can’t find good cheese curds in Toronto, I think, is crazy, actually.”

“You think it’s crazy?”

“I think it’s crazy,” he said again. “Are we Montreal? Well, no. I mean, not quite. But you know what? We have very good cheese curds.”

“You’re telling me if I come down there and I have a cheese curd, it’s going to squeak?”

“Yeah, it’s going to squeak.”

“OK, I’m going to march down there. You call me crazy? I’ll come down there. I’ll have a cheese curd.”

“No problem. When would you like to come in?”

“How about this afternoon?”

He paused. “Oh. What day is it today?” It was Monday. “Why don’t you come tomorrow because they come fresh every Tuesday and Thursday.”

And that’s exactly the problem. Even at one of Toronto’s foremost cheese specialty shops, the customer who comes in on Sunday is getting curds that arrived on Thursday, eating them long after the squeak window has closed.

Curds are the butterflies of the cheese world — beautiful, transcendent, but only for an instant. They offer the rare example of cheese reaching its full expression as a snack unto itself, so airy and texturally complex that it is liberated from the usual dependence on crackers or bread or wine. Curds have been spared all the pressing and squeezing that occurs in the late stages of the cheddar-making process. They’re pulled right from the vat before any of that happens, still full of air and whey. That’s what makes them so much different than the cubes of mild cheddar beside the slices of salami on your cheese tray. Not for long. As that moisture seeps out over time, they inch closer to their cubed cousins, closer to ordinary. The squeak is, really, the only thing separating the two.