The cheese I'd defend to anyone.

A few years ago I was at dinner in one of the fancier restaurants in Washington, DC — the kind of room where half the tables hold faces you half-recognize, a few from politics, a couple from the movies. A waiter was working his way around our table, shaving Parmesan over everyone's pasta. When he reached me, a piece broke off — not a delicate curl, a real chunk — and landed on the tablecloth beside my plate.

I didn't decide to do anything. My hand was already moving. Before my brain caught up, the cheese was in my mouth and I was casually scanning the room to see whether anyone had witnessed it.

One person had: my friend across the table, by then laughing so hard she couldn't speak. Nobody else saw a thing. But she has maintained ever since that no human reacts to falling cheese that fast — and that the only possible explanation is that I was a mouse in a previous life.

Reader, I've never denied it.

All of which is to say: when I tell you Parmesan is my favorite cheese, it is not a casual preference. People are usually a little disappointed to hear it — they were hoping for something rarer, a runny washed-rind, a blue from one particular cave on one particular hillside. Parmesan sounds like the answer of someone who hasn't tried much. It's the opposite. It's my favorite because I've tried a great deal, and it keeps winning. (Also, apparently, because I'm part rodent.)

But I have to be precise, because "Parmesan" is a word doing far too much work. There's the green can on the shelf that never needs refrigerating — and there's Parmigiano-Reggiano. They are not the same food wearing the same name. They are barely cousins.

The real thing can only be called Parmigiano-Reggiano if it's made in a small band of northern Italy — Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, and slivers of Bologna and Mantua — and almost nowhere in cheese is the rule list so short and so strict. Three ingredients: milk, salt, and rennet. Nothing else. No preservatives, no shortcuts. The cows eat local forage; the milk is raw, with the evening's cream skimmed off after it rises overnight; and then the wheel — close to forty kilos, the size of a small drum — is aged for at least a year, and usually two or three. Its name is stamped in tiny pin-dots all the way around its own rind, so that even a broken wedge tells you the truth about itself.

Age is where it gets astonishing. A young wheel is milky and gentle. Give it two years and something happens: it dries, it concentrates, and it grows those little white crystals — tyrosine, an amino acid — that crunch between your teeth. The flavor stops being "cheese" and becomes something stranger and better: brown butter, toasted nuts, dried pineapple, the bottom of a good pot of broth. Savory in a way that makes your mouth water for the next bite before you've finished this one.

And it does everything. It's the rare cheese that belongs equally on the board and in the pan. Grate it over pasta, of course — but first, break a chunk off with the little spade-shaped knife (you break Parmigiano, you don't slice it) and eat it plain, or with a few drops of aged balsamic, or — my preference — the thinnest drizzle of honey. Keep the rinds in the freezer and drop one into your next pot of soup or beans; it dissolves into the broth and leaves the whole pot tasting like someone's grandmother made it.

Here's the part I love most, and it's the whole reason I'm telling you. The most familiar cheese in the world is also one of the most remarkable — and you never needed a special occasion, a tasting vocabulary, or anyone's permission to love it. You already did. You just maybe didn't know the green can was a different thing.

So this is my small defense of Parmesan: buy the wedge, not the tub. Look for the words Parmigiano-Reggiano and, if you can see it, the dotted rind. Ask for a piece aged two years, and eat a corner of it standing up in your kitchen before it ever touches a plate.

The six-year-old in the Bolivian valley wouldn't have had the words for any of this. She just knew it was the best thing she'd ever tasted. On the matter of Parmesan, she and I are still in complete agreement.

— Karelia