Secret Ingredients (45 page)

We were sitting at the back of the restaurant, in a small room with mahogany wine racks on four sides. In the corner was McCalman’s high-tech cheese cave: a large refrigerator kept at an unvarying forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, with around 85 percent humidity. On a butcher block in the center of the room, and on two carts alongside, the night’s cheese selections were laid out: more than fifty noble slabs, towers, and pyramids, marbled and crumbling, like the ruins of an ancient metropolis. McCalman reached over and cut wedges from two Reblochon-style cheeses, one of pasteurized milk, the other of raw. We had done a few of these comparisons already, with the pasteurized invariably tasting milder, gummier, and less complex. But this time the difference was more elemental. The pasteurized version wasn’t bad, with its musty orange rind and rich ivory pâte. But the raw-milk Reblochon seemed to bypass the taste buds and tap directly into the brain, its sweet, nutty, earthy notes rising and expanding from register to register, echoing in the upper palate as though in a sound chamber. I thought of something one of the founders of the Cheese of Choice Coalition had said when I asked her what difference raw milk could possibly make: “One is a cheese; the other is an aria by Maria Callas.”

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, keeping 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.