Secret Ingredients (44 page)

RAW FAITH

BURKHARD BILGER

I
f it’s all the same to you, Mother Noella Marcellino would rather you didn’t call her the cheese nun. It’s true that she makes cheese—a New England variation on the unctuous Saint-Nectaire of Auvergne. And, yes, she lives in a Benedictine cloister, the Abbey of Regina Laudis, in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Were you to point out that she just finished filming a documentary in France called
The Cheese Nun,
you would not be incorrect. Yet when Noella thinks of herself, which seems to happen only rarely, she does so in terms both more scientific and more spiritual: as an authority on cheese molds, or as a singer of gospel and Gregorian chant. One of her best friends was a blues musician, but that can give rise to its own misconceptions. She was a little miffed, a few years ago, when a French newspaper ran a story headlined
SHE DOES RESEARCH BY DAY AND SINGS BLUES IN THE CHURCHES OF THE JURA BY NIGHT.

Mother Noella has spent twenty-nine of her fifty-one years in the abbey. Although she has occasionally been given permission to travel, she must spend all other nights and many hours of daily prayer behind the wooden scrims and walls of the cloister. In 1985, she took her final vows to remain at Regina Laudis for the rest of her life, earning the title of Mother. Yet her secular interests have only widened and deepened over the years. This winter she is completing a Ph.D. in microbiology, even as she helps shepherd the country through a culture war of an unusual sort: a war of cheese.

The United States has long produced more cheese than any other country: eight and a half billion pounds in 2001 alone, enough to stuff the Sears Tower, like an enormous celery stick, four times over. But for nearly a century that tower of curd has been a purely industrial product—formulated, manufactured, extruded, and dispensed with the kind of machinery usually reserved for making plastic. Only in the past fifteen years has a generation of former lawyers and first-time farmers, dot-com dropouts and back-to-the-landers, begun to develop true artisanal cheeses. “American cheesemaking is where winemaking was in the late 1970s,” the food writer Clark Wolf says. “Every time you taste something new, you’re shocked at how much better it is.” Cheesemakers like Willow Smart, in Milton, Vermont, are creating their own rural traditions—Smart treats her sheep homeopathically and uses llamas to protect them from coyotes—and rivaling Europeans for the first time. Outside Louisville, Kentucky, Judy Schad, of Capriole Farms, makes some of the finest goat cheeses in the world. “The French have seven hundred years of experience, they’ve got experimental cheese stations, and their milk supply is subsidized,” Schad says. “But my Mont St. Francis can kick a French Muenster all the way across the Atlantic.”

One essential ingredient in this success is easy to isolate: the raw milk in many artisanal cheeses, unlike the pasteurized milk used by Kraft or Borden, is alive with billions of bacteria. These cultures transform the cheese as it ages, breaking down fats and proteins and giving off esters and other compounds that are the building blocks of flavor and aroma. Of course, bacteria can have less salubrious effects, too: well into the last century, raw milk was a prime breeding ground for tuberculosis and typhoid. Consequently, the Food and Drug Administration has required that all store-bought milk be pasteurized (heated to 145 degrees for thirty minutes, or to 161 degrees for fifteen seconds) and, since 1947, that all raw-milk cheeses be aged for at least sixty days. The assumption has been that pathogens can’t survive in the dry, acid environment of an aged cheese. But six years ago a small study in South Dakota found that
Escherichia coli
could survive the sixty-day limit in cheddar, and the FDA took part in a study to verify the results. Raw-milk cheese, the study warned, might have to be aged for more than sixty days to be safe—if it can be made safely at all.

The news was even more upsetting to Europeans than it was to Americans. Unaged raw-milk cheese is considered a birthright in France and Italy, yet even before the FDA’s research was complete, the United States began pushing for an international ban on raw-milk cheese. Cheesemakers responded by circulating petitions and forming advocacy groups, including a European raw-milk alliance and the International Coalition to Preserve the Right to Choose Your Cheese (now called the Cheese of Choice Coalition). They argued that raw milk is often healthier than pasteurized milk, and that cheese-borne illnesses are extremely rare. But it was hard to sway regulators with talk of tradition and “good bacteria.” What was needed was an ally of impeccable character and scientific standing, someone to whom cheesemakers could bring their microbial troubles and ask for guidance. What was needed was a cheese nun.

On a gusty morning in April, Mother Noella strode across the University of Connecticut campus at Storrs, her habit flapping and billowing behind her, her gait both stiff-backed and rollicking. Beneath her white wimple, her plump cheeks were flushed and she peered out with a kind of cockeyed glee. She’d warned me before the ride to the campus that she had a lazy eye, but I thought she was joking until I saw her squinting at the side-view mirror. “Don’t be nervous,” she said, grabbing the wheel as the car lurched into gear. “That’s my blind side anyway.” Now, after an eventful parallel-parking session, we were going to meet her doctoral adviser, David Benson. “You should have seen me on some of those nights commuting back to the abbey,” she said. “Midnight in downtown Hartford, after experiments with ether—that’s when it got really interesting.”

She let out a raucous laugh and bustled up the stairs of the molecular-and-cell-biology building, toward the labs that have served her as a kind of second cloister for the past ten years. She went past orange biohazard and radioactivity signs, past a virus lab that was off limits to pregnant women, and into a room cluttered with old beakers and calcium-crusted instruments. “The FBI was all over the building next door after September 11,” Benson said, ushering us into his office. “Someone left a sample of anthrax in one of the freezers.” He showed us a computer slide show, “Cheese Fungi: Cat Fur and Toad Skin,” full of fuzzy and warty-looking cheese rinds, frighteningly magnified. Then Noella took me over to her cubicle. She leafed through a pile of papers on the desk and pulled out a monograph from a recent issue of
Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
N. Marcellino was listed as the first author. “There it is,” she said, pointing to a page-long list of molds, each associated with a French region and cheese. “There’s a story behind every one of those molds.”

For nearly a year in the mid-1990s, Noella traveled through France on a Fulbright scholarship. She had wanted to study the history and ecology of French cheese caves, but the field proved so vast that she decided to focus on a single mold:
Geotrichum candidum,
the wrinkly white mold that encases some of the greatest French cheeses. How much, she wondered, did the mold vary from one cave to another? To find out, she crisscrossed the countryside in a secondhand Fiat. She would pull up to a ramshackle farm, introduce herself to a wary local cheesemaker, and ask for a sterile flask’s worth of his milk. If she was lucky, and he realized that she wasn’t after his secret recipe, he might take her into the underground chamber or natural cave where he ripened his cheese. “It helped that I was a nun,” she says. “But it helped even more that I was a cheesemaker.”

After nine months and nearly thirty thousand kilometers, Noella had collected 180 samples. It took another two years to characterize the molds with genetic and biochemical tests, but the results more than justified the effort: the samples contained dozens of distinct strains of
G. candidum.
Noella had been making and selling cheese at the abbey for twenty years by then. She had always thought that there were good molds (like the white rind on Brie) and there were bad molds (like the bluish fuzz on old bread). But her research showed that those categories concealed whole bestiaries. Each strain had its own appetites, its own ecology, its own biochemical effects. And each mold produced a different cheese.

A Frenchman would hardly be surprised by such diversity—Charles de Gaulle acknowledged it forty years ago when he said, “How can anyone be expected to govern a country with 246 cheeses?” But to Americans it is a revelation. Decades of pasteurized and processed cheese have all but wiped clean our memory of cheese as a living culture, formed and flavored by the grasses in a pasture, the yeasts in the air, the bacteria in a barrel, the molds in a cave. But the new cheesemakers tend to be quick studies.

Last year, at a meeting of the American Cheese Society, in Louisville, Mother Noella and Mother Telchilde, who tends the abbey’s cows and has a Ph.D. in animal science, were asked to share their research results. “We brought our microscopes,” Noella says. “We thought we could set up in the hall and show the cheesemakers some molds for an hour and a half or so.” They ended up sitting in the hotel for seven hours. Cheesemakers came with hunks of rind and tales of infestation. They brought wheels of cheese that had been eaten through by scopulariopsis—an invasive fungus—and rinds that were overgrown by
poils de chat,
the dreaded hair-of-the-cat mold. “It was so touching,” Noella says. “These American cheesemakers had no one else to turn to.”

For the cheesemakers, though, the true heartaches weren’t over cheeses that had gone bad; they were over cheeses that they would never make—at least, not legally. Toward the end of the conference, Noella gave a talk in which she mentioned that her favorite cheese in the world is a Mont d’Or. Made in the high valleys of the Massif du Mont d’Or, or the border between France and Switzerland, this raw-milk cheese is so magnificently molten when ripe that it must be held together by strips of local spruce. Like many of the world’s finest cheeses, Mont d’Or can’t be sold in America; by the time the cheese has aged sixty days, it has dissolved into a puddle.

After Noella’s talk, a young Canadian cheesemaker with bleached-blond hair took her aside. Would she and Mother Telchilde like to come with him? He had something they might like to see. He led them to the hotel’s restaurant and through the kitchen, past teams of cooks and servers preparing for the evening rush, to the chef ’s private office in the back. A few other guests joined them, and the sommelier brought a loaf of bread and a bottle of Bordeaux. Someone closed the door, and then the Canadian pulled out a small wrapped package and placed it on the table. “It was the Mont d’Or,” Noella recalls. “He had made it himself and hidden it away like contraband. It was his offering to us.”

The existence of a raw-milk underground has long been an open secret to certain epicures. The oozing Pont l’Évêque or Livarot, sold with a nudge and a wink at gourmet cheese shops; the reeking Epoisses, triple-wrapped and stashed in a Prada bag on the way through customs—these are emblems of devil-may-care sophistication nearly as clichéd as the flask of hooch in a Southern judge’s chambers. What has changed, in recent years, is the fact that some of these cheeses are now homegrown. Clark Wolf used to make a point of going to a certain farmstead whenever he was visiting friends in upstate New York. “There was a guy there who was making contraband raw-milk Camembert,” Wolf recalls. “It was incredibly good, but we always wondered if we’d be dead the next day.” The story conjures up images of back-alley cheese exchanges, of men running through forests carrying wheels of Brie on their shoulders, hounds baying at their heels. But when I tracked down the cheesemaker in question he’d gone on to computer programming. He was in the kitchen one day stirring curd, he said, when he saw a car with a federal insignia pull up outside. Okay, he thought, this is it. When the knock on the door came, it turned out to be a land surveyor, but the cheesemaker had had enough. “You just can’t live like that,” he said. “You can’t be an outlaw forever.”

In 1983, a reporter at the
Times
published an exposé on contraband cheese: he had gone to eight food shops in Manhattan and had found unaged raw-milk Camemberts and Bries in every one. After that, the FDA quickly clamped down on cheese importers. Yet no arrests were made or fines levied, and within a few years the market quietly revived. This spring, at Murray’s Cheese shop, in Greenwich Village, a raw-milk Camembert was perched on a mound of its pasteurized cousins, with a small sign stuck into it: “Get this before the FDA does.” Other cheesemongers claim that heat-treated cheeses are really made of raw milk, just to inflate the price. Online,
Fromages.com
will send raw-milk cheeses from France to anyone with a credit card. When my shipment arrived by FedEx, the deliverywoman handed over the refrigerated box with evident relief. “Here’s your
fromage,
” she said, wrinkling her nose.

The cheeses were delectable, but it was hard to tell how much they owed to raw milk and how much to mere mystique. So one afternoon not long ago, I went to visit Max McCalman, the
maître fromager
at the restaurant Picholine, the hushed inner sanctum of lactophilia in Manhattan. McCalman is lean and phlegmatic, with heavy brows, rumpled skin, and cheekbones so narrow that his eyes seem almost to round the corner. When he talks about cheese, he falls into an intense monotone, as if he were reciting an argument endlessly rehearsed while cutting more than 150,000 pounds of cheese (at last count) into one-ounce portions. McCalman prefers the term “uncompromised milk” to “raw milk,” and bears toward his charges the doomed and anxious love of a kindly orphanage director. “Cheese has suffered enough,” he says. “People just don’t understand it. They don’t know what it is.”