Best Food Writing 2011

by Holly Hughes

  And in the world of the consumer? Well, who in that world could refuse to buy an itsy-beany, teeny-weeny, slender greeny Broccolini®?

  A TOMME AT TWIG FARM

  By Eric LeMay

  From Immortal Milk

  In a recent essay for the literary magazine Alimentum, poet and essayist Eric LeMay calls for food writing that “gives us stories about food that let us live more fully.” Immortal Milk puts that theory into practice: it’s less a food history than a manifesto of cheese passion.

  To call Michael Lee a cheesemaker feels like a lie.

  If you met him on his farm in West Cornwall, Vermont, and saw his sun-worn Red Sox cap and rustic smile, you’d think he’d sprung from the local tunbridge soil. But you’d also notice his barn was painted a funky chartreuse and you’d glimpse the abstract tattoo on his bicep and you’d start wondering if maybe he wasn’t a displaced Soho hipster.

  Later, as you strolled with him through patches of juniper, goldenrod, trefoil, and clover and tasted the stems he casually plucked and handed to you as he described western Vermont’s wind and rain patterns or its limestone, you’d think he was a horti-geometeorologist. But when you squatted alongside his goat Crab Cake and followed his index finger as he detailed the ideal goat haunch or explained the benefits of dehorning kids in late winter to avoid flies, you’d decide he was an expert in animal husbandry.

  Until, that is, you listened to him enthuse about the molecular separation of curds and whey, which would make you think he was a chemist. Though when you entered his aging cave and felt the ammonia hit your nose and marveled at the hundreds of cheese lining the walls in neat military rows, you’d wonder if he wasn’t something of a mad scientist, creating moldy little monsters in his underground lab. After all, you’d watch him work with a strange mixture called “morge” and you’d hear him address each cheese as “you.”

  But Michael Lee is a cheesemaker. And if you ask him what it takes to make cheese, he won’t say you need a working knowledge of ecology, gastronomy, veterinary medicine, or any of the other subjects he slides into with ease. He’ll say you need one thing: “Imagination.”

  “Tradition” is the answer you’d expect.

  Read up on any celebrated cheese, a Comté or Parmigiano-Reggiano, and you’re likely to learn about medieval shepherds pounding up mountains or farmers tucked away in remote villages, making the cheese of their fathers’ fathers’ fathers. In these stories, tradition means quality. Tradition means that a cheese comes from generations of cheesemakers who have refined their recipe over centuries until it’s reached perfection. Tradition also means trouble if, like Michael Lee, you’ve been making cheese since 2005. A few years isn’t much of a start, much less a tradition. Not that Michael isn’t up for tradition’s demands. He’s looking toward a life on Twig Farm.

  “I like to joke that I’ve got a thirty-year plan here,” he said in an interview that took place right after he started. “I’m going to do this for thirty years, then I’m either going to pass it on or hang it up.”

  Joke or no joke, his plan impresses me. I can’t imagine a job I’d tick off in years (“One down,” laughs Michael, “twenty-nine to go”), but that’s his point: A cheesemaker thrives on imagination. And Michael imagined the whole of his operation before he began it. He imagined the design of the house, the barn, the cave, and, even though he insists that he makes only three cheeses—a tomme, a washed rind, and a groovy semisoft he calls “square cheese”—when you look around his aging shelves, you’ll spot all sorts of experiments tucked away in the corners; these are cheeses he’s still imagining into being. The latest of them is the “fuzzy wheel,” a cheese he’s based on his washed rind, but instead of washing it, he lets it grow a fuzzy gray mold. After a few weeks, it looks like a leukemia-ridden cat. It’s delicious.

  The fuzzy wheel was what inspired Chuck and me to visit Michael at Twig Farm. We had tried it at Formaggio, where Michael once worked and where it bested the other American goat cheeses we sampled, from Maine to Oregon. It has a bright burst up front that rounds into rocky earth. That complexity is rare enough in an American cheese, but the fuzzy wheel also has a singular taste, which is what I kept saying, “It’s so singular,” because I couldn’t pinpoint what makes it singular. I pestered [my girlfriend] Chuck for an answer.

  “What makes it so singular?”

  “Not sure,” Chuck thoughtfully chewed.

  “Here,” I said, handing her my piece, “try it again.”

  Chuck tried it again. And again, until she’d swiped my fuzzy wheel, but we never figured out what it was. Now we know. Michael’s cheese is untraditional. It tastes fresh, unfettered, uniquely its own. You might say it’s imaginative.

  “What’s our shoe size?”

  Our first words from Michael weren’t about tradition, imagination, or the complexities of cheese, but footwear.

  Michael has a lot of shoes. He has rubber clogs for his cave, squeaky boots for his cheesemaking, shitkickers for his pastures. We must have seen him change shoes seven or eight times while we were with him. He even has shoes for fixing lunch. The shoes make sense once you see the care he takes to keep his milk clean and cheese pure. His barn has swept corners, his curd knives gleam, and the concrete walls of his cave look freshly poured, despite the dank air. Michael makes surgeons look like slobs.

  We didn’t know that yet, but we dutifully gave him our shoe sizes and put on the clogs he keeps for guests. We then scrubbed up and followed him into the cave, where he set us to work turning cheese.

  “You can do the least damage this way,” he assured us.

  Chuck shot me a look. She worries in worst cases (“What if, when I’m in the cave, I sneeze?”), so I knew that as soon as Michael cast our work as potential damage, she’d start fretting. I nodded at her, with more confidence than I felt, and, with a crinkled brow, she began turning the square cheese. I got the tommes.

  Cheese needs turning because, as it ages, its moisture sinks. Turning it keeps its texture and taste balanced. I found the work repetitive—down the rows you go, making tops bottoms and bottoms tops—but not boring. You’re squatting, craning, and torquing to reach the cheeses at the backs of the shelves, so you’re happily aware of your body. You also get to see the way a cheese ages over several weeks, almost in time-lapse photography. Some cheeses splotch and mottle, others grow uniformly dark, but all of them could be objets d’art and, taken together, create an installation you might find at MoMA. They feel cool, too. The tommes are sticky and dense, like diving bricks. And your hands gradually develop their own layer of mold as you move from cheese to cheese. Before long, you’re leaving your prints on the rinds.

  And your rhythmic turning, along with the cave’s dreamy light, the whir of its cooling fan, and its ammonia-laden air, all lead to a state of mind in which you want to wax about what it might mean to make an imaginative cheese, even after you’ve finished turning your tommes and Michael gives you your next job.

  “Use this squeegee and work along the floor, wiping up the cheese goobers.”

  As I wiped up the cheese goobers, by which Michael meant the bits of cheese that come off the rinds as you wash them, I came to this conclusion: If you’re an imaginative cheesemaker, you might have mixed feelings about tradition.

  You’d value tradition, of course, and you’d certainly need it. From where else would you get the knowledge to make your cheese? But tradition also might stifle you, not because you’d want to defy it and start making “imaginative” cheeses in zucchini skins or out of badger milk, but because tradition wants to preserve the past. Tradition asks you to inherit what’s known, maintain it, and carry it forward, whereas imagination wants to create. Imagination asks you to discover what’s still possible. If you’re an imaginative cheesemaker, tradition might cramp your ability to make cheese.

  I learned later that I’m not the first to see this tension. In The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir, Amy Trubek explains how a view of food
that prizes tradition often “leads to a nostalgia for the past and difficulties in imagining the future.” This problem becomes particularly bad for Americans, since, as Oscar Wilde once observed, our lack of tradition is our oldest tradition. Here’s how Trubek puts it:

  According to this view the lack of a long agrarian tradition in the United States, and the swift transition from small-scale peasant farms to large commodity farms, dooms us to a long, slow walk toward terroir; only the passage of time will give us the customs and know-how necessary to really taste place.

  Terroir, in this view, emerges only after an eon or two of tradition has drawn it from the earth. And that does sound like doom if, like Michael, you have only twenty-nine years to make cheese or, like me, as much time to eat it.

  Against this doom, there’s hope. Rather than viewing place and tradition as inextricably linked, you can view place as a good in itself, whether or not a given place has a tradition. This view gets argued for and celebrated in books such as Trubek’s and magazines such as Edible Chicago or Missoula. It informs the work of groups such as Farm Fresh to You, Community Supported Agriculture, and the Vermont Fresh Network. And it inspires the foodies at your farmer’s market down the street, who’ll sing its watchword—“Local!”—as they show you their lumpy heirloom tomatoes or leafy kale. Locavores like Trubek triumph place, but a place doesn’t have to have an established past. Focus on local alone and you can have new farms and new fields. You can have terroir without tradition.

  You can also have imagination. If your aim is to capture a terroir, especially in a place where no one has tried before, you’ll need your imagination. How else will you find the flavors in America’s tradition-poor soil? How else will you accomplish your aim?

  “I want a cheese that reflects a place, that comes from a specific place,” says Michael. “The more specific I can make it, the happier I’ll be.”

  He should be happy. His cheese tastes and looks like western Vermont. You might mistake his square cheese for a lichen-spotted stone that’s been pulled from the New Haven River, and his tomme has a rind that looks like schist....

  As for taste, both start brightly, the square cheese with a yogurt burst, the tomme with a lemon tang. Then both move to the ground. The square cheese gives you black pepper and green bean before it finishes in gravel, and the tomme sighs into animal and dirt. For cheeses so full of terroir, they’re surprisingly unbucolic. They find the bounty in Vermont’s rocky landscape and coax out its hard flavors.

  “They’re cheeses that comfort you in your solitude,” said Chuck, an inward look in her eye.

  It’s true. Even though Michael hosts picnics for a local church and attends town meetings (he wanted to hear the debate about a new dog ordinance) and even though he has a young son named Carter who takes swimming lessons and a hip partner named Emily who handles the business side of Twig Farm, you can easily picture him standing on a windswept crag in the Green Mountains, his goat herd below him, gray sky above, and under his arm, his tomme. He and it, elemental and alone.

  I doubt Michael would agree with this picture, but I don’t think he’d mind it. He’s very nonchalant about how people respond to his cheese. He’d just smile when Chuck or I asked a dumb question. (“Is that mold?”) And when I mentioned the upcoming competition held by the American Cheese Society, which are the Oscars of American cheese, he looked at me quizzically. I had to explain that I was talking—“you know”—about the competition he had entered before, the one at which—“remember?”—his cheeses had won prestigious awards in the Farmstead Goat Cheese category.

  “Oh, yeah,” he recalled, “I’ll probably send a few again this year.”

  Michael isn’t out for glory. He says he makes cheese because he wants to eat it and sells the rest. That’s obviously true, but it’s also his stock line. Something he said in the cave as he was washing rinds struck me as less stock and more true. He was telling us how he likes that cheese unites so many disparate things. The land, the goats, the milk, the season, all of them and all his work come together in the moment when you eat his cheese. He likes that impermanence: that it’s there, that you eat it, that it’s gone, that you’re nourished. I knew he was once a painter and sculptor, so I asked him about audience. What did he want us to experience as we ate his cheese?

  He stared at the wet cheese in his hand and said, “I just want it to exist.”

  That existence is precarious.

  Ten months out of the year, Michael can’t miss a day of work. The goats need daily attention when they’re giving milk, and with milk comes the need to make and care for cheese. No one else knows how to do everything on the farm that Michael does, and he can’t afford an assistant. So, if he gets sick or hurt, that’s it. His cheese won’t exist.

  That puts a lot of pressure on Michael, and the more Chuck and I saw how much work he does, the more we were amazed he wasn’t bone-weary and cross. We wouldn’t have lasted a day.

  Only once did we see a hint of the strain Michael feels. Right before we left, he took us into the pastures to meet his goats. He calls them his girls (“Where’s my goats? Where’s my girls?”), and his girls have as much affection for him as he does for them. Indeed, they have affection to spare. Agatha, Brandeis, and Esther took turns butting their foreheads into our butts. That made chatting difficult, especially for Chuck, who didn’t do well with how much and how freely goats piss and shit.

  I did, however, manage to ask Michael if he always worked with the end in mind. When he was in the pasture or milking parlor, did he imagine how his work would influence the final taste of his cheese?

  “You can think about it that way if you want,” he sighed. He wasn’t smiling. He was feeding a stalk of grass to Crab Cake, almost talking to her, and waving off black flies, “But mostly it’s about what’s next. It’s about getting it all done.”

  “So, what’s next?” I asked.

  His smile returned, all teeth. “Today?” He said and shrugged at a far thicket. “Today’s bushwhacking!”

  BREADWINNERS

  By Indrani Sen

  From Edible Manhattan

  A freelance reporter and journalism teacher, Indrani Sen is also editor of The Local news blog about the Fort Greene and Clinton Hill neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Locally baked bread is one thing, Sen discovered—but how local is the flour?

  There’s something simple and comforting about a bag of flour. Plunging one’s fingers into its cool, dry softness is a nostalgic pleasure, and one that is always reassuringly consistent.

  That’s because pretty much every bag of flour is exactly the same—all-purpose, indistinguishable, interchangeable—and has been for a century. Across the country, it’s the same nondescript flour we powdered our kitchen counters with as children in those first attempts at making cookies. The same we whisk into Sunday morning pancake batters, bake into blueberry muffins and knead into pizza doughs. And, for many of us, it’s that same battered paper bag that’s been sitting on the shelf for a year.

  But, these days, educated eaters are losing their appetites for anonymous commodities; clued-in cooks prefer specialty specimens over consistency and shelf stability. Which is why some local-food advocates are arguing that it’s high time to rethink that unassuming white powder—that a truly viable New York food system must grow its own grain.

  “It all comes down to grain,” says chef Dan Barber. “Yes, because it’s delicious—a whole world of flavor that’s been ignored for the past 50 years—but also because it’s a critical missing link in any community’s ability to feed itself.”

  In the 18th century, New York was the region’s breadbasket, producing wheat for consumption here and in neighboring states. But as canal and railroad systems allowed for long-distance transport, cheap grain rolled in from the large, flat farms in the Midwest, and the small community mills dotting the Hudson Valley crumbled. Today some farmers are working to rebuild the Empire State’s grain industry, following the lead of farmers resurrecting local g
rain economies across the country, from New Mexico to Pennsylvania.

  But plugging local wheat into a system designed to funnel it from the West is more complicated, it turns out, than building a local market for heirloom tomatoes, organic milk or even grassfed beef. The generational knowledge of growing grain on our terrain has been lost. New York is no longer home to regional mills that clean, de-hull and grind grain. And, despite today’s farm-to-table sensibilities, local flour is a hard sell.

  Even farmers market mavens who seek out Sungold tomatoes, Lemon cucumbers and Silver Queen corn are typically innocent of the nuances of high-quality, stone-ground wheat flour—and those who buy a bag might find baking with it a challenge. One batch of regional flour often varies from another in gluten content, water absorption and texture. Small-batch stone-ground flours, with their quirks and variations, their slightly oily textures and their musky, unfamiliar fragrances, can be tricky for bakers raised on the consistent, mass-produced flour that has made precisely calibrated baking recipes the norm. And, for professional bakers, inconsistent supplies of local grain have made bulk production difficult.

  But against all these odds, New York’s grain industry is experiencing a renaissance. Growers are experimenting with specialty grains, which are in turn showing up in farmers markets, bakeries and restaurants. A grain tasting organized by Greenmarket and the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) at the French Culinary Institute in January drew a who’s who of the city’s baking elite—including representatives from Sullivan Street Bakery, City Bakery and Hot Bread Kitchen. Pasta made from emmer flour by chef Patti Jackson of I Trulli was especially delicious, as was a bread Sullivan Street’s Jim Lahey baked using Warthog, a hard red winter wheat.