Milk

by Mark Kurlansky

  The ban is also regarded by some as a form of class warfare against the Dalits, the lowest caste in India, once called Untouchables. The Dalits have always done the things no one else wanted to do and used the things no one else wanted to use. They collected garbage, they scavenged for animal carcasses, they ate beef, and they slaughtered cattle for beef and leather. In fact, it was their association with dead cows that made them untouchable. The ban on the slaughter of cattle has decimated the economy and food supply of the Dalits, the poorest people.

  Another effect of the ban is that it has turned farmers to buffalos. There are no restrictions on slaughtering buffalos. Buffalo’s milk has a high fat content, and since milk is priced in India according to its fat content, it commands a high price. But it is not the most prized. The most prized milk is that of the purebred desi cow. A2 milk, the Indians call it.

  India may be further proof that the more milk you produce, the more contentious issues will arise.

  18

  RAW CRAFTSMANSHIP

  Since the Industrial Revolution, cheese factories have become bigger and more ubiquitous than ever. Some artisanal cheeses have disappeared. But many have endured and some of the ones that vanished earlier have been brought back.

  Not only have artisanal cheeses survived, but the most famous ones of the preindustrial age remain among the most celebrated. While cheese has always been a common food, it has also always been revered by gourmets. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, an eighteenth-century politician, lawyer, and early food writer, famously declared, “A dessert without cheese is like a lovely lady with only one eye.”

  Brillat-Savarin insisted that the greatest cheese was Époisses, while Grimod de La Reynière, France’s first great food writer, put Roquefort at the top of his list. He called it “the drunkard’s biscuit” because it induced thirst. According to Grimod, the chief function of cheese was to lead to the enjoyment of wine.

  As it happens, Époisses and Roquefort are the two favorite cheeses of this twenty-first-century writer. Neither King Louis XVI nor the statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, briefly prime minister of France from July–September 1815, agreed. They were both passionate about Brie, and it was said that the king was in the process of enjoying a fine Brie when he was arrested and then executed, a dubious celebrity endorsement. Talleyrand was a tireless promoter of Brie, which he called the king of cheeses, supposedly at a dinner at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, when Europe was slicing up post-Napoleonic Europe. It was said that Brie was the only king to whom he always remained loyal.

  In 1896, Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf-Astoria’s chef, named Brie from the Paris region the most popular French cheese and Camembert from nearby Normandy the second most popular. Both of these cheeses have many imitations, both factory-made and artisanal, around the world. But the real Brie or Camembert are made in very specific places and shaped by these places, in the same way that only a wine from Burgundy is going to taste like a Burgundy.

  A top-quality cheese is made shortly after milking, when the milk is considered to be at the optimum temperature for curdling. A true Brie is made from the raw milk of a specific area of Île-de-France. A Brie-de-Meaux comes from one place and a Brie-de-Melan from another. Raw milk has a distinct flavor, derived from the specific grasses in the pasture where the cow is grazed. The milk for a good Brie all comes from the same pasture. But the grasses change from one season to another. A fall Brie-de-Meaux does not taste like a spring one, and fall and spring Époisses are very different from each other. A good fromagerie in Paris lets its customers know the season of its cheeses. All of which is to say that a true artisanal cheese can only be made in small batches on a farm.

  Artisanal Brie is made from the milk of a Belgian breed, the Belgian blue, a gray, lean, and extremely muscular cow. Its milk has less butterfat than does the milk of the white-and-black-speckled Normandy cow, whose milk is used to make Camembert.

  Belgian blue

  Though Cuba is not well known for cheesemaking, the most famous Camembert imitator was Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Aside from his personal love of eating ice cream and gulping chocolate milkshakes at the Habana Libre, he believed that building up the Cuban dairy industry was an essential priority.

  Milk and milk products were an important part of the Cuban diet, and before the revolution, much of it came from the United States. A subtropical country, poorly suited for cows, Cuba had never produced milk efficiently, but after the U.S. embargo was imposed on the island country in 1962, Castro was determined to improve Cuban dairy farming. In time this would lead to the invention of Cuban Camembert.

  In the 1960s, most Cuban cows were descendants of either the Spanish criollo cow or the Zebu from India. Both of these cows, though well adapted to hot climates, produced little milk. Castro’s solution, like the subcontinent Indians’, was to import Holsteins. They would be kept in air-conditioned stables. Given fuel costs, air-conditioning cow barns was not a commercially viable way to produce milk. But in those days, the Soviet Union was subsidizing the Cuban experiment, and dairy was a priority. The Cubans imported thousands of Holsteins from Canada.

  A third of those Canadian cows died in a matter of weeks, leading Castro to pronounce that they would have to invent a new Cuban breed, “the Tropical Holstein.” This new cow ended up being the exact same cow as the one developed in the Indian cooperatives—a cross of either a Holstein or a Swiss Brown with a Zebu. Most of these cows did not do well in Cuba either, probably because of a lack of proper diet. Holsteins, even half Holsteins, need to be well fed.

  But there was one exception, a cow named Ubre Blanca, which means “white udder.” This cow produced a phenomenal amount of milk, so much so that it made it into the 1982 Guinness Book of Records as being the cow that held the world’s record for producing the most amount of milk in a day—109.5 liters. As well as the highest yield from a single lactation cycle—24,268.9 liters. The cow was a hero of the revolution, frequently reported on, and when she died in 1985, her official obituary said, “She gave her all for the people.” The Cubans never produced another cow that made a comparable contribution.

  For a while, the Cubans tried to produce cows small enough for people to keep in their homes for their own dairy needs. Nothing worked, but the Commandante was feeling good because he had come up with an idea for a star cheese product. He had decided that he would make the best Camembert in the world. By most accounts, Cuba was already producing a pretty good Camembert at that time, but he wanted something even better and instructed his cheesemakers to come up with it.

  A short time later, in 1964, when the revolution was still young and of boundless ambition, Fidel invited André Voisin to Cuba to give a series of lectures. Voisin was a French war hero who had developed a theory of “rational grazing” that was influencing farming practices all over the world. Fidel asked him to sample the new Cuban Camembert, and the Frenchman said it was very good, like a French Camembert.

  But Fidel wanted more and tried to get him to say it was better than a French Camembert. Finally, a frustrated Voisin grabbed the cigar from Castro’s shirt pocket, a big Cohiba, the type of cigar developed by the Castro regime to replace the ones made pre-revolution. The Cohiba was generally considered to be the world’s best cigar. Voisin asked Castro if he thought the French could make a better cigar than this.

  Some days later Voisin died of a heart attack in his hotel room, and he is buried with many of Cuba’s greats in Havana’s Colón Cemetery. His memory is revered in Cuba despite his refusal to endorse their Camembert.

  The world wants more cheese. That’s why cheese factories were started. The world’s population keeps growing and the amount of cheese eaten per person keeps growing. In an economic system that disfavors small-scale farming, where small farms fail every day, artisanal cheesemakers could never produce all the cheese people want. In France alone, the per capita consumption of cheese increased more than five times between the 4.4 pounds per person per year in 1815 and th
e 23.3 pounds in 1960.

  Frenchman and women at work in a dairy, ca. 1910. (Adoc-photos/Art Resource, NY)

  Holland has almost completely ceded its famous cheese tradition to factories. Few people today have even tasted Dutch farm cheese, boerenkaas. In the most famous Dutch cheese district, Gouda, there are still a few stubborn farm families making farmhouse Gouda, but not many. The hard and nutty dark handmade Gouda has almost nothing in common with the factory-made Gouda known to most of the world, except for its shape.

  Farmhouse Gouda, traditionally made by women, is produced with the raw milk of cows that graze in the same pasture. Their milk is brought in twice a day after milking, and the cheesemaking process is started while the milk is still warm. The first step is to sour the milk with lactic acid. Today this acid can be purchased, but only two generations ago it was still made by the women. Getting the lactic acid exactly right was one of the keys to making a good Gouda. When finished, some of the farmhouse cheese is sold in the local market, but most of it is sold to cheese merchants. It has been done that way since the fourteenth century.

  Today, only an estimated 1.5 percent of the cheese made in Holland is artisanal, and there are only about five hundred such artisans left.

  Almost all of the most famous internationally known cheeses—Brie, Camembert, cheddar, Parmesan—are made from cow’s milk. In this upper stratum of world-famous cheeses, there is one exception, Roquefort, which is made from sheep’s milk.

  The village where Roquefort is made, Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, has fewer than two hundred inhabitants. Only cheese that is made in this small village, which sits along a narrow road on a ridge beside a massive outcrop of rock, is allowed to be called Roquefort. This makes the real estate here too valuable to be used for anything else. The monopoly on the name was granted by King Charles VI in 1411. In 1961 a court ruled that even if the ingredients and technique used to make the cheese were followed exactly by cheesemakers elsewhere, only cheese that matures in the natural caves under the village, the caves of Mont Combalou, can be called Roquefort.

  This is not without reason. Inside the Mont Combalou caves, the circulation of air and the humidity trapped in the rocks creates a unique mold-growing environment. The natural cellars are four stories below the village, a hundred feet or more deep into the rock. It is cold and humid in the caves, and the rock walls, the old hand-hewn wooden beams, and the wooden shelves where the cheeses are aged are all wet and slippery. The rocks show a kaleidoscope of colorful molds and lichens, and this is essential to making Roquefort Roquefort. The cellars are centuries old, and attempts to create new cellars always fail.

  In the beginning of the 1990s, health inspectors from the European Union visited the caves and were appalled. Food was being left on moldy antique wooden shelves. Imagine the possibilities for dangerous bacteria. The cheesemakers argued that bacteria couldn’t live in Roquefort because it contains live penicillium. Nevertheless, they were ordered to replace the wooden shelves with hygienic plastic ones.

  Slowly and reluctantly, the cheese companies made the shift. All except Jacques Carles, who today is one of only five small independent Roquefort producers left. Most Roquefort today is produced by two giant companies, Société and Papillon.

  Carles had inherited his company from his father, who started it in the 1920s when there were a dozen such small Roquefort companies. A traditionalist, he ignored the European Union edict and did not remove a single shelf. This saved him a great deal of money once it was discovered that Roquefort did not taste the same on plastic shelves and the old wooden ones were put back.

  The village of Roquefort is in one of the wilder, least settled parts of France known as Saint-Affrique, in the Aveyron département, an area just south of the Massif Central. The people here speak their own dialect of French, and anyone who arrives speaking standard French is greeted with suspicion for fear he or she is a government inspector from Paris or, worse, a representative of the European Union in Brussels.

  The villagers have their own ancient ways of doing things, and their response to anyone who wants them to change is that they should not argue with success. The one-street village is packed with trucks loading up to take their cheese around the world and the town smells as much of money as of blue cheese.

  There are many rules regarding the use of the name Roquefort. Milk must be delivered within twenty days of lambing; the sheep, a relatively productive milker called Lacaune, must be from the Aveyron and a few neighboring areas; and the penicillium must be produced in the caves of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. There are differences between the small cheese producers and the big companies. The small producers collect their milk in old-fashioned cans, not tanks. The curds are stuffed into molds by hand. The bacteria, penicillium, causes the fresh cheese to bubble and in time the bubbles turn blue. It used to be distributed from powdered bread, but today a liquid version of the exact same mold from the caves is used. The producers swear it is the identical mold, and the EU accepts this, though it is a violation of one of the fundamental tenets of what makes a cheese a Roquefort.

  Traditionalists still use bread to culture the penicillium. Carles buys a rye-and-wheat bread from a baker in the nearby village of Plaisance. He lets the bread mold in the caves, cuts off its crust, and then turns it into a blue powder.

  The milk for making the Roquefort comes from more than two thousand farms. It takes a great many sheep, which are notoriously poor milk producers, to make cheese, which is why there are so few leading sheep cheeses in the world. The all-white Lacaune sheep has a reputation for producing a good amount, but a one day’s milking of twenty sheep produces only enough to fill a 40-liter milk can. Some of the sheep are still milked by hand, but most are milked by machine. And the sheep farmers are paid well for their product. A farm with a good-sized flock can earn better than $100,000 a year from milk.

  Lacaune sheep

  Like most artisanal cheeses, Roquefort is a highly seasonal product. From July to December, no milk is collected, because the ewes are allowed to feed their lambs. During this period, the cheesemakers sell what they call the vieux fromage, old cheese. In December they begin making cheese again, but this cheese, nouveau, will not be ready for sale until spring. From April until June both old and new cheese are available. And both have their fans; the nouveau is subtle but complex, and the vieux is strong and nutty. But none of this is marked on the label. As with Époisses and Brie, most customers don’t know the differences unless they are local or buy from a very good fromagerie in Paris.

  Roquefort cheese is made from unpasteurized milk, another one of the requirements to carry the Roquefort name. Many countries do not generally let raw milk products come through customs. But Roquefort is an exception. It would be unthinkable not to have Roquefort.

  At the other end of the Pyrenees is another much-loved but much less famous sheep cheese, made by the Basques, who have fought hard for every inch of their identity and are therefore careful about what they call Basque. Truly Basque cheeses, hard and pungent, must be made only from sheep’s milk. The French government designates the Basque cheese Ossau-Iraty and allows it to be made with various types of milk. But the Basques call it ardi-gasna, sheep cheese, and stipulate that it must be made not only with sheep’s milk, but with Basque sheep’s milk.

  The Basque have a Basque everything—the Basque sheep, the Basque pig, the Basque horse, the Basque dog, the Basque goat. The Basque sheep is the burru beltza, “black face,” known in French as the tête noire, “black head.” It is a white sheep with a black face and is unique to the Basque region.

  Basque sheep are a bit difficult. They do not always behave like domestic animals and can seem wild. Sometimes they are difficult to milk. Also, they do not produce much milk. Crossbred Basque breeds, such as the tête rousse, “red head,” and Basco-Béarnaise (bred with sheep from neighboring Béarn) are easier to handle. Neither of these produces great quantities of milk either, but their milk is known for its flavor.

  Bur
ru beltza (black face), in Euskera, the Basque language. (Print from a woodcut by Basque artist Stephane Pirel)

  What is not acceptable, at least to the traditionalists, is using cow’s milk, goat’s milk, or even the milk from the Lacaune sheep from the Roquefort region when making Basque cheese. Nonetheless, some Basques have been bringing in the Lacaune because a Lacaune will produce roughly twice as much milk daily as a Basque sheep. Still, the true Basque connoisseur wants only true Basque cheese made from true Basque sheep. The only question is whether he or she prefers the sharper Basque cheese from the scrubby high country or the milder Basque cheese from the low pasturelands. This also is never marked on a label, and the customer has to either know which farms are where or talk to someone who does.

  Jean-François Tambourin and his sons Michel and Guillaume make real Basque cheese on their farm, Enautenea. The farm is at the foot of Jarra, a velvet green slope in the rugged foothills leading to the Pyrenees. The high pasturelands here have slopes pitched at sixty degrees or steeper. The Basques joke that Basque sheep have one pair of legs shorter than the other so they can stand sideways on the slopes. These green pastures with purple crests behind them, this land near the town of Saint-Étienne-de-Baïgorry, in a narrow mountain pass between France and Spain, must be among the most beautiful pastures that livestock anywhere have ever seen.

  Basque Cheese label.

  Only family members work the Enautenea farm and only Basque, Europe’s oldest language, is spoken here. In school the children learn French and get French names. It was in school that Frantxua became Jean-François.

  The family knows what they have. Jean-François, a lanky man with a thin weathered face and long Basque nose, waves his arm in a grand gesture of awe at the rugged crest, steep green pastures, thick dark woods, and terraced vineyards around him. “It’s an inspiration to see the mountains, the woods, the vineyards,” he says. The family has operated the Enautenea farm since at least 1788. They are one of ninety milk producers in the area.