Whipped Goat Cheese and Honey Crostini

Room temperature cheese whips better. Good honey is essential - something floral like wildflower or orange blossom. Fresh thyme adds elegance; dried won't do.

The combination of goat cheese and honey is one of the oldest pairings in the Western culinary tradition. Goat and sheep milk cheese was the dominant cheese of the ancient Mediterranean world — the mountainous landscape of Greece and much of the region favoured goats and sheep over cattle, making their milk and cheese far more common than cow's milk products. Stone tablets from the Minoan Palace of Knossos document cheese-making from goat's and sheep's milk, and cheese appears throughout ancient Greek literature. Athenaeus of Naucratus, writing in the 3rd century AD in his Deipnosophists — an account of ancient Greek dining — describes sweet pastries made from cheese topped with honey as a cherished part of banquets, and notes that in the ancient city of Argos, brides sent their prospective grooms gifts of roasted cheesecakes topped with honey. Honey was the primary sweetener of the ancient Greek and Roman world, used across both sweet and savoury preparations. The pairing of tangy, fresh goat or sheep cheese with golden honey is therefore not a modern invention but a continuation of a table tradition that is at least 2,500 years old. The crostini base is Italian, rooted in the ancient Roman practice of toasting bread and dressing it with olive oil — a tradition food writers Waverley Root and Marcella Hazan trace back to ancient Rome and describe as "probably nearly as old as olive oil itself." The modern crostini format, with its small, toasted bread rounds used as a vehicle for toppings, developed more formally during the Middle Ages.