If it’s all the same to you, Mother Noella Marcellino would rather you didn’t call her the cheese nun. It’s true that she makes cheese—a New England variation on the unctuous Saint-Nectaire of Auvergne. And, yes, she lives in a Benedictine cloister, the Abbey of Regina Laudis, in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Were you to point out that she just finished filming a documentary in France called “The Cheese Nun,” you would not be incorrect. Yet when Noella thinks of herself, which seems to happen only rarely, she does so in terms both more scientific and more spiritual: as an authority on cheese molds, or as a singer of gospel and Gregorian chant. One of her best friends was a blues musician, but that can give rise to its own misconceptions. She was a little miffed, a few years ago, when a French newspaper ran a story headlined “she does research by day and sings blues in the churches of the jura by night.”
Mother Noella has spent twenty-nine of her fifty-one years in the abbey. Although she has occasionally been given permission to travel, she must spend all other nights and many hours of daily prayer behind the wooden scrims and walls of the cloister. In 1985, she took her final vows to remain at Regina Laudis for the rest of her life, earning the title of Mother. Yet her secular interests have only widened and deepened over the years. This winter she is completing a Ph.D. in microbiology, even as she helps shepherd the country through a culture war of an unusual sort: a war of cheese.
The United States has long produced more cheese than any other country: eight and a half billion pounds in 2001 alone, enough to stuff the Sears Tower, like an enormous celery stick, four times over. But for nearly a century that tower of curd has been a purely industrial product—formulated, manufactured, extruded, and dispensed with the kind of machinery usually reserved for making plastic. Only in the past fifteen years has a generation of former lawyers and first-time farmers, dot-com dropouts and back-to-the-landers begun to develop true artisanal cheeses. “American cheesemaking is where winemaking was in the late nineteen-seventies,” the food writer Clark Wolf says. “Every time you taste something new, you’re shocked at how much better it is.” Cheesemakers like Willow Smart, in Milton, Vermont, are creating their own rural traditions—Smart treats her sheep homeopathically and uses llamas to protect them from coyotes—and rivalling Europeans for the first time. Outside Louisville, Kentucky, Judy Schad, of Capriole Farms, makes some of the finest goat cheeses in the world. “The French have seven hundred years of experience, they’ve got experimental cheese stations, and their milk supply is subsidized,” Schad says. “But my Mont St. Francis can kick a French Muenster all the way across the Atlantic.”
One essential ingredient in this success is easy to isolate: the raw milk in many artisanal cheeses, unlike the pasteurized milk used by Kraft or Borden, is alive with billions of bacteria. These cultures transform the cheese as it ages, breaking down fats and proteins and giving off esters and other compounds that are the building blocks of flavor and aroma. Of course, bacteria can have less salubrious effects, too: well into the last century, raw milk was a prime breeding ground for tuberculosis and typhoid. Consequently, the Food and Drug Administration has required that all store-bought milk be pasteurized (heated to a hundred and forty-five degrees for thirty minutes, or to a hundred and sixty-one degrees for fifteen seconds), and, since 1947, that all raw-milk cheeses be aged for at least sixty days. The assumption has been that pathogens can’t survive in the dry, acid environment of an aged cheese. But six years ago a small study in South Dakota found that Escherichia coli could survive the sixty-day limit in Cheddar, and the F.D.A. took part in a study to verify the results. Raw-milk cheese, the study warned, might have to be aged for more than sixty days to be safe—if it can be made safely at all.
The news was even more upsetting to Europeans than it was to Americans. Unaged raw-milk cheese is considered a birthright in France and Italy, yet even before the F.D.A.’s research was complete the United States began pushing for an international ban on raw-milk cheese. Cheesemakers responded by circulating petitions and forming advocacy groups, including a European raw-milk alliance and the International Coalition to Preserve the Right to Choose Your Cheese (now called the Cheese of Choice Coalition). They argued that raw milk is often healthier than pasteurized milk, and that cheese-borne illnesses are extremely rare. But it was hard to sway regulators with talk of tradition and “good bacteria.” What was needed was an ally of impeccable character and scientific standing, someone to whom cheesemakers could bring their microbial troubles and ask for guidance. What was needed was a cheese nun.
On a gusty morning in April, Mother Noella strode across the University of Connecticut campus at Storrs, her habit flapping and billowing behind her, her gait both stiff-backed and rollicking. Beneath her white wimple, her plump cheeks were flushed and she peered out with a kind of cockeyed glee. She’d warned me before the ride to the campus that she had a lazy eye, but I thought she was joking until I saw her squinting at the side-view mirror. “Don’t be nervous,” she said, grabbing the wheel as the car lurched into gear. “That’s my blind side anyway.” Now, after an eventful parallel-parking session, we were going to meet her doctoral adviser, David Benson. “You should have seen me on some of those nights commuting back to the abbey,” she said. “Midnight in downtown Hartford, after experiments with ether—that’s when it got really interesting.”
She let out a raucous laugh and bustled up the stairs of the molecular-and-cell-biology building, toward the labs that have served her as a kind of second cloister for the past ten years. She went past orange biohazard and radioactivity signs, past a virus lab that was off limits to pregnant women, and into a room cluttered with old beakers and calcium-crusted instruments. “The F.B.I. was all over the building next door after September 11th,” Benson said, ushering us into his office. “Someone left a sample of anthrax in one of the freezers.” He showed us a computer slide show, “Cheese Fungi: Cat Fur and Toad Skin,” full of fuzzy and warty-looking cheese rinds, frighteningly magnified. Then Noella took me over to her cubicle. She leafed through a pile of papers on the desk and pulled out a monograph from a recent issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology. N. Marcellino was listed as the first author. “There it is,” she said, pointing to a page-long list of molds, each associated with a French region and cheese. “There’s a story behind every one of those molds.”
For nearly a year in the mid-nineteen-nineties, Noella travelled through France on a Fulbright scholarship. She had wanted to study the history and ecology of French cheese caves, but the field proved so vast that she decided to focus on a single mold: Geotrichum candidum, the wrinkly white mold that encases some of the greatest French cheeses. How much, she wondered, did the mold vary from one cave to another? To find out, she crisscrossed the countryside in a secondhand Fiat. She would pull up to a ramshackle farm, introduce herself to a wary local cheesemaker, and ask for a sterile flask’s worth of his milk. If she was lucky, and he realized that she wasn’t after his secret recipe, he might take her into the underground chamber or natural cave where he ripened his cheese. “It helped that I was a nun,” she says. “But it helped even more that I was a cheesemaker.”
After nine months and nearly thirty thousand kilometres, Noella had collected a hundred and eighty samples. It took another two years to characterize the molds with genetic and biochemical tests, but the results more than justified the effort: the samples contained dozens of distinct strains of G. candidum. Noella had been making and selling cheese at the abbey for twenty years by then. She had always thought that there were good molds (like the white rind on Brie) and there were bad molds (like the bluish fuzz on old bread). But her research showed that those categories concealed whole bestiaries. Each strain had its own appetites, its own ecology, its own biochemical effects. And each mold produced a different cheese.
AFrenchman would hardly be surprised by such diversity—Charles de Gaulle acknowledged it forty years ago when he said, “How can anyone be expected to govern a country with two hundred and forty-six cheeses?” But to Americans it is a revelation. Decades of pasteurized and processed cheese have all but wiped clean our memory of cheese as a living culture, formed and flavored by the grasses in a pasture, the yeasts in the air, the bacteria in a barrel, the molds in a cave. But the new cheesemakers tend to be quick studies.
Last year, at a meeting of the American Cheese Society, in Louisville, Mother Noella and Mother Telchilde, who tends the abbey’s cows and has a Ph.D. in animal science, were asked to share their research results. “We brought our microscopes,” Noella says. “We thought we could set up in the hall and show the cheesemakers some molds for an hour and a half or so.” They ended up sitting in the hotel for seven hours. Cheesemakers came with hunks of rind and tales of infestation. They brought wheels of cheese that had been eaten through by scopulariopsis—an invasive fungus—and rinds that were overgrown by poils de chat, the dreaded hair-of-the-cat mold. “It was so touching,” Noella says. “These American cheesemakers had no one else to turn to.”
For the cheesemakers, though, the true heartaches weren’t over cheeses that had gone bad; they were over cheeses that they would never make—at least, not legally. Toward the end of the conference, Noella gave a talk in which she mentioned that her favorite cheese in the world is a Mont d’Or. Made in the high valleys of the Massif du Mont d’Or, on the border between France and Switzerland, this raw-milk cheese is so magnificently molten when ripe that it must be held together by strips of local spruce. Like many of the world’s finest cheeses, Mont d’Or can’t be sold in America; by the time the cheese has aged sixty days, it has dissolved into a puddle.
After Noella’s talk, a young Canadian cheesemaker with bleached-blond hair took her aside. Would she and Mother Telchilde like to come with him? He had something they might like to see. He led them to the hotel’s restaurant and through the kitchen, past teams of cooks and servers preparing for the evening rush, to the chef’s private office in the back. A few other guests joined them, and the sommelier brought a loaf of bread and a bottle of Bordeaux. Someone closed the door, and then the Canadian pulled out a small wrapped package and placed it on the table. “It was the Mont d’Or,” Noella recalls. “He had made it himself and hidden it away like contraband. It was his offering to us.”
The existence of a raw-milk underground has long been an open secret to certain epicures. The oozing Pont l’Évêque or Livarot, sold with a nudge and a wink at gourmet cheese shops; the reeking Epoisses, triple-wrapped and stashed in a Prada bag on the way through customs—these are emblems of devil-may-care sophistication nearly as clichéd as the flask of hooch in a Southern judge’s chambers. What has changed, in recent years, is the fact that some of these cheeses are now homegrown. Clark Wolf used to make a point of going to a certain farmstead whenever he was visiting friends in upstate New York. “There was a guy there who was making contraband raw-milk Camembert,” Wolf recalls. “It was incredibly good, but we always wondered if we’d be dead the next day.” The story conjures up images of back-alley cheese exchanges, of men running through forests carrying wheels of Brie on their shoulders, hounds baying at their heels. But when I tracked down the cheesemaker in question he’d gone on to computer programming. He was in the kitchen one day stirring curd, he said, when he saw a car with a federal insignia pull up outside. O.K., he thought, this is it. When the knock on the door came, it turned out to be a land surveyor, but the cheesemaker had had enough. “You just can’t live like that,” he said. “You can’t be an outlaw forever.”
In 1983, a reporter at the Times published an exposé on contraband cheese: he had gone to eight food shops in Manhattan, and had found unaged raw-milk Camemberts and Bries in every one. After that, the F.D.A. quickly clamped down on cheese importers. Yet no arrests were made or fines levied, and within a few years the market quietly revived. This spring, at Murray’s Cheese shop, in Greenwich Village, a raw-milk Camembert was perched on a mound of its pasteurized cousins, with a small sign stuck into it: “Get this before the F.D.A. does.” Other cheesemongers claim that heat-treated cheeses are really made of raw milk, just to inflate the price. Online, Fromages.com will send raw-milk cheeses from France to anyone with a credit card. When my shipment arrived by FedEx, the deliverywoman handed over the refrigerated box with evident relief. “Here’s your fromage,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
The cheeses were delectable, but it was hard to tell how much they owed to raw milk and how much to mere mystique. So one afternoon, not long ago, I went to visit Max McCalman, the maître fromager at the restaurant Picholine, the hushed inner sanctum of lactophilia in Manhattan. McCalman is lean and phlegmatic, with heavy brows, rumpled skin, and cheekbones so narrow that his eyes seem almost to round the corner. When he talks about cheese, he falls into an intense monotone, as if he were reciting an argument endlessly rehearsed while cutting more than a hundred and fifty thousand pounds of cheese (at last count) into one-ounce portions. McCalman prefers the term “uncompromised milk” to raw milk, and bears toward his charges the doomed and anxious love of a kindly orphanage director. “Cheese has suffered enough,” he says. “People just don’t understand it. They don’t know what it is.”
We were sitting at the back of the restaurant, in a small room with mahogany wine racks on four sides. In the corner was McCalman’s high-tech cheese cave: a large refrigerator kept at an unvarying forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, with around eighty-five per cent humidity. On a butcher block in the center of the room, and on two carts alongside, the night’s cheese selections were laid out: more than fifty noble slabs, towers, and pyramids, marbled and crumbling, like the ruins of an ancient metropolis. McCalman reached over and cut wedges from two Reblochon-style cheeses, one of pasteurized milk, the other of raw. We had done a few of these comparisons already, with the pasteurized invariably tasting milder, gummier, and less complex. But this time the difference was more elemental. The pasteurized version wasn’t bad, with its musty orange rind and rich ivory pâte. But the raw-milk Reblochon seemed to bypass the taste buds and tap directly into the brain, its sweet, nutty, earthy notes rising and expanding from register to register, echoing in the upper palate as though in a sound chamber. I thought of something one of the founders of the Cheese of Choice Coalition had said when I asked her what difference raw milk could possibly make: “One is a cheese; the other is an aria by Maria Callas.”
McCalman smiled sadly at the compromised Reblochon, as if at a three-legged dog. “I like all of our cheeses,” he said. “Even the pasteurized.” But when I asked him how old the raw-milk variety was, he frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it hasn’t been aged sixty days, but we’re not over here counting.” To eat a cheese like this was to participate in the preservation of a dying culture, he said. “It’s like the military policy: Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
There are those, it is true, who lack the courage and the conviction to risk their lives for a dairy product. But then raw-milk advocates don’t expect them to. Not really. McCalman says that Picholine serves about a ton of cheese every month, most of it unpasteurized, yet, in seven years as maître fromager, he hasn’t heard “so much as one complaint of a tummy ache.” It’s one of the perverse ironies of F.D.A. policy, he says, that raw-milk cheese is actually better for us than pasteurized: easier to digest and better at fending off contaminants.
To Mother Noella, the best symbol of this paradox is the sawed-off whiskey barrel in which she makes her cheese. Built from a few oak boards bound by a crude iron hoop, the barrel violates any number of food-safety principles and F.D.A. regulations, but her local dairy inspector has learned to let it slide. It’s more than a matter of tradition, Noella says; it’s a triumph of rustic microbiology.
Standing in the abbey’s dairy several weeks ago, Noella gazed down into the barrel’s open mouth, at the glistening surface of what looked like an enormous flan. “Cheese is the collective memory of France,” she told me, quoting a cheesemaker she once met. “No matter how extravagant or irrational its rituals seem, they usually have some practical purpose.” Earlier that morning, before Mass, two sisters had filled the barrel with fresh milk—still warm from the cows and butter-yellow from the spring grasses they had eaten. A few millilitres of rennet had gone in, and its enzymes, distilled from the lining of a calf’s fourth stomach, had done their work: the milk’s proteins, once as long and loose as a skein of wool, were knitted into an elegant matrix, riddled with pockets of watery whey.
I reached down and fished out a hunk of curd. At this stage, it tasted as bland as poached egg white. But beneath the surface bacteria were furiously consuming lactose and converting it into lactic acid. As the pH plummeted, the acid would fend off E. coli and other pathogens that can’t tolerate an acid environment. Most cheesemakers—even artisanal ones—add commercial cultures to their milk, just to help the process along. But Noella relies only on what’s already in the barrel. Like everyone at the abbey, she starts out with next to nothing and builds a rich existence from it.
When Noella left home, in 1969, her name was Martha Marcellino. She was the youngest daughter in a family of gifted, headstrong Italians—her brother John (Jocko) Marcellino co-founded the fifties-revival group Sha Na Na—and after four years of Catholic high school she was hungry for “the most radical place” she could find. She opted for Sarah Lawrence, which at the time gave neither exams nor grades. But, after a year of watching her classmates skip lectures and feed LSD to their cats, she was ready for something a little more structured. She had no idea how radical her choice would be.
“You don’t come ready-made to be a cloistered nun,” she says. “When you step behind that grille, it’s a shock to the body. It’s, like, Oh my God, what have I done?” On her first trip to the abbey, on a weekend retreat in 1970, she was most impressed by the nuns’ faith—the way they held to their vows, and to strict obedience, yet somehow seemed free. The abbey is a medieval place with a modern soul. The nuns are worldly and educated. (A number of them hold advanced degrees; one is a former movie star who gave Elvis his first onscreen kiss.) Yet their living areas are walled off from outsiders, and they sustain themselves on what they can grow and make on their three-hundred-and-sixty-acre farm. Seven Latin services punctuate the day, and in between the nuns work as beekeepers, cowherds, and blacksmiths; they make their own pottery, grow and blend their own herbal teas, raise their own hogs, and sell some of their products in a gift shop. As a postulant, Noella was given the task of milking the Holsteins. (The abbey now has Dutch Belted cows, which give richer milk and look a bit like they’re wearing habits themselves—black with a pure-white band around the belly.) Then, in 1977, she was asked to make the abbey’s cheese.
At first, the abbey’s pigs feasted on her mistakes. “It takes time to get it right, so the pigs had a lot of cheese,” she says. “I learned that flies could lay eggs and you would get maggots. Who knew? And I was using boards and bricks to press the cheese, so I’d get these big spongy, horrible things. So again: pigs.” Noella used to tell the Abbess that she was praying for an old Frenchwoman to come and show her how it was done. When Lydie Zawislak came to visit the abbey, it seemed like an act of Providence. Zawislak was from the Auvergne, in the Massif Central, and her grandmother had taught her how to make Saint-Nectaire. “We just spent day and night making butter and cheese,” Noella says. The barrel was Zawislak’s idea, as was the wooden paddle for stirring curd, with a cross-shaped hole in the center. Within a year, Noella was re-creating Saint-Nectaire in nearly every particular, even the color and taste of its rind. The molds of the Massif Central apparently had close cousins in the hills of Connecticut.
Noella might have gone on making cheese, without a thought to its microbiology, but in 1985 an unaged cheese made with raw milk was blamed for twenty-nine fatalities—mostly stillbirths—in Southern California. The cheese was contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, a bacterium that is often associated with food poisoning, which causes fever, aching muscles, and brief but violent stomach illness. When the F.D.A. subsequently cracked down on dairies across the country, one of the first victims was Noella’s wooden cheese barrel: the local inspector insisted that she trade it in for a stainless-steel vat. The nuns could simply have stopped selling their cheese and gone on making it the old way. Instead, they complied with the inspector and set about learning to defend their traditions scientifically. Four nuns were asked to get doctorates in key disciplines: microbiology, animal science, plant science, and agronomy.
“It was just terrifying,” Noella says. “I had been a nun for twelve years, I didn’t even have a bachelor’s degree, and my first course was algebra and trigonometry, things I’d avoided in high school.” To make matters worse, not long after the inspector’s visit something went horribly wrong at the abbey’s dairy. Instead of shrinking as they aged, the cheeses were swelling to the size of footballs and sometimes exploding. Noella took samples of milk and curd and tested them at the university. Then she swabbed every inch of the dairy kitchen, the equipment, the cows’ udders and the milkers’ hands, and ran tests again. The milk was clean enough to drink—its bad bacteria were too scarce to do any harm. But, soon after it went into the vat, it became infested with E. coli. Noella next made two batches of cheese—one in a stainless-steel vat, the other in a wooden barrel—and inoculated them with E. coli. The results were as clear as they were counter-intuitive. In the cheese from the sterile vat, E. coli populations thrived even after the cheese had ripened; in the cheese from the wooden barrel, they gradually died off.
“What was happening was that good bacteria were growing in the wood,” Noella explained, when she told me this story at the dairy. “It was like a sourdough culture that you keep on using, and it was driving off the E. coli.” She reached into the barrel and dredged up a ragged white slab of curd, then plopped it into a round beechwood mold. The curd had been cut and stirred, releasing its pockets of whey and settling to the bottom. Now it had to be pressed by hand in order to fill the mold to capacity, then placed in a mechanical press. Noella bent over and pushed the heels of her hands into the curd, leaning into the motion until pale streams of whey trickled from the mold. Years of this kind of work, of squeezing udders every morning and carrying buckets of milk up and down stairs, had given her carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists, and she had already had surgery a number of times. “The instinct is to move around,” she said, keeping her hands steady despite the pain. “But it’s better not to. ‘Restez là,’ Lydie always said.” Stay where you are.
This past spring, Mother Noella, Mother Telchilde, and a committee of other cheese experts began to map out a scientific strategy for defending raw-milk cheese. The whiskey-barrel story may have convinced Noella’s inspector, but she knew that it wouldn’t pass muster with the F.D.A. The agency leans toward zero tolerance in matters of food safety, and it makes no exceptions for cloisters. Government scientists have finished the first half of their cheese study, and the news isn’t good. They’ve made raw-milk Cheddar under typical dairy conditions and inoculated it with strains of E. coli which have been associated with outbreaks. The doses were roughly a hundred to ten thousand times higher than would ordinarily be found in a natural cheese, so it is not surprising that the bacteria survived the aging process. But the F.D.A. spokesman I talked to seemed to draw broader conclusions. “Sixty days does not render the product pathogen-free,” he said.
The next phase of the study will show whether lower doses of bacteria fare as well. But in a sense the F.D.A. already has an answer. Government statistics show that cheese is among the safest foods on the market—far less likely to make you sick than chicken, beef, pork, eggs, fish, or even vegetables. It’s true that most of the cheeses covered by that statistic were pasteurized. Yet between 1948 and 1988 aged raw-milk cheese caused only one outbreak of disease in the United States, while pasteurized cheese caused five outbreaks. Catherine Donnelly, a professor of food microbiology at the University of Vermont and an expert on Listeria, spent a year reviewing the epidemiological literature at the behest of the Cheese of Choice Coalition. “Aged raw-milk cheeses have enjoyed a remarkable safety record,” she concluded this spring. When an outbreak does occur, it’s usually caused by a cheese that became contaminated after it was pasteurized.
Pasteurization has its place, of course. For a raw-milk cheese to be safe, it has to go straight from cow to curd to consumer, with impeccable hygiene every step of the way. That’s fine for a French farmer with a village market down the road, or for an American with a few Jerseys and a lot of FedEx boxes. But it’s not so good for Kraft. Cheesemaking will always be an industrial business in America—the geography as much as the culture dictates it. There’s no margin for holding raw milk in a tanker while it crosses South Dakota, no guarantee that one sloppy farmer won’t taint a thousand cheeses when his milk is mixed in at the factory.
The real question, then, is how and where to make exceptions. Should an American cheesemaker be able to make a Mont d’Or if her standards are high enough? Most scientists agree that after sixty days almost any cheese is safe. But before that the risks begin to rise. “People always say, ‘Where are the bodies?’ ” Rusty Bishop, the director of the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research, says. “The bodies are in France.” In the past seven years, ten people have died after being infected by Listeria in unaged French cheeses, and many thousands more have suffered stomach illnesses. Unlike an aged Cheddar, a Mont d’Or is high in moisture and low in acidity—an ideal breeding ground for bacteria, good and bad. “I mean, there is nothing about those cheeses that would inhibit pathogens,” Donnelly says.
Still, a curious thing happens when you talk to cheese experts. They start by gravely intoning morbidity statistics and bacteria counts. But as soon as you ask whether they themselves would eat an unaged cheese their worries seem to evaporate. “Absolutely!” Richard Koby, a lawyer for the Cheese Importers Association of America, told me. “And I’ve gotten sick before.” Bishop says that he regularly eats unaged cheese in France, but he jokes that he always disinfects it with plenty of wine. And Donnelly, who keeps a boat called Sailmonella on Lake Champlain, could bring herself to pass up raw-milk cheese only when she was pregnant. “You know what?” she says. “It’s really good.”
It comes down to defining reasonable risk—something Americans have never been very good at. On the same day that Max McCalman worried about the demise of raw-milk cheese, restaurants around the city were serving oysters on the half shell. Raw shellfish causes fifty times as many illnesses as cheese, yet diners have learned to live with that risk. They weigh guaranteed pleasure against potential pain, and if it’s fall or winter, when oysters are least likely to be contaminated, they casually order a dozen. If the F.D.A. were to allow it, we might develop the same offhand calculus for cheese. We’d come to trust certain farmsteads, whether their cheeses are aged or not, and when in doubt choose pasteurized cheese. The alternative would be to stick to Cheez Whiz, and its worrisome list of chemical additives, or avoid cheese entirely. If you can’t stand a little risk, as one microbiologist put it, shoot the cow.
Inside the abbey’s cheese cave—a corner of a basement in the house beside the dairy—the walls are lined with wooden racks filled with ripening wheels. The air smells of wet earth, but it’s really something more peculiar: geosmin, a chemical compound produced by G. candidum. Noella showed me where the mold grew on some of the older cheeses, wrinkling the surface as if it were a fine linen shirt. Then she took down a younger wheel, still plump and yellow but topped with a wispy crop of white hairs. She put the wheel under a microscope and twiddled the knobs for a moment, then moved aside to let me see. A field of ghostly dandelions hovered into view, each crowned with a perfect sphere of black spores. “They’re beautiful,” I told her, and she laughed. “That’s the spirit. But if you were making Reblochon you’d kill yourself.”
This was the hair-of-the-cat mold, the cheesemaker’s bane. The spores in a single stalk could infest a cave within a matter of hours, leaping from wheel to wheel on the lightest currents of air. Wherever they landed, they would take root in the curd, digesting proteins and secreting bitter peptides. “They call it la bête noire,” Noella said. She had once known a woman in the French Alps whose Reblochon was so badly infested that she called in an expert from the local dairy school. This was in the Haute-Savoie, where cheesemakers trace a cross in their curd before cutting it, and science is never far removed from religion. “I can’t help you,” the expert said. “You’ve been visited by un mauvais sort”—a bad spell. The only remedy was to call in a priest and have him exorcise the cave.
And yet in the right place, on the right wheel of cheese, the same mold could change from a curse to a blessing. In Noella’s cheese, the bitter peptides would be digested by G. candidum, and the two molds would join forces in breaking down fats and proteins, transforming the chewy curd into a tender pâte. Like a continent evolving in rapid motion, the ripening rind would be invaded by wave after wave of new species, turning from gold to gray to a mottled brown. The cat hairs would sprout up like ancient ferns, then topple and turn to a velvet compost for their successors. The penicillium molds would arrive, their stalks too fine to be seen under a standard microscope, and put down pillowy patches of the palest gray. Then, at last, a faint-pink blush would spread across the surface like a sunset: Trichothecium roseum, the flower of the molds.
“St. Benedict had a vision, just before he died, in which he saw the whole world in a ray of light,” Noella said. “For me, that’s what it’s like to see through a microscope. You look at the rind of a cheese and there’s a whole world there.” Every dairy, every cheese cave, has its own specific ecology. Every handful of soil, no matter how ordinary, contains more biodiversity than a rain forest. That was the great lesson of her doctoral research. In just seven French dairies, she found eighteen unique strains of G. candidum. (The abbey’s strain is more vigorous than all but one of them. “I’m so proud of my fungus,” Noella said.) Most dairies never tap into this native genius. They dose their milk with prepackaged bacteria and spray their cheeses with generic molds, never guessing that their local soil may hold the secret to the next Roquefort or Gruyère—to an American cheese as inimitable as a Baldwin apple or a Concord grape.
Noella pulled a perfectly ripe wheel from the shelf and put it under the microscope.
Cheesemaking is a kind of Eucharist, she likes to think, transforming the simplest material into a transcendent food—“milk’s leap toward immortality,” as the essayist Clifton Fadiman put it. But ripening is really more like prayer. You repeat an ancient formula as faithfully as possible, then you wait for something extraordinary to happen—for a visitation that is never guaranteed.
It’s tempting to imagine what wonders Noella might conjure, given the same freedom as the French. But that’s too much to hope for, even for a nun. “I can’t sit around here dreaming about new cheeses,” she said. Beneath the microscope’s lens, the last wave of settlers was arriving: four pearlescent spheres, perched on twitchy, hairlike legs, traversing the fields of mold like Conestoga wagons. “Cheese mites,” Noella said. She took a straw brush and swept the surface clean, then handed the wheel to me. “Don’t worry,” she said. “They say they always pick the best cheese.” ♦
No comments:
Post a Comment