Eating for Beginners Page 5

  It had been almost a year since the first death from E. coli- tainted spinach grown in California—two more people later died, and more than two hundred others got sick—but the episode was still very much on people's minds, not least because it was followed fairly quickly by another E. coli outbreak linked to green onions. (Since then there have been a number of other major food recalls in quick succession, including everything from peanuts and peanut butter to cookie dough to beef in 2009 alone.) That spinach had come from large, commercial produce farms, some organic, some not, and was eventually found to have been contaminated by manure from nearby cattle, probably delivered through groundwater. The growers had not been at fault, but it had taken almost a month for health officials to reach that conclusion. In the meantime, people had plenty of time to reflect on the fact that they didn't know much about who was growing their food or how.

  Hence the increased sales at Cato Corner, a place small enough to maintain almost total control over land, animals, and product. As the farm staff is happy to tell anyone who asks, they adhere to strict inspection and hygiene practices that far exceed what's required by the FDA and the Connecticut Department of Agriculture, testing all of their milk immediately for listeria, a big threat in dairy production, and periodically for all kinds of other bacteria. They use antibiotics only in the event of illness and never inject their cows with hormones to make them produce more milk, a common practice at big commercial dairies. They want their animals to be healthy so they produce the best milk—not the most milk—possible, and they want their land to be healthy so it helps feed the animals, all of which results in delicious, worry-free cheese. Even though the FDA treats raw milk like a toxic substance, banning interstate sales and requiring cheese made from it to be aged at least sixty days before being sold, if the milk comes from a place like Cato Corner it's a pretty safe bet.

  As Cheryl and Dianna were explaining some of this to me, Mark Gillman, the resident cheesemaker, emerged from the cheesemaking room behind the shop, his curly red hair and beard encased in shower caps. "Oh!" he said. "I forgot you were coming."

  Mark grew up on the farm, which is owned by his mother, Elizabeth MacAlister. Wiry and energetic, he looked as if he had just come from another world, and once I got into the cheesemaking room myself, I could see that he had—a world that resembled a fetid New York City street on a hot, humid summer afternoon.

  Outside the cheesemaking room, all was green and fresh. Inside it, the air was about ninety degrees and smelled totally rancid. Walking into it was like getting inside someone's dirty sneaker—or someone's carton of spoiled milk. I had scrubbed myself with sanitizing fluid, washing up to my elbows like a surgeon (in that environment, Mark said, "stuff is growing, and you want it to be the right stuff"), then rinsed off and donned the green Wellies I had brought with me, plus a shower cap, plastic gloves, and one of the farm's huge white aprons, which hung almost to my ankles. The door was sealed behind us to keep out the "bad" bacteria: cheese is created by encouraging and then controlling the growth of the specific bacteria you want for each variety.

  The room was dominated by an oval stainless steel cheese bath about three feet deep and ten feet long, filled with twenty-seven hundred pounds of milk that had been warmed to ninety degrees (most cheeses are made with milk warmed to a temperature between eighty-eight and ninety-two degrees). For every round of cheesemaking, Cato Corner uses the milk from one day's milking of about thirty cows. Besides the cheese bath there were two long, narrow stainless steel sinks and a stainless steel cheese press, which we didn't use that day since we were making an uncooked, unpressed soft cheese. (Cooking and pressing both get rid of a lot of moisture, which results in hard cheeses like cheddar or Gouda.) A small window above the sinks looked directly into the cow barn, while another offered a view of the grass at the front of the property where the cows had been grazing when I arrived.

  The cheese we were making that day was called Hooligan, a soft, washed-rind variety like Munster or Taleggio. "It's a stinky cheese so it seemed like it deserved an appropriately troublemaker sort of name," said Mark. The twenty-seven hundred pounds of milk (almost three hundred fourteen gallons) would make about two hundred one-pound wheels. Mark had already added the starter culture, dried bacteria that speeds up the transformation of lactose into lactic acid, the first step in turning milk into cheese, and also plays a role in the breakdown of milk proteins so that the cheese develops flavor as it ages: older cheese is sharper because the proteins have broken down more. Mark orders his various cultures freeze-dried from a European provider in Canada. "It's basically a commercial starter culture that's created by isolating the bacteria from some of the best cheese in Europe," he said. Because Cato Corner's cows graze from May through November on the tiers of pasture I had seen rising up behind the barn, and because Mark uses their milk raw, he uses much less starter culture than someone working with pasteurized milk would need. Pasteurization kills the milk's natural bacteria and also makes many of its enzymes inactive, and since these two elements contribute enormously to the development of flavor as cheese ages, their absence means more starter culture has to be introduced to compensate.

  At last I had the answer to one of my main questions about raw milk cheese: Why does it taste so much better than cheese made from pasteurized milk? Because it's naturally complicated: it tastes like the bacteria produced by grasses, flowers, weeds, and all the other things cows eat when they roam the landscape. "There are millions of micro-organisms in all that," Mark told me. "Any commercial starter culture has fairly limited strains. We've got millions of bacteria from the grass and weeds that are just naturally occurring." When he said this, I thought of the novelist Italo Calvino, who wrote, "Behind every cheese there is a pasture of a different green under a different sky."

  As for my other big question about raw milk cheese—one that was on the mind of the FDA and of every pregnant woman whose doctor had warned her not to go near any soft cheese, which seems to function as an incorrect equivalency for unpasteurized cheese—Mark put it to rest, at least for me, with a simple statement. When I asked him about the risks of eating cheese made from raw milk, he said, "We have two little kids. The first pregnancy my wife ate no raw milk cheese. The second time she ate a lot of it."

  We went back to the Hooligan at hand. In addition to the starter culture, Mark had added rennet, the stomach enzyme that enables calves to digest milk. Rennet, obtained from animals that are being slaughtered for other reasons, usually for food, coagulates the milk and together with the starter culture helps break down proteins to determine texture and taste. Once the milk has firmed up, it can be cut into curds, which are the solids that get turned into cheese. While many cheesemakers have switched to cheaper, genetically engineered vegetable rennets in place of the traditional calf rennet, Cato Corner has not. "People who are squeamish about animal products may not like it," Mark told me, "but in my mind it's a way to use all of an animal that's being harvested anyway. And it's a natural product."

  I got into the cheese room about forty minutes after Mark had added the rennet, and the milk had already taken on the consistency of yogurt. He stuck a big blade into the bath to check for firmness. "The flavor of any cheese comes from the breakdown of fat and protein in the aging process," he explained. "Each cheese is a little bit different in terms of what you want to happen. Feta, you develop a lot of acidity very quickly and you end up with the crumbly feta texture. Swiss, you develop your acidity fairly slowly and its pH stays high, and it has low acid. That leaves it very high in calcium, which makes it chewier."

  Essentially, cheesemaking is the management of four basic ingredients: milk, starter culture, rennet, and time. Various amounts and combinations of these key elements yield different cheeses, with the flavor of the raw milk playing the wild card according to the season. "The milk is always changing," Mark said as he wiped the knife clean and hung it back on a peg on the wall. Richer milk, for example, winter milk—from the months when the cows e
at local hay and grain rather than grass—needs more culture and less rennet because it has more protein. In order to produce more or less consistent cheese over the span of seasons (though no two batches of artisanal cheese will ever be exactly the same), according to Mark, "you want the rate of acidification to proceed at roughly the same rate in February as in June. Ninety percent of the work of an aged cheese takes place in the first six hours."

  Part of that work was cutting the curds in the cheese bath, which had solidified into a firm, gelatin-like consistency while we were talking. Mark ran a curd knife, a rectangular wire-strung paddle with a long handle, first horizontally and then vertically through the quivering yellowish-white mass, separating it into neat little cubes that immediately began to collapse as the whey—the liquid by-product of curdled milk—leaked out of them. While he worked, my mind drifted back to those UPS boxes that arrived at the restaurant.

  One of the cheeses that came frequently was Cato Corner's dry, nutty, crystal-filled hard cheese called Bloomsday, and I had become addicted to it on garde manger. As Mark and I bent over the bath with Cheryl and Dianna, turning the piles of curds with our plastic-gloved hands over and over again until they were more glob-like than cubed and most of the whey had seeped out and been pumped into a vat for the cows to drink—and made many truly terrible jokes, starting with the perfect name for a new soap opera, "As the Curd Turns"—I had Bloomsday on the brain. By the time we loaded the curds into small plastic molds that looked like miniature laundry baskets and set them on a sanitized wooden plank over the sink to finish draining, I was hankering for a fix.

  Either Mark could sense this or he was just hungry. As we emerged from the cheesemaking room he suggested we go across to the farmhouse for some lunch.

  There, at a table covered by a cloth printed with cows and the slogan "Contented Cows Give Sweet Milk," in a room featuring peeling radish-print wallpaper and a small bookshelf holding, among other reading material, 2000 Spanish Verbs, Milk Them for All Their Worth, and The New Agrarianism, we ate one of Cato Corner's blue cheeses, Black Ledge Blue, plus an unbelievable amount of Bloomsday. As we each bit into our third Bloomsday sandwich Mark looked up at me, wild-eyed for a second, and said, "I love this cheese!"

  It turned out that my new favorite cheese (and Mark's apparently, at least that day) was a mistake Mark had made one year on June 16, also known as Bloomsday because it's the day on which James Joyce's Ulysses, the story of twenty-four hours in the life of a man named Leopold Bloom, takes place. Taped up next to the Homeland Security poster in the cheese shed was a passage from the book that seemed to say, in simple terms (not usually Joyce's strong suit), everything I was finding to be true during my days at the restaurant:

  —How much sir? asked the old woman.

  —A quart, Stephen said.

  He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white milk ... She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out. Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed about her whom they knew, dew-silky cattle...

  —It is indeed, ma'am, Buck Mulligan said, pouring milk into their cups.

  —Taste it, sir, she said.

  He drank at her bidding.

  If we could live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bog-swamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horsedung and consumptives' spits.

  Mark had come home to cheesemaking at Cato Corner after teaching English in Baltimore's inner city for a decade. When he was growing up, his parents had raised sheep and goats for meat and wool. "It was not a self-supporting farm," he recalled. "My parents both worked off the farm, too. We worked after school and we had about a hundred ewes and forty goats." I had to laugh as the animal laundry list went on. "We raised three pigs, somewhere in there they had a cow or two. It was a time-consuming hobby." Mark decided to return partly because his mother, Elizabeth, had begun to change the land back into the dairy farm it had been when she bought it in 1979, which would turn it from a hobby into a self-sustaining business. "She started by getting a loan and putting in all the equipment," Mark said. "I was teaching and thought I'd come home and check it out for a while." That was it for him. "I love it," he told me, as though it wasn't obvious to anyone who saw him at work. "It's hard to imagine doing something else at this point."

  After lunch Mark asked, rather jauntily, "Do you want to go flip Hooligans?" We scrubbed down again and went back to the cheese room where, in the forty minutes or so that had elapsed while we were eating, the curds in their little baskets had already bonded together enough that each proto-cheese could be dumped out of its mold, damp and gelatinous in the palm of my hand, and flipped over on its way to being dumped back in. They would sit on the plank, with a few more flips, until all the whey had drained out. Then Mark would take them to ripen in the cheese cave built under the shed—"We have lots of naturally occurring molds down there that are going to help contribute to the flavor. I'm not even exactly sure how they work," he confessed. He would bathe them in salt brine twice a week for eight weeks until their rinds were a deep orange color and sticky to the touch. When I asked him how he knew for sure when they were ripe, he laughed. "I taste 'em!"

  I went down to the cave with him to check on the progress of some older Hooligans, where I discovered a kind of library, with cheeses in place of books. The floor was concrete, and the cave was kept at a chilly fifty degrees and a very damp eighty-five to ninety percent humidity. The stench of cheese in varying stages of bacterial growth made inhaling almost painful. As far as the eye could see were cheeses stacked on open wooden shelves, hundreds of them of all sizes. Each shelf was labeled with the date the cheese sitting on it had been made. The newest group of Hooligans looked almost like cakes, yellow with pink edges, as they moldered on their dark shelf. As the dates went further back, the cheeses turned to various shades of orange, then that sticky deep orange, with all the rawness and newness gone. When Mark mentioned that they smelled like body odor because they were made with some of the same bacteria that grows on the human body, I decided it was time to get away from the cheese and into the open air.

  ***

  Outside again, I met up with Elizabeth for a tour of the barn. Thanks to her mix of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh ancestry, most of the cows had names like Moira and Deirdre and Maeve, but there were a few standouts called Juanita, Doozie, and my personal favorite, Gin. Elizabeth, who had long gray hair and an infectious laugh, got up at two-thirty every morning to tend to them. As I watched her greeting them and thumping their sides, I suddenly felt like an absolute brat for ever mentioning sleep deprivation when Jules was a newborn.

  Thirty-two cows were "milkers" that day. (Cows lactate for about ten months of the year, and only after they've had a calf, an event delightfully named "freshening," hardly the word I would have used to describe myself after giving birth.) When we walked in they were being milked three at a time by machine, their udders hooked up to vacuum pumps that combined all their milk in a stainless steel tank. The ones who weren't on deck were milling around in an open area, chewing their cud. Some of them were more tan than caramel, some a darker brown. Several had heart-shaped splotches of white above and between their eyes.

  Some of the animals, Elizabeth explained, weren't particularly "good specimens" by cattle-breeders' standards. Their bodies weren't lined up properly or they just didn't look quite right. Unable to bear the thought of their being punished for their imperfections, she had either adopted or bought them from the farms where they weren't wanted. Looking into their eyes, I could see why. The awkward bulk of their bodies seemed to disappear behind the calm brown depths.

  We left the barn and walked up through the pastures, accompanied by Harp and Flute, the farm's border collies. This was where the cows grazed on forty-two acres in twelve-hour rotations to keep the land fertile a
nd the milk delicious. In every bite of Bloomsday, I was tasting these fields, planted mostly with wild clover and bluegrass. But the cows ate almost anything they could find, Elizabeth said as we walked, the dogs bounding around us and barking enthusiastically. "The one thing they won't eat is thistle," she mentioned as we passed some purple blooms.

  As we ascended the fields, she told me the pastures had just been approved for inclusion in the USDA's Grassland Reserve program—"a tiny part of the Farm Bill that does a lot of good stuff"—which aims to protect two million acres of grassland, pasture, and shrubland all over the country from being developed for crops or other uses, including urban development. Designed to retain and restore habitats for animals and plants, the program places a special emphasis on what it calls "working grazing operations," or pastureland like Elizabeth's.

  The rest of her seventy-five-acre farm, made up of woodlands and wetlands, is part of the Connecticut Farmland Trust, which holds agricultural easements on about twelve hundred acres of family farms throughout the state, preventing their development as well. In 2007 the organization estimated that in the previous two decades Connecticut had lost twenty-one percent of its farmland at a rate of eight thousand acres per year. Elizabeth was thrilled that her acres would now never be among them. "We didn't want the land to be developed ever," she said, "and the only way you can do that is to put a permanent easement on it. It's what's most important to us."