Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (50 page)

Several things about that centuries-old
recipe were guaranteed to give an American health inspector conniptions; indeed, the raw
milk may have been the least of it. No, what gave the health inspector fits was the old
wooden barrel in which the milk is curdled, and the wooden paddle used to stir the
curds, which was carved (with two cutouts in the shape of a cross) from beech wood by a
craftsman in the Auvergne. Cheese in America is
always
made in stainless-steel
vats with stainless-steel tools. Easy to clean and disinfect, stainless steel is the
Pasteurian’s material of choice. Once scrubbed, its perfectly smooth,
machine-tooled surface gleams, offering an objective correlative of good hygiene. Wood
on the other hand bears all the imperfections of a natural material, with grooves and
nicks and pocks where bacteria can easily hide. And indeed the inside of Sister
Noëlla’s cheese-making barrel wears a permanent cloak of white—a biofilm of milk
solids and bacteria. You could not completely sterilize it if you tried, and part of the
recipe for Saint-Nectaire involves not trying: Lydie told Noëlla that between batches
the barrel should only be lightly rinsed with water.

So it happened that in 1985, after raw-milk
cheese was implicated in the deaths of twenty-nine people in California, the state
health inspector demanded that Sister Noëlla get rid of her wooden barrel and replace it
with stainless steel.

Sister Noëlla regarded her wooden barrel and
paddle not merely as quaint antiques, but as essential elements of the traditional
cheese-making process. The fact that the wood harbored bacteria was actually a good
thing. She preferred to think of them not as contaminants but “more like a
sourdough culture.” So Sister Noëlla designed an experiment for the benefit of the
health inspector. From the same raw milk, she made two batches of cheese, one in the
wooden barrel, and the other in a stainless-steel vat. She deliberately inoculated both
batches with
E. coli
.

What happened next was, at least to a
Pasteurian, utterly baffling: The cheese that had been started in the sterile vat had
high levels of
E. coli,
and the cheese made in the wooden barrel had next to
none. Just as Sister Noëlla had expected, the “good bacteria” living in the
barrel—most of them lactobacilli—had outcompeted the
E. coli
, creating an
environment in which it couldn’t survive. As had happened in my sauerkraut, the
good bugs, and the acids they produced, had driven out the bad. The community of
microbes in the raw-milk cheese was, in effect, policing itself.

Sister Noëlla had eloquently made her point:
The traditional makers of something like Saint-Nectaire have, without realizing it, been
practicing a kind of folk microbiology, developed over generations by trial and error,
and it works to help keep them safe. Wood, and the bacteria wood harbored, formed an
indispensable part of this process, and, ironically enough, introducing a more hygienic
material only made the process
less
hygienic.

Presented with the results of this elegant
little experiment, the health inspector relented, allowing Sister Noëlla to keep her
wooden
barrel. More than a quarter century later, she is still making
cheese in it.

Sister Noëlla has become something of a hero
to the post-Pasteurians. A nun’s habit and a Ph.D. in microbiology—the abbey sent
her to the University of Connecticut so that she might better be able to defend her
cheese, both from pathogens and from public health authorities—are an unbeatable
combination, and, so far at least, the FDA has thought better than to mess with Sister
Noëlla, even as the agency has come down hard on many other raw-milk cheese makers. Yet
when I visited her at the abbey recently, hoping to learn from her how to make cheese,
she was more equivocal on the subject of raw milk than I expected.

“I’m not quite the champion of
raw milk that people think I am,” she explained, as she showed me how to use the
notorious wooden paddle to gently corral pearly white curds into a mass. “People
say, Raw milk was fine for our grandfathers so why not for us? Because you are not your
grandfather, and those are not your grandfather’s microbes. Some of them have
gotten much nastier. We’re dealing with a different reality. So we can’t say
a raw-milk cheese is automatically safe. It has to be made with care.”

What Sister Noëlla was suggesting was that
many of the post-Pasteurians were in fact
pre
-Pasteurian in their assumptions,
harking back to a biologically more innocent time, when people were hardier and the bugs
more benign. We have no choice but to take account of history—including the impact of
the Pasteurian regimen on our immune systems and on the microcosmos.
^*
The
techniques of traditional cheese making still offer a measure of protection, but
America’s
cheese culture is fairly young, and not everyone
making cheese has mastered them.

Sister Noëlla and I were working together in
the cheese room, which sounds grander than it is: a low-ceilinged kitchen with a few
extra work sinks and a bulk tank for milk, in the back of a clapboard house on the
grounds of the abbey. In the fenced pasture behind it, the abbey’s Dutch Belted
cows were lounging on the ground, looking very much like exceptionally fat Oreo cookies.
I had spent the night at the abbey, sleeping, or trying to, on a microscopic sliver of
bed in a microscopic cell upstairs in the stoplight-red converted barn that houses the
tiny number of men in residence—altar boys, interns, and guests. Except when the nuns
were at work—in the garden tending vegetables, in the barn caring for the cattle, in the
shop working wood or leather or iron, or in the dairy making cheese—they were supposed
to have no contact with men. I had spotted Noëlla earlier that morning at mass, where
she and the sisters were singing some of the most hauntingly ethereal music I’d
ever heard, from behind the grille of bars that symbolizes their detachment from men and
the outside world.

But although life at the abbey was as
hushed, solemn, and regimented as you might expect, Sister Noëlla herself exhibited none
of those qualities. To the contrary: She enjoys nothing more than making people laugh,
and the powerful beam of her smile is infectious. There was a lot of joking around in
the cheese room, some of it fairly crude. Apart from her habit and wimple (and while at
work the sisters can wear a special habit made from blue denim), there was little to
remind you she was a nun.

Noëlla grew up in a big Italian family
outside Boston (her older brother cofounded the fifties nostalgia band Sha Na Na), and
after a difficult year at Sarah Lawrence—she enrolled in 1969, at the height of the
messy ferment of the sixties counterculture—she embarked on
a quest to
find a more sympathetic, and more structured, environment. She visited Regina Laudis at
the suggestion of a friend in 1970, and three years later she entered the abbey as a
postulant—the first step on the long road to becoming a nun.

My first impression of Sister Noëlla was of
a woman decidedly more earthy than spiritual. But I soon came to see that, for her, the
miracles of Christ were many, and could be witnessed in the unlikeliest of places,
including in a barrel of milk or under a microscope. Several of Christ’s miracles
rather famously involve fermentation, as she pointed out to me with a twinkle. Like
bread and wine, cheese is the transformation of ordinary matter into something
extraordinary, a process suggestive of transcendence.

“I never did understand why cheese
wasn’t included in the Eucharist,” she told me at one point. At first I
thought she was joking, but she turned serious. As a sacrament, Sister Noëlla suggested,
cheese would actually offer something that wine or bread cannot. “Cheese forces
you to contemplate death, and confronting our mortality is a necessary part of spiritual
growth.”

I knew enough to know Sister Noëlla
wasn’t referring to the mortal risk of food poisoning, but what exactly she
was
referring to with this comment, clearly heartfelt, it would take me
some time in the cheese-making room, and the cave, to figure out.

Learning how to make cheese from Sister
Noëlla, rather than another of America’s rapidly growing tribe of artisanal cheese
makers, has its advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, her method and
approach are so Old World that they reveal the process at its most stripped down and
elemental. Not only does Sister Noëlla have no use
for pasteurization
or stainless steel, but she relies exclusively on naturally occurring bacteria and
fungi—she adds no commercial cultures, which is virtually unheard of in modern cheese
making. That brings me to one of the disadvantages of learning from Sister Noëlla: Her
approach is so far outside of the mainstream that it is in no way representative of how
most cheese is made today, even artisanal cheese. Yet there is one other, crucial
advantage: Whereas most of the cheese makers I visited and interviewed would only let me
watch them work, and then only after walking through a vale of disinfectant and donning
a virtual hazmat suit, Sister Noëlla was perfectly happy to let me get my hands wet and
to handle the curd.

The work of making cheese at the abbey is
carefully stitched into the daily rhythms of the place, which revolve around worship,
seven times a day and once in the middle of the night. After Lauds at 6:00 a.m., the
abbey’s five cows are milked, and the milk is carried, still warm, to the cheese
room, where it is poured into the wooden barrel. Right before eight o’clock mass,
Sister Noëlla adds two tiny vials of rennet to initiate the coagulation of the milk.
While she and her sisters are at mass, singing Gregorian chants and taking communion, a
complex biochemical alchemy begins to unfold in the big barrel.

Lactobacilli present in the raw milk and the
surface of the wooden barrel begin furiously to reproduce, gobbling up lactose and
converting it into lactic acid. The pH of the milk gradually falls, and as it does, the
milk becomes inhospitable to undesirable strains of bacteria, including any
E.
coli
that may have found their way into it. The acidifying environment also
promotes the action of the rennet, which begins magically to transform the fluid milk
into a silky white gel. Returning from mass at ten-thirty, Sister Noëlla ran her index
finger through the surface, cleaving open a little canyon where, just an hour or two
before, there had been only liquid. It looked like a soft tofu,
but it
gleamed. For most of the cheese makers I’ve met, Sister Noëlla included, this is
the moment of magic.

Rennet, the catalyst of this alchemy, is
stuff so strange as to be almost mythological.
Ripped from the belly of a baby
animal:
And so it is, literally. Rennet comes from the lining of the first
stomach of a calf, lamb, or baby goat. It contains an enzyme called chymosin, the
function of which in a baby’s stomach is to curdle mother’s milk, thereby
slowing its absorption and rearranging the milk proteins in such ways as to aid the
baby’s digestion. Anyone who has ever burped a baby and been spit up on for his
troubles, has observed the action of chymosin on milk.

Presumably some herder discovered the
process several thousand years ago, when he or she slaughtered a young ruminant, opened
up its stomach, and found some lumpy curds of milk. Or perhaps the ancient herder used
the stomach of a young animal as a vessel in which to store or carry milk. Exposed to
the rennet in the stomach lining, the milk would have turned to something much like
cheese. Whatever its taste, the advantages of this “processed” milk over
fresh would have been immediately apparent, particularly to a nomadic people in a time
before refrigeration. Since curdling removes most of the water from the milk, it renders
the food much more portable, and the curds, having been acidified in the animal’s
stomach, would remain edible much longer than fresh milk.

What this suggests is that cheese was not so
much an invention as a discovery. Like other fermentations, cheese making is a form of
“biomimicry”—a technology modeled on a naturally occurring biological
process. Certainly there was plenty of room for improving on stomach-curdled milk,
including its taste and appearance and longevity. But, like other fermentations, cheese
was from the beginning a boon to humankind: a perishable foodstuff that has been
processed
in such a way as to render it more digestible, more
nutritious, more durable, and more flavorful than the original.

Rennet, which, remarkably, still often comes
from the stomach linings of baby animals,
^*
requires an acidic environment
in order to best perform its magic of coagulation. In cheese making, the acid is
supplied by bacterial fermentation rather than stomach acids. As in pickles and
sauerkraut, the necessary bacteria are ubiquitous in the environment and on the
“substrate”—in this case, the raw milk. But pasteurizing milk creates a
biologically blank slate, into which cultures of lactobacilli must be reintroduced after
pasteurization in order to acidify the milk and begin to build flavors. Starting with a
clean slate has its advantages: The cheese maker can decide precisely which bacteria to
introduce, and there will be few surprises—or
“accidents de
fromages,”
as the French call their cheese-making disasters. That’s
why such blank-slate ferments are now the rule, and not only in cheese-making. Most
brewers and winemakers work the same way, killing off the native bacteria and yeasts and
then reintroducing only the ones they want. Yet the gain in control of the process comes
at the price of a loss in complexity that, according to proponents of raw-milk cheeses
and other wild fermentations, you can taste.