Proper Roles for Those Second-Act Cheeses

However artfully you have arranged the board for your party, setting the cheeses from the mildest chevre to the most pungent blue, you might still end up with a problem.

What do you do at the end of the night? The remains have run for their life across the board. The hardier cheddars are gently sweating, their crumbly remains mixed in with a fresh and feisty goat. The blues, be they Bayley Hazen Americans or pure British Stiltons, have left a pasty trail of full-on sharpness that is too abundant to hoover up yourself but not abundant enough to reconstitute and put out on the board again tomorrow.

Anyway, you want to do something different, and, leftovers being the most creative form of cooking, you want to turn at least one of these specimens into something fabulous and festive for supper.

The first advice is to think about which cheeses do and don't cook well. A nutty, cave-aged Beaufort can be grated into a bechamel sauce and emerge gooey and gorgeous poured over chicken with a handful of fresh tarragon thrown in. A soft white goat cheese, though, shouldn't shake hands with a broiler. Keep it raw. Spread a little black olive paste on toasted bruschetta, then slice or spread the goat on top. Add tomatoes or a tomato relish of some sort and have as a snack, starter or light lunch.

If it's blue you're left with, and you have some mashed potatoes hanging around, try a blue cheese, onion and potato pie, which is homey yet spectacular. Cook four onions in olive oil and butter in a skillet until they turn to a soft tangle, and remove them. Spread a cup or two of leftover mashed potatoes in the skillet, top with the onions and a half-pound of blue cheese, top with another cup or two of mashed potatoes, sprinkle some grated Parmesan over, and bake for about 25 minutes in a 400-degree oven. (To serve, spoon out the first portion, then cut the rest into wedges.)

My favorite of all, though, is the greatest comfort food on Earth: Cheddar Cheese and Onion Pie. Make it with the best raw farmhouse cheddar you can lay your hands on. It's great for this time of year, but I confess to having carried it warm in a little foil parcel last summer onto an Irish beach, where we ate it after plunging into the shockingly cold Atlantic breakers. It was the best of leftovers, and not a crumb remained.

Food writer and British television presenter Tamasin Day-Lewis is the author, most recently, of "Tamasin's Kitchen Classics" (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006).