County Fare
by Diana Cercone
Cheese is the culinary world’s little black dress. Always appropriate—be it as an appetizer before dinner or an après course to an elegant meal. And with its high protein content, cheese makes a great choice for breakfast when accompanied by multigrain or whole wheat bread and fruit. You might even say like a charming single man at a dinner party, cheese is a hostess’s most welcomed guest.
But, then, you’ll hear nothing to the contrary from Rita Ferrante and Shawn Robbins of Savour, the new artisan cheese shop in Lambertville. Rita is the proprietor of The Chocolate Box, the popular chocolate boutique next door on N. Union Street. For the last five years, she says, customers had been asking her to open a shop that would carry cheeses, which like her chocolates, aren’t found in supermarkets. When the empty storefront became available, Rita saw her chance to both oblige her customers and pursue her other culinary passion. She tapped Shawn to be her manager at Savour.
I first had the pleasure of meeting these two dynamic women at one of Judy Detrano’s Wednesdays for Women dinners (held monthly fall through spring) at Hamilton’s Grill Room. Rita and Shawn were the evening’s guest speakers. Along with their knowledge of cheese, the two women treated us to individual cheese plates. For the tasting, they had selected Mt. Tam, a triple cremé cow’s cheese from California; Red Dragon, a Welsh cheddar made with brown ale and mustard seeds; and Blue Stilton from England. Each was paired perfectly with a confit, such as the French apple cider confit with the Blue Stilton. For local pizzazz from Bucks County, they married Eat This blackberry and rosemary jam with the Red Dragon cheese, and for the Mt. Tam, the two chose a sun-dried tomato confit from Tunisia and cornichons.
I was immediately smitten with the Red Dragon and Mt. Tam, two cheeses I had not been acquainted with before. Wanting to know more, I decided to pay Shawn a visit.
Savour’s inviting interior design, complete with original fireplace and elegant mantlepiece, lends it a feel of a boutique cheese shop one might find on a tony street in Rome or in Paris. The array of condiments, confits and crackers, as well as pastas, dried fruit and nuts found on the shelves and tables are chosen to complement the cheeses.
At any given time, says Shawn, Savour offers 50 different cheeses. The selection changes seasonally, including the addition of those specially made for a holiday. Their cheeses come from family farms in Italy and France and locally in PA and NJ as well as from other American artisan cheese makers.
The rest of the story about Savour can be found on page 119 in the Summer 2015 issue of bucks County Magazine.