• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 903 0

In fact, later on when I went poking into these codes, I learned I might stand in violation of Virginia State Law 2VAC5-531-70 just by making cheese for my own consumption. It takes imagination to see how some of these rules affect consumer safety. Many other raw food products—notably poultry from CAFOs—typically carry a much higher threat to human health in terms of pathogen load, and yet the government trusts us to render it safe in our own humble kitchens. But it’s easy to see how impossibly strict milk rules might gratify industry lobbyists, by eliminating competition from family producers.

Ricki was sympathetic to that position, having traveled the world and seen a lot of people working without major milking-room specs. In Greece, for example, she watched shepherds make cheese in a cinderblock shed right after they milked, making feta over a fire, pouring out the whey over the stone floor to wash it. The specific bacteria that thrived there created a good environment for making the cheese, while crowding out other, potentially harmful microorganisms. French winemakers apply the same principle when using their grapes’ leftover yeasty pulp as compost in their vineyards. Over the centuries, whole valleys become infused with the right microbes to make the wine ferment properly and create its flavorful terroir.

Many of our most useful foods—yogurt, wine, bread, and cheese—are products of controlled microbe growth. We may not like thinking about it, but germs crawl eternally over every speck of our planet. Our own bodies are bacterial condos, with established relationships between the upstairs and downstairs neighbors. Without these regular residents, our guts are easily taken over by less congenial newcomers looking for low-rent space. What keeps us healthy is an informed coexistence with microbes, rather than the micro-genocide that seems to be the rage lately. Germophobic parents can now buy kids’ dinnerware, placemats, even clothing imbedded with antimicrobial chemicals. Anything that will stand still, if we mean to eat it, we shoot full of antibiotics. And yet, more than 5,000 people in the United States die each year from pathogens in our food. Sterility is obviously the wrong goal, especially as a substitute for careful work.

That was our agenda here: careful work. Ricki moved in a flash from terroir to bacterial cheese cultures to warming our own pots of milk to the right temperature. While waxing poetic in praise of slowness, she moved fast. By the time we’d added the culture to set our cheddar, she was on to the next cheese. With a mirror propped over the stove so we could see down into the pot, she stirred in vinegar to curdle the queso blanco, laughing as she guessed on the quantity. There’s no perfect formula, she insisted, just some basic principles and the confidence to give it a try.

Confidence was not yet ours, but we got busy anyway, we maverick dairywomen, fathers, buffalo ranchers, and dreamers. It does feel subversive to flout the professionals and make a thing yourself. Our nostrils inhaled the lemony-sweet scent of boiling whey. The steamy heat of the kitchen curled our hair, as new textures and flavors began to rise before us as possibilities: mascarpone, fromagina, mozzarella. Remote possibilities, maybe. That many successes in one day still seemed unlikely.

At lunch break I checked out the wildly colorful powder room, where a quote from Alice in Wonderland was painted on the wall:

“‘There’s no use trying,’ Alice said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’

“‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”

It’s fair to admit, I wasn’t a complete novice. I had already been making cheese for a few years, ordering supplies and cultures from Ricki and following the recipes in her book. It wasn’t only a spirit of adventure that led my family into this line of cooking, but also bellyaches. Lactose intolerance is a common inherited condition in