Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [68]
What kind of weirdo makes cheese? It’s too hard to imagine, too homespun, too something. We’re so alienated from the creation of even ordinary things we eat or use, each one seems to need its own public relations team to calm the American subservience to hurry and bring us back around to doing a thing ourselves, at home. Knitting clothes found new popularity among college girls, thanks largely to a little book called Stitch and Bitch. Homemaking in general has its Martha. French cuisine had its immortal Julia. Grilling, Cajun cooking, and cast-iron stewing all have their celebrity gurus. What would it take to convince us that an hour spent rendering up cheese in our kitchens could be worth the trouble? A motivational speaker, a pal, an artisan—a Cheese Queen, maybe?
Yes, all of the above, and she exists. Her name is Ricki Carroll. Since 1978, when she founded New England Cheesemaking Supply and began holding workshops in her kitchen, she has directly taught more than 7,000 people how to make cheese. That’s face to face, not counting those of us who ordered supplies online and worked our way through her book, Cheesemaking Made Easy, which has sold over 100,000 copies. An Internet search for Cheese Queen will pop her right up.
When I went to see Ricki, it was equal parts admiration and curiosity. If my family is into reconnecting with the processes that bring us our foods, if we’ve taken it upon ourselves to be a teeny bit evangelical about this, we have a lot to learn from Ricki Carroll. We’re just small-time country preachers. This woman has inspired artisans from the Loire to Las Vegas. She’s the Billy Graham of Cheese.
Okay, not really. She’s just Ricki. She starts to win you over when you step onto the porch of her Massachusetts farmhouse, a colorful Queen Anne with lupines and lilies blooming around the stoop. Then you walk through the door and fall through the looking glass into a space where cheesemaking antiques blend with the whimsy of handmade dolls winking at African masks, unusual musical instruments and crazy quilts conversing quietly in several languages. The setting prepares you to meet the Queen, greeting her workshop guests with a smile, waving everyone into the big kitchen as she pins up her wildly curly hair with a parrot-shaped barrette.
Ricki had invited our family to come for a visit, after hearing of our interest in local and artisanal foods. Generously, she let us and half a dozen of our friends sit in as her guests at an all-day workshop for beginning cheesemakers. Now we sat down at long tables and introduced ourselves to the twenty other workshoppers. I was already taking notes, not on cheesemaking, but on who in the heck comes here and does this thing?
Anybody. For several men it was an extremely original Father’s Day gift. A chef hoped to broaden her culinary range; mothers were after healthy, more local diets for their families. Martha, from Texas, owns water buffalo and dreams of a great mozzarella. (Their names are Betsy and Beau; she passed around photos.) Maybe we were all a little nuts, but being there made us feel like pilgrims of a secret order. We had turned our backs on our nation’s golden calf of cellophane-wrapped Cheese Product Singles. Our common wish was to understand a food we cared about, and take back one more measure of control over our own care and feeding.
We examined the stainless steel bowls, thermometers, and culture packets assembled before us while Ricki began to talk us into her world. Cheese is a simple idea: a way to store milk, which goes bad quickly without refrigeration but keeps indefinitely—improves, even—in the form of cheese. From humble beginnings it has become a global fascination. “Artisanal cheesemakers combine science and art. All over the world, without scientific instruments, people make cheeses the way their grandparents did.” In the Republic of Georgia, she told us, she watched cheesemakers stir their curd