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I have a game I like to play with my friends, or rather, a game I force my friends to play with me. It’s called “What Snack Are You?” — the gist is that everyone has to determine the snack that personifies somebody, and the only rule is that you have to be ruthlessly honest and think really, really hard about it. (It is also not the same thing as asking, “What is your favorite snack?”)
What almost always ends up happening is that somebody, inevitably, will call themselves a cheese plate. This person will always have very high self-esteem (a good thing!) and may be a bit of a snob (a fine thing!). But they will probably also be right, because a Cheese Plate Person is generally as lovable and persnickety as cheese plates themselves.
Because cheese plates, possibly more than any other snack, represent everything we want to be: gorgeous, widely adored, the center of attention, and a little bit fancy. But perhaps more important than any of those things in the year 2019 is that they look really, really good on Instagram.
Marissa Mullen knew this well before most people did, which means that today, she’s Instagram’s premier cheese plate influencer. Before launching That Cheese Plate, which posts photos of cheese plate inspiration, and Cheese by Numbers, a how-to guide for budding cheese plate builders (current combined follower count: 68,000), Mullen was simply just another Northeastern University student trying to make cute cheese plates for her friends.
After struggling to find decent sources for inspiration, she launched a Tumblr devoted to pretty photos of cheese plates in 2013, and soon began taking her own photos of the ones she’d created. In 2014, she moved her work over to Instagram and built a following by searching for cheese-related hashtags and liking every single photo. Within the first year she’d garnered about 5,000 followers, at which point, brands like Whole Foods started reaching out. “They paid me in a $100 Whole Foods gift card, which at that time I was like, ‘Yes, I made it!’” she says.
Though cheese plate influencing doesn’t pay her bills yet — Mullen says it accounts for about 10 percent of her income; her main job is as the creative coordinator and executive assistant for Jon Batiste, the bandleader at The Late Show With Stephen Colbert — she continues to do sponsorships with food brands, and recently had a major break by appearing on the Rachel Ray Show.
Cheese plates, much like baked goods and homemade bread, seem to be the subject of a growing fascination among digitally savvy young people. All three offer the chance to make something tangible — a therapeutic exercise in its own right — but they also carry with them the values of community, intimacy, and domesticity, all of which can often feel as though they’re under threat by modern life.
Unlike baking and breadmaking, however, you don’t need to follow a recipe to make a cheese plate. You don’t even really need to know anything about cooking. Even if you screw it up, cheese is still delicious, and the draw of Mullen’s creations isn’t just that they’re beautiful, but that they’re aspirational in a way that’s entirely attainable.
I spoke to Mullen on the phone recently, smack in the middle of cheese plate season, about her cheese plate philosophy (there’s an order of operations and everything), Instagram food culture (bowls are out, platters are in), and whether she regards cheese plates as self-care (totally). The following interview has been edited and condensed.
Why do you think cheese plates bring us so much joy?
Cheese plates, I always say, bring people together. Anytime you have a cheese plate, it’s usually at a gathering. So having that communal plate of all these fun different things you can try really affects people, and it creates this sense of community, to have a girls’ night and to make a cheese plate. It’s just so fun to have that there to photograph and talk about. And eat, obviously.
I have a group text called the Cheese Party; it’s me and eight of my friends. If I need to make new content for a cheese plate, I’ll just send a text saying, “Cheese party tonight!” and everyone will come over and bring a bottle of wine.
How’d you begin learning about cheese plates?
Phoebe [Connell] is one of the co-owners of Lois, a really cute wine bar in the East Village. She is one of the top cheesemongers in New York, so she’s taught me a ton about cheese in general. Because cheese is such an intricate, artisanal food, a lot of cheese people get very — not offended, but it’s like wine. You can definitely go to Trader Joe’s and get an awesome cheese plate for cheap, but I have a lot of followers who are very specific about cheeses.
I did this one thing with a company like Walmart or something and I got some hate mail from it. Like, “Don’t feature that cheap cheese.” So I made it a point to learn about cheese and how it’s made and the good farms, the good creameries, and the big creameries I should stay away from.
I’m a very visual person, coming from a photography background, and I wanted my cheese plate to be vibrant and abundant and full. With flavors, I’ll put sweet stuff on one side and more savory stuff on another side — you don’t really want an olive to be touching an orange. With colors, I try to use really vibrant colors and flowers and garnish on the plates. I do a thing called “fill in the gaps.” Basically when you’re putting nuts on the plate, you wanna fill in every single gap that’s showing so that it looks very full and abundant.
I eventually came up with an order of operations: cheese, meat, fruit, vegetables, nuts, jams, and then garnish. If you do that every time, it works perfectly.
How much do you think you spend on cheese plates?
It depends on where you shop, and what it’s for, and how big it is. Everyone always asks me to do a Trader Joe’s cheese plate, and I did it for $35, which was cheap. That’s the price of a luxury gym class in New York. One time I made a pretty big one with stuff from a more artisanal place, and sometimes really nice cheese can cost up to $15 or $20, just for the block. Something like that would cost $80 for the plate, so it ranges. I can average a pretty decent cheese plate for 40 bucks. If you have six people eat it, if you’re cutting costs or whatever, it’s 6 bucks a person.
What cheese are you super into right now?
This is my most frequently asked question that literally changes every day. Right now, since it’s winter, I’m super into truffle-y things. There’s this one truffle Pecorino cheese that’s really good that I like.
One of my all-time favorites is Humboldt Fog, which is from Cypress Grove. It’s goat cheese but it has more of a robust flavor to it, and it’s really pretty — it has a blue stripe down the middle, so it looks good on cheese plates. I always tell people it’s kind of like a gateway cheese if you want to introduce someone to an artisanal cheese, but you can find it at the supermarket.
My all-time favorite is probably a sharp Gruyère. Sometimes Gruyère has crystals in it from lactic acid and calcium. I really love a crystal-y Gruyère.
Are there any rules of cheese plate etiquette? Like, when hosting a party, should you steer clear of stinky cheeses?
With stinky cheeses, they always smell worse when they’re wrapped up in the fridge. The second you take it out and let it breathe, it doesn’t smell as bad. What you can do with overwhelming blue cheeses is you could put a fig jam on it and level out the flavors of that pungentness with sweetness. A Taleggio kind of smells like feet sometimes, but also tastes amazing.
I always think it’s fun to have a variety of cheeses on the plate. Like a Brie, something soft, then something hard like a Gruyère or Manchego. And then definitely something stinky just to balance out some of the flavors.
Any tips for building a cheese plate on a budget?
Trader Joe’s is a great spot to go to. My go-to inexpensive cheeses are Boursin, which is a soft French cheese with herbs in it. It’s pretty popular; it’s at most grocery stores and costs $4. A sharp cheddar is always reliable; that’s at most grocery stores and pretty cheap. Also I’ve seen goat Brie at a lot of grocery stores lately, which is a little bit more funky than a traditional Brie.
Do you have any rules about the ratio of cheese to other stuff on the plate?
Usually on my plates, I’d say a third or less of the plate is cheese, and then the rest is meats, fruits, vegetables and whatnot. You want to make sure that the cheese isn’t overpowering the plate so that people, if they’re grazing, can make different pairings. Say it’s a plate that’s feeding 16 people, I’ll do a small wheel of a goat cheese or a small circular cheese, and then cut up ten slices of another cheese. And then the rest we’ll fill in with meat and nuts and fruit and whatnot.
What photos perform the best on your Instagram?
The videos have actually been performing the best, and then the really gooey cheese ones, and then the colorful ones. I posted a photo of a baked Brie around Thanksgiving, and that one got a ton of likes just because the phone is inside the Brie, you see all the goo sort of pouring out. People love those kinds of food porn cheese plates.
So much of Instagram is devoted to food porn, but then there’s a huge part of it that’s all about health and wellness. Where do you think cheese plates fall within that larger universe?
It’s funny because I feel like that cheese plate can be a chameleon in the sense of fitting into a lot of different worlds. I did a plate on the 2nd of January and I called it the “Cheese Can Still Be Healthy” plate. I pretty much did two little things of cheese and the rest is fruit and vegetables. If you don’t eat a whole block of cheese, it’s not unhealthy. It’s full of protein, you know? But then it can go from there to the complete opposite where it’s decadent, gooey baked Brie covered in truffle honey.
You said back in 2013 there wasn’t a ton of cheese plate content, but have you noticed an uptick in people’s interest?
Yeah, especially in the past year, to be honest. Instagram always has trends, with food especially. In the wellness world, bowls were very in — acai bowls, smoothies in bowls. I feel like boards are the new bowls. You see avocado toast on boards and [other hip foods items] on boards now. That’s a trend I saw pick up in the past year, which has definitely helped the cheese plate world.
This Christmas and Thanksgiving, I got so many tags on Instagram of people making cheese plates. So I think it’s kind of coming into the popular sphere now of activities people can do with each other. When I made this, people definitely didn’t make cheese plates for fun as frequently as I see they do now. I don’t know where that shift happened.
And then there’s that whole culture of people anxiety baking and Silicon Valley dudes making bread.
Yeah, I think cheese plates fall in line with that. We want to entertain, and we want to enjoy time with our friends, and we want to do things, so I think that bread baking and the cheese plate making has definitely picked up a bunch in the past few years.
Are cheese plates self-care?
Yes, 100 percent. Making a cheese plate is therapeutic; you have to be in a calm space, put on music, have some natural light in your apartment. It’s like painting: You’re building a cheese plate, and it comes together, and it’s so bright and beautiful. Then people come over, and you converse, and hang out, and then you’re eating the cheese. [Cheese] makes people happy. Definitely self-care.
