Nathalie Bouffe

Meeting Heroes: Madness and Cheese

Irish cheesemakers are a funny, gnarled breed of fighters.  Those who’ve made West Cork their home have chosen an area of undeniable beauty; rolling green hills that tumble into a lapping, tender sea.  The rough-cut landscape of westernmost West Cork carves peninsulas that stretch out of Ireland like fingers, and these cheesemakers live on the green and rocky tassels of what is already the fringe, making cheeses that taste incontestably of the sea.  They have banded together to fight any adversity that dares head their way: funky bacteria, unreasonable laws, ignorant auditors.  Over the thirty years of their struggle, they have become some of the most well-informed, highly organized, voluble, eloquent and compelling of the cheesemakers in the British Isles. 

Because West Cork is wet, most of them make washed-rind cheeses.  Washed-rinds are generally recognizable as pinky-brown, sticky, squidgy, stinky wheels covered more in moist bacteria than dry, powdery mold (like a Camembert or Brie might), although if it’s been a while since its last washing, the cheese might feel dry to the touch and look brown, like an Appenzeller or Comte (both of which are technically washed-rind cheeses that just don’t get washed very often—towards the end of their maturation they are dry-salted instead, so the outside gets crusty and hard).  The bacteria known as B. linens (the name we’ve given to the sticky pink stuff) thrives in humid environments and by the sea, which explains the prevalence—and excellence—of the many West Cork washed-rinds.  Indeed, Veronica Steele of Milleens, one of the first cheesemakers in this area of then-undiscovered terroir, tried at first to make a hard, cheddar-style cheese, but as it kept being colonized by B. linens, she eventually gave in to the stuff and ever since has been proud to make some of the loveliest, pinkest, stinkiest literalizations of West Cork’s terrain and sea air. 

Berkswell Near and Far

On my way to visit Linda Dutch at Berkswell I met two old gentlemen in the farm lane.  They tottered on canes, both, they wore button-down navy cardigans over striped polos over what, even as an American, I'd call trousers.  Pleated.  One was ghostly white and flat-haired; the other, bristly and brown. 

The first asked haltingly if I knew what the sheep in the fields were used for.  "Cheese," I said.  "Berkswell cheese."  They'd never heard of it.  "Taste a piece," I offered.  I'd brought some up from London to have Linda try; it's always nice for cheesemakers to taste the finished product, as few ever do once it leaves the farm. 

The piece was sweaty and had soaked the grease-proof paper but they both closed their eyes to enjoy it, as if revisiting a buried memory.  "Can I get this in the village?" one of the gentlemen asked.  I supposed so, but I wasn't sure.  "You're American, aren't you?" the other one wondered.  "I'm going to visit my son in Philadelphia next week."

Well, I never.  Now at least he knows where to find Berkswell in Philadelphia...

(not philadelphia)

Short Stories about British Cheese

Funny thing, fame.  Hard to know when or where it’ll hit, what haphazard celestial logic plucks the chosen ones from the chaff.  Some people seek it out, bartering sex, principles or money for column inches…and then there are those whose notoriety suddenly materializes, fashions itself without their permission: lightning strikes them twice, or doctors remove a tumor the size of a microwave from their backside, or they unexpectedly birth octuplets.  Or they make a famous cheese.

Charles Martell, I think we’d agree, is rather unlikely a choice for infamy.  A zoologist turned cattle truck driver turned farmer, he became passionate about a local, ancient breed of cow known as the Old Gloucester, brownish-black, white-striped animals suited beautifully to both milk and meat, but especially cheesemaking (high casein content, small fat globules).  Only 68 were left by 1973, when Martell revived the Gloucester Cattle Society, defunct for over fifty years.  Today, thanks to the good work of Martell and fellow enthusiasts (and boy are cattle people enthusiasts), 719 Old Gloucester cows graze contentedly in pastures from East Anglia to Cornwall.

ENTERING KIRKHAMSHIRE

I realized with a gulp as I checked my bank balance at Euston station after paying for my ticket to Lancaster that I had 40 pence to my name, meant to last me til Friday (mongers, I'd be willing to wager, are far more likely to know the start date of the next pay period than that of their own menstrual period).  Graham had mentioned a cheap B&B, and I was intending to pay for drinks and dinner.  A significant problem, we'll agree, was at hand. 

(Ironically, the nearest person to me at the time was none other than Richard Goddamn Branson, who was posing for a photo op near the ticket office.  I tried to avoid drowning both of us in the flood of rejection slips that spouted from the cash machine). 

Wisdom holds that the farther up England you go, the nicer people become.  Well, Martin Tkalez hails from Morden, but other than that, the theory seems to stick.  When I got to Preston, Graham told me sheepishly that the cheap B&B was full, so he'd made a reservation at a slightly posher one, down the road.  And paid for it.

Well, slap me on the bottom and call me Betsy, I do know how to wield a credit card properly and told him so in no uncertain terms, but he'd have none of it, bless.

I was on my way up north to see Martin Gott's new lambs, new cheese room and new baby, and to go shooting with Graham Kirkham, a man who, when I first met him, must have spoke for forty minutes before I understood a single word he said.  To get a feel for the Lancashire accent, imagine the offspring a Canadian park ranger, Dallas cheerleader, and Glasgow cabbie would produce after nine months spent stuck in an elevator.  Add the laugh of a rhino and the heart of an angel and you've pretty much got Graham Kirkham, sine qua non.  I called him from the train station.  "Where are you?" I said.  "I'll come and get you," he answered.  "Oh shit, wait, I've still got my smelly wellies on.  Forget it.  You come here, it's too embahrahssing!"  When I climbed into the refrigerated van, I was too excited to speak properly.  "What are we going to shoot?" I asked him.  "GIRLIE, WE'RE GOING TO SHOOT THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYTHING!" roared Kirkham.  He's way louder in person than over the phone.

Making Mont d'Or

Every affineur and cheesemaker in France, it seemed, was in Paris on Monday for the Salon d’Agriculture. All except Monsieur Rousselet, president of the Longueville-Mont d’Or cheese cooperative. His wife was cadgy about why, and wheedled about before giving us an appointment in the afternoon. “It all depends how he’s feeling,” she said finally. “You see, he’s just had another round of chemo.”

We pulled up to the cooperative, blaring the Dead, stretched our legs and breathed in the sunshine glinting off the vast expanse of snow. Tiny skiers in one-piece quilted suits lobbed across the Mont d’Or like bright, slow-motion ping-pong balls on a massive white table.  It was a few minutes before M. Rousselet hobbled briskly up to us, a daft giant of a man with a fat, smooth head under a porkpie hat. He accepted Mateo’s cheese with amiable surprise—“Américain? Vraiment?”—and invited us in.

Mont d’Or production is exclusively cooperative-based; farmhouse production no longer exists and is in fact forbidden. “Except one renegade,” winked M. Rousselet. “My brother-in-law. Morbier man by trade. Makes Mont d’Or sometimes too. Sells it all on markets. How long are you staying? Hm, too bad…”  

What followed was the cleverest, most technically apt display of resourcefulness we’d witness all trip. The man and his brain trust had rigged up four tipping vats that spilled curd onto a table packed tight with forms. Men holding spade-like tools raked the curd over until the surface became level, which meant the forms were all equally full. Grouped in packs of sixteen so they could all be picked up at once, the forms were then racked and left to drain. Made-to-order trolleys and dollies askew littered the vast, deserted tile like android soldiers waiting idly for battle.

Gilt Ain't Gold

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Deep in the gorgeous heart of Gloucestershire sprawls a massive country estate that spends its decades slowly trickling through the various grubby hands of earls and archdukes, bankers and industrialists. At the moment, it’s held by a manufacturing heir and his wife, to whom society pages enjoy referring snarkily as “a former air hostess."  In the last few years they have transformed the old farming buildings—barn, pigsty, hayloft—into a muted fawn-and-cream paean to genteel country life.

My friend Jack makes cheddar there under conditions that would make most cheesemakers swoon until they fairly swam in their own drool. Milk from organically-pampered cows gets pumped the few dozen meters from the milking parlor to the cheese room. Jack, given carte blanche to design the cheese room, ordered wooden Dutch cheese presses that work on a pulley system and beautiful barrel-vaulted vats in which the water meant to heat the milk swishes around a thin exterior jacket made of fitted slats of wood held together by the water pressure.

Jack’s colleagues occupy similarly privileged positions. When we wake at 5:30 in fog so thick and cold so blistering that walking feels like maneuvering blindly through a frozen cloud, the bread bakers are already peering anxiously into their glowing ovens, spritzing moisture at the crusts of lovely rye bloomers and rising ciabattas (gluten-free). As our milk trickles into the vats, the arriving pâtissiers throw jagged chunks of bittersweet organic chocolate and bricks of farm butter into gigantic bain-maries, then make themselves Monmouth lattes. Jack’s helpers Pauline and Rose show up, shaking frost off, as does Pierre, the estate’s French yogurt-maker.  

One of the cows on the estate was recently pegged as a TB reactor, so Jack has no choice but to pasteurize until further notice. A TB reactor does not necessarily signify TB in the herd—in fact no lesions were found on the slaughtered beast—but it raises hell with the EHO, and has virtually paralyzed Jack’s cheesemaking. His pasteurizer, unused for years, processes milk so slowly that Jack’s only filling half a vat despite prolonging his already-lengthy day by two hours. 

Sure, no one wants foot-and-mouth. But it’s funny how frightened people are of unpasteurised cheese, which is a.) not less safe than pasteurized cheese and b.) safe, goddamn it already. More people die from eating badly-washed salad and drinking funky water than from eating cheese—I’ve hard, in fact, that it’s the safest food after honey.

Yes, pasteurisation kills pathogenic bacteria that may be present in unclean milk. But it also kills the inoculating, flavor-producing bacteria, effectively offering a clean slate for pathogens that happen to sneak in post-pasteurisation—that the ‘good’ bacteria would probably eliminate were it still around.

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It’s a crazy place, this estate. The shop sells everything from gluten-free highland muesli and organic homeopathic moon drops to scythes emblazoned with the estate’s logo (who uses a scythe to garden with? An embossed scythe???), ridiculously costly stumps of petrified wood, and, in a converted hay barn building, a complete line of muted, earth-toned linen tunics and discreet wraparound skirts specially designed for the estate. Oh, and Doga, a book about yoga for dogs.

I’ve heard swags of stories about this place and its owners, each more outré than the last, but this one takes the cake. Allegedly, the lady behind this grass-fed organic madness decided she wanted garlands of Parma hams to festoon the farm shop, so each week she had eleven flown up from Italy on her private plane. Naturally, the shop couldn’t sell eleven Parma hams, so at the end of the week, they were all thrown out to make way for the following week’s shipment. Très sustainable, signora. Other whispers snidely recount her purchasing a bushel of gorgeous melons on sale at a shop in….well, somewhere nice (the family owns extraordinary homes in most of the pretty corners of the world). She bought them all and had them air-lifted to the farmshop. When the managers costed out the price of the melons, they realized they’d have to charge ₤45 per melon to break even. Of course, no one bought any. All the lovely melons rotted away. 

Master Craftsman Francois Pralus, And A Whole Load Of Nathalie's Bullshit

To be honest, I don’t really have much recollection of my visit to Francois Pralus'. I was so overcome with appetite and awe and desire the whole time I was there that I took no notes and paid little attention to anything other than what I was looking at, listening to, or, mainly, tasting at any particular moment. When I call my time there to mind, fragments of sweet-smelling, over-bubbling machines swim blurrily into place, but mainly what drifts through my memory is my mind-state throughout the visit— breathless, transfixed, thoroughly mesmerized, and ravenously hungry..

The first thing that happened was Valérie from Hervé Mons (another tremendous visionary of a craftsman that I won’t even try to cubby into place by writing down) taking us to a dingy post-war cube of a building that exuded such a riveting smell that Katie and I clutched at each other desperately.

Inside, I remember a quiet whirring of old machines, the sound dough makes when one punches it, the noise of a knife mashing butter in a metal bowl and the gentle trickle of crushed cocoa beans falling through spread fingers. A tall man with curly white hair and architect’s glasses coming forward to shake our hands and take us through his chocolate factory: the rooms in which the canvas sacks of cocoa he selects from single estates all over the world are stored, roasted, ground, and conched for three days until they morph into chocolate.

Neither book nor movie Wonka, actually, accurately represents the work of today’s chocolatier. Oompa-Loompas and facetiousness aside, what I mean is that most famous artisans du chocolat do not make chocolate. They are called fondeurs and they buy raw product, usually from Valrhona, and melt it (fondre is the verb for melt) to use as their base for whipping up whatever confections we celebrate them for. Because it is difficult and time-consuming and one needs special equipment and know-how and it’s fucking hard enough just to confection chocolate, most people leave it to experts like Valrhona to roast the beans and conch the cocoa, then buy the raw product from them and go on from there.

Not Francois. Frustrated at the lack of options for fondeurs, fueled by a hunger for travel and a bit of an iconoclast to boot, he decided to give roasting a go. His father’s candy factory in Roanne made (and still makes) the town’s classic Praluline, a divine butter brioche studded and spangled with almonds and hazelnuts that’ve bubbled awhile in boiled pink sugar. He had a base from which to work, then, and wasted no time in sourcing the best beans from around the world and sending them to France. The chocolate world is notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to professional secrets, but trial and error led him to his own methods. He only ever uses criollo and trinitario strains of cocoa (the best for chocolate-making, even if they are rare and much harder to grow), chosen from small plantations in places like Venezuela and the Ivory Coast and Madagascar, where he has now set up his own plot of cocoa-been trees.

Comté Country: Part II

A drawbridge leads into a mountain.  But the mountain is hollowed out.  And in it live 65,000 wheels of Comté with their keeper, Claude.

The fort is a veritable library, filled with cheese rather than books.  Row after row, impossibly stacked, perpetually regular, teeming with mold, a cache, a vault, a catacomb.  It’s musty and cold and damp; spiderwebs hang off shelves; stalactites dangle from the blasted stone ceiling. 

Whistling, officious machines turn the cheeses electronically and dry-salt them; every cheese is turned, brushed and salted every week.  Every board (over 100,000) is changed every year by the fifteen workers that spend their time in the fort.  Only twelve cheesemakers in the region store cheese there; Bobillé makes up about ten percent of its stock.

The Fort is Marcel Petite’s.  The man after which it is named started out as a Comté cheesemaker who then turned to affinage, and before he died he penned some memoirs through which I flipped before lunch.  In them he recounts that one day when he was small, a vagrant came to the house pleading dinner.  His mother fed the man, who thanked her and said he’d come back a year later.  He did.  But this time he laid down the equivalent of 30 years of Marcel’s father’s salary down on the kitchen table and told the family he was a distant relative, lacking kin, who wanted to bequeath his money to the family members most deserving.

Petite’s first caves were in Pontarlier, but he acquired the Fort St-Antoine, an old stone garrison built a century and a half ago, in 1966. 

Comté Country: Part I

I might as well have been awakened by a cowbell, that’s how pastoral the scene appeared.  Rollercoasting meadows with on the fringes ripped-up clods of earth, the grass their scrabbed-out green fur.  The sky an infinity of blue. 

Bobillé and his wife live in Chapelle d’Huin amidst this splendor, have for many years.  And while I’m sure they know it’s nice, I doubt they’ve much time to think about it.  Making cheese, after all, is rather on the extreme side of time-intensive activities.

Bobillé wakes up every day at four in the morning and drives to fourteen farms in the neighborhood, collecting milk.  The farms have between 20 and 80 Montbéliard cows each, and Bobillé carefully notes how much each stop adds to the tank; at the end of the year, the profits will be divided proportionally amongst the farmers.

Unlike Swiss dairy farmers, whose ties to their milk are severed as soon as it pours into the vat, cowherds in the Jura have a vested interest in tasty cheesemaking: better cheese fetches higher profits for them to share.  They are the ones responsible for hiring a cheesemaker, who alchemizes their milk into cheese, but ultimately, the quality of a cheese depends on the quality of the milk that makes it, so they make sure to treat their cows nicely.

Alpage Comté means cheeses made in summer, when the cows browse alpine pastures for the 580 species of flora available for mastication: grains, legumes and wildflowers, medicinal plants and aromatics.  Typically a Montbéliard’s summer diet includes 150 different things; in winter, the cows eat hay and grains, producing cheese less nuanced.  They’re still a class apart, though—when asked whether the cows ever eat silage the man overseeing deliveries cries out “Never!”  He looks horrified.

'Twas Poacher's Delight Every Saturday Night

 

“‘Twas Poachers delight every Saturday night to feast on what he pleased.

With cunning and guile, this gentleman of style went out for his pound of cheese…”

—Lincolnshire folksong

The strangest thing about cheddar-style cheese Lincolnshire Poacher is the land from which it derives.  To the east is the ocean; to the west, the fens, a flat beige-and-brown patchwork quilt of rapeseed and flax, wheat and cattle beans.  It ain’t exactly Somerset, but Tim and Simon Jones, the fourth generation of farmers cultivating Ulceby Grange (on fields a bit lusher and hillier than fenland), took over their father’s dairy herd, and, thirteen years ago, decided to make cheese with the milk.