How Erika Kubick Makes Cheese Magic
Cheese Magic by Erika Kubick
There are not many people in the world who can say they have hosted a cheese burlesque or started a cheese church. Erika Kubrick of Cheese Sex Death has done both. Now on the verge of publishing her second book Cheese Magic, she wants to share the magical world of cheese with the world.
Kubick had always loved cheese from a young age. Growing up vegetarian, she found that it made a large part of her diet. But she did not even think of it as a career in and of itself until after college.
She got a dual degree in English and Film Production but had no idea what to do with her life. She took a front desk job at a waxing salon where she happened to meet an associate editor at Plate Magazine. She knew that she loved food and wanted to work with it, but she had no experience, not even as a restaurant server. But Kubick took a chance and successfully asked the associate editor for an internship at the magazine.
Erika Kubick photo credit John Jennnings
As an intern, Kubick edited chef interviews and did other odd jobs for the magazine. But then she got an assignment to create a chart of Spanish cheeses that did not include manchego. “I had no idea what Manchego is,” she explains, “I just completely fell down the rabbit hole and was blown away by the sheer variety of cheeses, the stories about each individual cheese, and their economic, and historical significance.” She knew she had to devote her life to cheese. It was what she called her “come to Cheesus moment.”
Kubick quit her job at the salon and became a cheesemonger at the former cheese shop, Pastoral, in Chicago’s Loop. She spent a year there, but it was a challenge to make ends meet as a cheesemonger. So she took a job as a server at Longman & Eagle Restaurant, an upscale restaurant in Chicago’s Logan Square, where she spent time critiquing the restaurant’s cheese plate.
During her time there, she realized that she “wanted to start some sort of cheese advocacy brand because I wanted to help teach people about cheese.” When she was at Pastoral, “I saw how intimidated people were by the cheese case and how they were afraid to even ask questions.” Like people in the wine world, there were a lot of people writing very seriously about cheese, which made some folks feel cowed by the food product. She wanted to make cheese more accessible to people and take a less serious, more sardonic approach. That’s when she decided to start a cheese blog.
And thanks to her social media job at restaurant group Lettuce Entertain You, she was able to take her new found digital skills for Cheese Sex Death.
Cheese Sex Death
So why did she name her blog and company Cheese Sex Death? She had always thought about cheese as a mystical substance, which was created from so few materials. But the idea of death and sex came later. She recalls reading Michael Pollan’s Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation where he interviews Mother Noella Marcellino, OSB, Ph.D., a Benedictine Nun and Microbiologist with a focus on cheese, who said that cheese reminds us of our mortality. It’s aged in crypts and smells of decay.
For Kubick, she was blown away by the nun’s ideas. Cheese is alive, but decaying in a controlled way. “That idea kinda fermented in my own head,” she says, cheese “unites all the different worlds—the animal world, world of flora, the human world, and even the sky in a way.” The sun feeds the plants that are eaten by the milk-bearing animals who are milked by humans who turn it into cheese. “There’s something so transformational and so magical,” she explains.
As for the exact name, that came from a vacation in Los Angeles. She was walking with her partner trying to come up with the name for her blog when her partner told her that “you have a really sensual relationship with food, and you're also pretty goth that you should call it ‘Cheese Death Sex.’” Then Kubick told her mom who suggested “Cheese Sex Death” had a better ring to it. It’s been the name of her blog/business since 2015.
Later Kubick realized that in Pollan’s book, he had mentioned a website called Cheese, Sex, Death and Madness. “That clearly embedded itself into my psyche,” she said. (That original website is now defunct.)
The name worked perfectly for Kubick. She recalls how she and her coworkers made weird jokes about cheese because it was so easy. From a technical standpoint, “Cheese is a product of sex. You need the animals to reproduce in order to produce milk,” she says, “Then, of course, fermentation is all about death.”
From a more philosophical standpoint, the name works because cheese is a bit of a memento mori. It’s “the idea that you have to make your heaven here on earth because life is so finite,” Kubick explains, “I think cheese just brings us closer to Heaven. It also releases dopamine when you eat it.”
Cheese 101
For the first couple of years of her company, Kubick ran a variety of events, including “Cheese Church.” She started intentionally posting about cheese on Sunday, preaching about different kinds of cheeses.
The metaphor kept going when a friend asked her to cater her birthday party and teach a cheese class. “There were 12 people attending and she was like ‘It’s the 12 Disciples doing Cheese Church.’” Kubick found this to be a great angle for her business. So she started holding pop up events at places in Wicker Park and other Chicago neighborhoods. That included the famous cheese-themed burlesque “Strip Cheese” at The Charnel House, which is a former funeral parlor turned into an event space.
At one point, Kubick started looking into a kitchen space to do catering events full time. But when the pandemic hit, she ended up having to pivot away from live events. She put together specially catered cheese boxes that were delivered to people’s homes. “I loved doing them at first, and they did so well. It really felt like something that I could give back to people in Chicago,” she says, "I'm so glad I did it. But, I don't think that's something I'd ever do again.”
Her First Book
The pandemic gave her time to work on her first book Cheese Sex Death: A Bible for the Cheese Obsessed (Book Review here). She had been approached by Jen Quinn, who she knew when they both worked at Culture Magazine, who had started a literary agency and design house called Indelible Editions. She reached out to Kubick and suggested that they write a book together. It was a bit scary but Quinn and her people helped her throughout the entire process including writing the proposal.
“I knew that I wanted to involve the concept and the branding of Cheese Church. Obviously, it should be a Cheese Bible,” Kubick recalls. She submitted the proposal and the rest is cheese history.
During the lockdown of the Pandemic, Kubick was able to dedicate a lot of time to putting the book together. She knew a fair amount about the subject, but she wanted to deepen her knowledge. She read up on cheese classics such as The Oxford Companion to Cheese and Tenaya Darlington’s Di Bruno Bros. House of Cheese. It was a tricky process of writing the book since it involved so many steps, such as waiting for the book from the editor and designing it, but ultimately, she fell in love with the process.
While some people called it a cookbook, Kubick sees it as more of a resource book. It has recipes as well as pairing recommendations. It also covers important concepts like cutting cheese and storing it properly (among other concepts).
Cheese Magic
Buckwheat Crepes from Cheese Magic
Kubick knew she wanted to do a cookbook next. She didn’t know the angle until she took a walk in her favorite forest preserve in Door County, Wisconsin. The idea just fell in her lap to make a spell book about cheese. “I've always been a really spiritual person. I was Christian when I was younger, but that fell away pretty early in my young adult life,” she says, “I started getting into mysticism in my early 20s.”
She began getting into Wicca and Neopagan concepts like the “Wheel of the Year,” which Kubick defines as eight sabbats, “a series of festivals that mark solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter festivals in between.” It’s how she organizes her new book. Not to mention that the cheese wheel worked well with the concept of the “Wheel of the Year.” “It just seemed to make so much sense [to organize it that way], because cheese is such a seasonal food,” she explains, “I love eating with the seasons.” The book includes recipes, pairing suggestions and spell work, all including cheese.
It was her first time writing a cookbook. Plus Kubick took all the photographs (as well as the photos for her first book). Because of the seasonal nature of the book, she organized her entire year around seasonal ingredients to write it. Kubick recalls that she signed the book deal in January so she was able to start writing the book at the beginning of the year and keep writing in line with the time of year.
An Evolving Focus
Looking back on her career so far, Kubick notes a change in her approach to cheese. “When I started off as this ‘Cheese 101’ person, my goal was to teach people about cheese and what is so special about it,” she says, “I do feel like I’m more in an occult place where I feel so passionate about mysticism, the seasons, and investing in your local farmer and local cheese shop.” She wants to help people get more attuned to the Earth and its season, just as she wanted to help people tune into the world of cheese.
Read more:
10 Surprising Cheese Pairings to Try (with recommendations from Erika Kubick)