Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  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 FDA 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 FDA 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 milliliters 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 on-screen kiss.) Yet their living areas are walled off from outsiders, and they sustain themselves on what they can grow and make on their 360-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 FDA 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 counterintuitive. 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 beech-wood 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, keep
ing 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 FDA. 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 that 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 FDA 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 FDA 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 FDA 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.

  “Saint 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, tra
nsforming 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.”

  2002

  “You think I'm a raw-foodist by choice?”

  NIGHT KITCHENS

  JUDITH THURMAN

  The abbot’s garden at the temple of Daisen-in, in Kyoto, is a rectangle of raked gravel bordered by a white wall on one of its long sides, and by the wooden porch of an old pavilion on the other, where the monks meditate. From behind the wall, a camellia bush throws off its scent. The grooves made by the rake run horizontally, like steady but freehand rulings on a blank page, until they eddy around two conical mounds, each about a foot tall. One evening last June, just after the temple had closed, I joined the sitting meditation, the hour-long zazen, held on the porch and open to the public twice a week. There were five other sitters, all Japanese, one a young mother who had her children in tow, two plump boys and a little girl, and I could hear them squirming at the end of the row (the wood creaks)—once or twice the presiding monk spoke to them in a low voice, breaking the silence. But after a while, with an impressive show of stoicism, they managed to keep still.