Shortly before I piled the cheese curds on a platter, sprinkled them with homegrown Espelette pepper and surrounded them with olives, I learned that this was a really lame idea. Cheese curds are supposed to be scarfed down like popcorn, straight from the bag. “They’re the potato chips of dairy,” says Jeanne Carpenter, a cheesemonger in Madison and authority on Wisconsin cheese. Obviously, I did it anyway, because fresh curds are rare where I live and worth some ceremony, and these were the best I had ever had.