Service Included

by Phoebe Damrosch

  Mateo and Andy Kehler bought the farm in 1998, never intending to make cheese. They had grown up in South America, but wanted to move to the Northeast Kingdom, where their mother’s family was from. Much of the family still lives in the area; during our visit, one cousin stopped by and a family friend came in from one of the fields where he had been working. Determined to settle there, the two brothers had a few ideas about how they would make a living. Before attempting cheese, they even contemplated making tofu, although Andy told us they only ever made it in their own kitchen on a very small scale.

  Not all cheese-makers allow visitors, for fear of disturbing the fragile environment. But not all cheese-makers play Grateful Dead in their barn, either. We were instructed to take off our own shoes, however, and select a pair of rubber clogs from a pile. We each put on a hairnet (even bald André) and washed our hands at the sink by the door with the casual protraction of surgeons. To our right as we walked in was a big stainless-steel vat attached to a line that runs from the barn. When Andy milks the cows in the morning, it’s in the vat within minutes. Unlike many cheese-making facilities that have to have the milk delivered to them, Jasper Hill milk never waits more than twenty-four hours before it becomes cheese. Andy walked us through the whole process, from separating the whey to salting, shaping, and aging.

  After we had gotten to know one another a little, André inquired after Agatha. Agatha, as it turned out, was dead. And they produced no such thing as a single-cow cheese.

  “I suppose we could,” Andy mused, “but it would be a real pain.”

  Agatha was their first cow that birthed. She had been ahead of schedule, before the cheese-making facility had been completed, and Andy had to milk her by hand. The beer had been named for her, but that was the extent of her involvement. So much for controversy.

  Andy explained that they went through eight hundred pounds of salt every six weeks. Which made me think of my friend David Rakoff.

  “What kind?” I asked him.

  “Sea salt,” he informed me and then went on to describe how hard it was to find a salt with no additives. I probed a little, mockingly referring to the excessive array of overpriced salts now on the market. Andy couldn’t disagree more.

  “The more we have to choose from, the better,” he said.

  Now that I think about it, I realize that I asked the question with a dash of overprivileged, consumer guilt. What had I been expecting, that he would look at me blankly as if he had never heard of anything but iodized supermarket brands? No indeed; I had met a salt connoisseur here in the Northeast Kingdom.

  In 1970 Greensboro, Vermont, had thirty-three dairy farms. In 2006 there were nine. Andy thought that this year, with the increase in fuel and transportation costs, would be especially tough. Just two days earlier, the town’s largest dairy farmer had approached them about selling his milk to Jasper Hill. This is not something they are necessarily interested in, because of the risks of possible contamination. But they would consider building a cheese-making facility on other farms.

  In a time where local farmers find they can no longer survive selling the products they have relied on, creating a reverse AOC might be their only hope. In Europe, certain regional products, such as prosciutto di parma or balsamic vinegar from Modena, are only allowed to be made in those regions. In exchange for following certain rules and traditions, these local producers maintain a protected monopoly over certain coveted ingredients. Mateo and Andy, if they played their cards right, could establish something like this with their cheeses and save a dying industry.

  It is not an easy time for farmers, and more and more we hear the leaders in food and agriculture industries calling for action on a local level. Andy and Mateo could buy organic feed from Canada and eat up tons of fuel transporting it. Or they could buy hay from the farmer down the road and help keep him afloat. Of course, they would love to be organic, but they also believe that if we are going to have any control over our food supply, we need to keep it close to home.

  The brothers think a lot about their neighbors. When we went downstairs to the cool concrete aging facility, we saw cheeses from all over the state. A lot of time and care goes into aging cheese. It has to be turned so it ripens evenly; patted, so the mold doesn’t build into an overthick rind; pricked, so the mold can penetrate; and worried over, because cheeses, much like children, pets, and plants, need to be coddled. In France, the title of such an artist is affineur. Jasper Hill provides this time-consuming service for large cheese-makers such as Cabot, whose rounds take up a wall in the basement cave, and smaller producers who lack the temperature and humidity-controlled space. We saw sheep’s milk cheeses from another neighbor, a few precious rounds from the oldest creamery in the country, down in Crowley, Vermont. And Jasper Hill’s own cheeses, of course.

  The fluffy white mold growing on the Constant Bliss made the little cheeses look like iced cakes from a distance and baby chicks up close. There were planks and planks of their two blues, Bayley Hazen and Bartlett Blue. At the far end of the wall lurked the cheddarlike Aspenhurst. These large rounds take up to eighteen months to age. The farm produces very few at the moment because with such slow turnover, they aren’t cost-effective. Much of the work on those is done around the beginning of the year, or as Andy called it, “resolution season.”

  “Let’s go see the cows,” he suggested after we had seen the operation.

  On the way down the hill, he pointed out the site of a new barn that they had been working on until it blew over. They had put up three sides and the roof when an eighty-mile-per-hour wind came along and, as he put it, turned it into a sail. Andy, who once worked as a contractor, had been happy to build it the first time around. But not twice. He unplugged the electric fence and lowered it so we could climb over. The grass was thick and green and barely revealed the thick pies that lurked every few feet.

  “Mmmmmmooo,” Andy called in a low voice.

  They cows answered in unison.

  When they are both around, Mateo runs the cheese end and Andy takes care of the animals. Although they have their specialties, the brothers have made sure they each know every aspect of the operation so that they have the flexibility to go on vacation, to food shows, and the like.

  Jasper Hill uses Ayrshire cows because of the natural homogenization of the milk. It is actually closer to goat milk than, say, the milk of Jerseys. If you leave Jersey milk out, you will soon find that a thick layer of fat rises—making it ideal for butter-making. But if you want a rich cheese milk that will ripen quickly, you want something more homogenized. Ayrshires, like the French Normandes and Montbeliard, do just this. They are rust and cream-colored, some mostly cream with red freckles, some mostly red.

  A gregarious heifer named Gizmo sidled over and began to drool on my bare toe. This was when it really hit me. The last time I talked this much about cows, I was standing in a suit and tie in a high-rise looking out over Fifty-ninth Street. Now, a wide, rough tongue was attempting to lick my belly. By attempting, I mean that she was butting her bony forehead against me and soaking my T-shirt, but not quite managing to lift it. I was flattered and scratched the tuft of hair between her long-lashed eyes. André, I noticed, was keeping his distance. Every so often the cows would have a tussle over a particularly tasty clump of grass and there would be a mass shuffling. André quickly backed away.

  “Was someone a little scared of the cows?” I teased him on the way back up the hill.

  “Anyways. I like having ten toes.” Andy had informed us that his herd weighed in the 900-to 1,100-pound range.

  The cows had no particular interest in André, either. They had more than their fair share of visitors. Elementary schools trooped through, as did the farmers who had retired to a home nearby. They’d have you know that they had none of these newfangled machines—they milked their herds by hand.

  After we had seen the cows, Andy wanted to show us his new pigs. This was an experiment, he explained. In what? Well, air-dried hams, among other
things. But when he hopped in the pen and started chasing them around, I wondered whether they would even see a knife. The man was literally frolicking. When I asked Andy about his models, he told me about a man in Virginia who had a large operation involving cows, pigs, and chickens. The pigs ate the whey from the cheese, and the chickens ate the insects from the cow pastures. This might not work with a small farm like Jasper Hill, but they were on their way. The eight pigs, Humpty, Dumpty, Piggly, Wiggly, Eeny, Meeny, Miney, and Mo, already ate the whey, and Andy was considering chickens.

  When we got back to the main barn and our dippy ride, we dug out the bottle of Laurent Perrier 1996 champagne we had brought thinking it would go well with the Constant Bliss. In exchange, Andy let us pick out a little cheese for dinner. On went the clogs again and down we trooped into the cave. We chose Constant Bliss and Winnemere, which Andy packed up on ice for the ride.

  On the drive to my brother’s house, where breast-feeding does indeed happen anytime and anywhere, we talked about the visit. It was like visiting vineyards, André said. Here you have this product that has the reputation of being pretentious, with French names and useless dates, and it is easy to forget that it is made by someone with mud on his boots.

  When we got to Sam’s house, there was a minivan parked out front. Apparently his truck had died, and he had been forced to borrow a car from a friend. The perfect opportunity to tease my brother unmercifully, it was a senseless act of beauty.

  DESPITE ITS HUMBLE origins, artisanal cheese is considered by most consumers to be a luxury product. But what really defines luxury? And when has something gone too far? For that VIP who was misinformed about the single-cow cheese, a line had been crossed between luxury and excess. But he might very well have a $14,000 refrigerator at home and be perfectly comfortable with that.

  Per Se is expensive, there is no way around it. But so are paintings and plane tickets and evenings at the theater. Friends often explained, apologetically, that they would love to eat at Per Se, but they just couldn’t afford to. If that were true, I would have understood. I’m not discounting true poverty. But the same people who balked at the price of the tasting menu regularly spent a similar sum on concert tickets, gadgets, software, or shoes they didn’t really need. People expect to pay for art and travel, but when faced with three-digit menu prices, they react as if it were some perverse compulsion.

  Not everyone who came to Per Se was a millionaire. At one table, a line cook and his date blew months of savings on a meal and a half bottle of our least expensive Sancerre. One table over, two brothers in the finance business spent their usual $20,000 on a few bottles and drank only half. If they were merely hungry, they would have grabbed a slice; instead, they paid for the memory, the communion, the relaxation, and the shared experience.

  I discovered early on that André and I had a very similar approach to spending. Neither of us had a car. We did not own real estate. We didn’t spend much on clothes. We rarely went to the theater or concerts. We didn’t buy art or expensive furniture or large televisions or sound systems. We spent money on two things: food and something we soon named “everyday luxury.” Under this heading fell things like eight-dollar toothpaste. Yes, toothpaste can be had for a quarter of that, but we decided that if it increased our love of life at least twice a day, it was worth it. The softest underwear. Good coffee, butter, jam, and mustard. Cabs. Flowers. Slab bacon. Triple-ply toilet paper. Big, fluffy towels and bathrobes. Magazine subscriptions. Cuff links and silver bracelets. Wine. Day trips. Of course, everyday luxury is in the eye of the beholder. For some people, it might be boxed cereal, a dye job, or day care. For others, it might be a private jet or a Calder mobile.

  I understand the risk involved. If I’m not careful, I will end up being part of what David Rakoff calls an “army of multiply chemically sensitive, high-maintenance princesses trying to make our way through a world of irksome peas.” The kind of person who categorically refuses to drink tap water. I have a few good friends who have promised to bump me off with no warning if this becomes the case.

  It’s all a roundabout way of saying that I don’t want anyone reading this to feel guilty about paying for good food. Or reading about people paying for good food. Gas-guzzling cars and blood diamonds, yes. Organic, heirloom, sustainable, local, real food, no. Now go out and buy some cheese.

  * * *

  • A TIP •

  Most white wine should be served at about 55 degrees and red wine at 67 degrees. We are happy to further chill a white or decant the red to bring up the temperature, but please do not ask us to microwave your wine.

  * * *

  • i can hear you •

  i BEGAN HYPOTHESIZING ABOUTuniversal shame one day at Baby Girl’s Bubbles & Cleaners. I was doing my laundry after someone broke the handle off the washing machine. Unlike washing clothes at home, where wet laundry happily hangs out in the machine for hours before it starts to smell, in a Laundromat, one is held hostage, staring through the porthole of the dryer as that one last sweatshirt goes around and around. I hold a certain plush white towel responsible for the trauma I experienced when a show titled I Love You—How Could You Sleep with My Mom? came on to a television hanging from the ceiling. I have no defense mechanisms when it comes to television, probably from years of living without one. I become a slave to the blue light, and when I finally come to, I ruminate for days over what I have seen.

  At first I was horrified that people would choose to reveal the pale, fragile underbelly of their souls to the millions of viewers pointing and laughing in living rooms and Laundromats across the country. The jilted daughters on the show yelled and cried and threatened to call off their engagements. The audience booed and cheered. I watched in horror and recounted the scene for André later in full detail—quotes and all.

  “That show really got to you?”

  “Chef, I have never seen anything like it. It was like…”

  “A three-ring circus in a trailer park?”

  “Exactly!”

  Some of us wear habits and some of us paint beach scenes on our nails, but I think all of us have a story we would prefer not to share. This goes for the Laundromat, for me, and especially for restaurant dining rooms.

  AT SIX O’CLOCK, two elderly couples settle in on table twenty-one to celebrate the men’s shared eightieth birthdays. They have already had martinis and Macallan 12 in the salon and taken turns visiting the bathroom for mysteriously long periods, which seemed not to faze their spouses. Upon sitting, the gentleman at position four tucks his napkin behind his yellow bowtie with a cheer endearing to anyone watching, except perhaps his wife who doesn’t mind it at home, but hoped that perhaps tonight he would place it on his lap like a civilized person. Having been married more than fifty years, she is bored by her husband, even before she wakes in the morning. This is not to say that she doesn’t love him, it is just that there comes a time when the person you love ceases to be entertaining—just like the face in the mirror that has lost its intrigue. She turns toward the woman next to her, whose mate has placed his napkin politely over his lap, for which she loves him slightly more at this moment, but has already ordered his third scotch and now turns his attention to the wine list. The women talk to each other for the duration of the meal, pausing every so often to make sure their husbands are still breathing. By dessert, both men are not only breathing, they are snoring heavily as their heads droop dangerously close to their glasses of Madeira.

  THE GENTLEMAN ON table twenty-three plans to propose and has arranged for us to deliver a Fabergé egg at the end of their meal. Proposals are nerve-racking for everyone involved. While terrified lovers contemplate eternity in sickness, poverty, death, or worse, equally anxious servers imagine ruining what might be the high point of these people’s lives together, before the bankruptcy, the Botox, and his affair with the life coach.

  We seat them in one of two private banquettes with a view of the restaurant and the park so that, if all goes well, they can snuggle clo
se and debate hyphenation. She seems a little jumpy, and I wonder if someone has tipped her off or whether she just has a feeling about this one. We clear the table after the cheese course, leaving only the candle and two glasses of champagne. The maître d’ arrives with a wooden box (the humidor we usually use for truffles) on a silver tray and bows to the lady with great ceremony.

  “Oh!” she gasps, placing her ringless hand on her heart and gazing at her intended with dewy eyes before she reaches for the egg. The maître d’ closes the truffle box and steps away from the table, keeping close enough to witness the moment.

  It is all we can do to feign calm when she opens the egg and there is not a ring in sight. She begins to cry. Her fiancé instructs her as to the egg’s value (which we Googled on the computer in the kitchen and determined to be somewhere be tween $500 and $5.5 million) and she pretends to be moved, but I know that she is heartbroken.

  He eats his sorbet and dessert with gusto while she prods at hers with her spoon, crestfallen. When he finally pulls the ring from his pocket, her joy is more like a worn relief. I imagine she will tell her girlfriends how clever his elaborate and extravagant proposal had been. But I wonder whether she will always think of how small and alone she felt when she opened the egg and realized that he would never know how to read her heart. Perhaps she will think of it as the first time she ignored the truth.

  ALTHOUGH HIS PARTY is incomplete, the silver-haired gentleman in tweed has been seated at a prominent table. He drinks a gin and tonic with lime (G& T as he and his wife call it when they take their places in their Fifth Avenue suite at five o’clock on the dot, he in an armchair with the Journal, she on the love seat with the dog). From the looks of him, I predict an overly blond woman in a short-skirted suit of an obscene hue.