Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (52 page)

Standing in the abbey’s
“cave,” it is possible to observe this succession of species as if in time
lapse. The cave is really just a ten-foot-square corner of a cellar, walled off and
air-conditioned to maintain cavelike temperatures and levels of humidity all year long.
Lining the walls are tall wooden cabinets faced with screen doors. Their shelves hold
two months’ production of cheeses, arranged according to seniority. Written on the
side of each cheese in blue ink is the date on which it was made and the initials of its
maker. Starting with the fat white discs made yesterday, I could follow the
cheeses’ progression from callow youth to venerable age, as the bloomy white rinds
gradually take on some gray, then slowly mottle and shrink, until you arrive at the
wrinkled and stinky gray-brown visage of a Saint-Nectaire that, after two months, is
fully ripe and ready to eat.

What takes place in the rind over the course
of these eight weeks is a more or less orderly form of rot. As successive rounds of
decomposition unfold, one species dines on the waste products of another, in the process
creating the conditions, and often the food, for the next. Most of these fungi you know
well and have had reason to despise in the past: They are the same molds that turn white
bread blue, that establish furry white beachheads on a ripe tomato or draw a dilating
brown target on a pear. The cheese maker has learned, at least to an extent, how to
manage or guide these familiar wild species, getting them to behave in more or less
predictable ways.

Sister Noëlla walked me through the stages
of fungal life and death unfolding in her cave. By the second day, a fine lawn of
yeasts—primarily
Debaryomyces
and
Torulopsis—
has spread across the
fresh cheese,
though it is only visible through a microscope. There
are also invisible colonies of bacteria, such as
Streptococcus cremoris,
working to turn the lactose in the milk into lactic acid—food for future fungi. By the
sixth day, the cheese has grown a fine white beard of hyphae from a fungus called
Mucor
. This particular fungus, which the French sometimes call the
bête
noire
, is considered a catastrophe when it appears in a Brie or Camembert, but
is warmly welcomed in a Saint-Nectaire or Tomme de Savoie. When on day nine the
Mucur
sporulates, a field of what (under the microscope) looks like black
daisy seed heads colonizes the rind, transforming its pristine white to a grayish brown.
By now the cheese looks as though it has lost its youthful innocence and acquired a few
unsightly scars of experience. It has also visibly shrunk, as the water in it continues
to evaporate.

In the shade of those blackish
Mucor
hyphae, strains of
Geotrichum candidum,
Sister
Noëlla’s favorite fungus, are feasting on lactic acid and growing their own
hyphae, though they are not yet visible to the naked eye. “Geo,” as some
American cheese makers call it for short, is responsible for the downy white coat—the
jolie robe
—found on a Saint-Marcellin. The fungus introduces a set of
powerful enzymes that break down various fats and proteins, in the process helping to
develop the cheese’s flavor and releasing several strongly aromatic compounds,
including the faint whiff of ammonia that filled the cave. Sister Noëlla has ultimate
respect for
Geotrichum
, which was the subject of her dissertation. She
mentioned that its enzymes have been known to bore holes through plastic. Some strains
of
Geo
also seem to make it more difficult for Listeria to survive in a
cheese.

By breaking down lactic acid and producing
ammonia,
Geotrichum
neutralizes the pH of the rind, changing the environment in
such a way as to make it hospitable to subsequent waves of bacteria and fungi. By
sending its filamentous hyphae down into the paste, the fungus in effect
“tills” the rind of the cheese, digging microscopic
channels that allow other aerobic microbes, like
Penicillium
, to move deeper
into the cheese, contributing new flavors and aromas. These penetrations gradually
thicken the rind and multiply its population of microbes, both in number and in kind.
Soon the rind accumulates a grayish dust of “fungal debris”—spores and the
bodies of dead fungi—that gives off the musty odor of a dank, neglected cellar. By day
thirteen pinkish patches of
Trichothecium roseum
have begun to powder the rind,
giving a violet cast to the Saint-Nectaire. By now the pH of the rind has been
neutralized, creating a happy habitat for coryneform bacteria such as
Brevibacterium
, which eventually will contribute powerful aromas to the
ripening cheese.

And so it goes for the two months it takes a
Saint-Nectaire to ripen, each species altering the rind environs in such a way as to
pave the way for the next, in a predictable ecological succession that Sister Noëlla
carefully documented in her dissertation. Along the way, each species releases its own
set of enzymes, each one a customized molecular tool for breaking down a specific fat or
sugar or protein into an amino acid or peptide or ester that contributes a specific
flavor or aroma to the ripening cheese. Within a few weeks, the process of ecological
succession has culminated in the establishment of a fairly stable community of fungi and
bacteria. Much about this microbial community remains a wilderness to science. But
Sister Noëlla is in touch with a group of microbiologists who are actively exploring the
cheese-rind ecosystem, hoping to learn how the various species compete and cooperate,
and how they may communicate with one another to defend their turf (and in turn the
cheese beneath it) from invasion, in a process known as “quorum
sensing.”

Listening to Sister Noëlla exalt this
leprous skin of decomposed milk as a vibrant ecological community is to appreciate just
what a weird and wonderful achievement cheese is: how our ancestors figured out how to
guide the decomposition of milk so that it might be
arrested and then
defended, using a jujitsu move that deftly deploys rot against rot, fungus against
fungus, to suspend milk’s inexorable slide into putrefaction just long enough for
us to enjoy a tasty cheese. Other ferments operate on the same general principle, earth
to earth deferred, but, unlike wine or beer or a pickled beet, the aroma of a ripened
cheese won’t ever let us forget the role rot has played in its creation.

Over time, the fungi living and dying in a
cheese rind work to neutralize their environment, a development that hastens the
ripening of the cheese in two important ways. First, the difference in pH between the
paste and the rind creates a “gradient,” or imbalance, that serves to draw
the strong-smelling compounds produced on the rind deep into the paste; ripening from
the outside in, the cheese is bland no longer. At the same time, the rising pH of the
rind creates conditions much to the liking of a notorious microbe called
Brevibacterium linens
, the appearance of which, beginning around week
three, is marked by a distinct reddish-orange cast creeping over the rind. But you
don’t need to see
B. linens
to know it has arrived:
B. linens
is
the bacterium responsible for much of the stink in a stinky cheese. Along with a few
other members of its bacterial family, the coryneforms,
B. linens
is the reason
certain ripe cheeses need a room of their own.

Saint-Nectaire is home to a healthy
population of
B. linens
that, when the cheese is fully ripe, gives it its
distinctive barnyard smell. But it is in the washed-rind cheeses—Époisse, Limburger,
Taleggio, and, in America, newer ones like Red Hawk or Winnimere—where
B.
linens
is actively encouraged to flourish, imbuing these cheeses with their
powerful and occasionally room-clearing aromas. Washing the rind, usually with salty
water (sometimes with wine or beer), creates
an environment maximally
hospitable to
B. linens
, which in turn can single-handedly create an
environment that is either much more or much less hospitable to members of our species.
Some people love the smell of
B. linens
, or learn to; others find it revolting.
And still others are repelled and attracted to it at the same time, captivated by what
might be called the erotics of disgust.

“Oh, I really like that term,”
Sister Noëlla said, when I raised, as delicately as I could, the issue of rankness in
her cheese. The subject of disgust is not something I’ve found many cheese makers
eager to discuss, at least not in the company of journalists. But Sister Noëlla is happy
to talk about the earthier dimension of her work, at least up to a point.

“Cheese is all about the dark side of
life,” she said one afternoon as we were strolling up the hill to her lab. She
told me about a French cheese maker of her acquaintance, a monk by the name of Frère
Nathanaël, who makes a strong cheese called Tamié at his monastery in the Haute-Savoie.
She once asked him how he determined when a Tamié is ripe. You turn it over and sniff
the bottom, Frère Nathaniaël told her. “
Ça sent la vache
.”
It’s ready when it smells like the cow. And then, in case that wasn’t quite
clear enough, he added, “The back end of the cow!”

It suddenly dawned on me that
“barnyardy”—a term cheese mongers use in praise of certain stinky cheeses—is
a euphemism for manure. (
Duh!)
Certainly the manure of some farm animals, such
as cows, is not unappealing, at least when they’ve been out grazing on pasture.
Yet some cheeses make even less socially acceptable allusions, if that’s the right
word. The various aromas of washed-rind cheeses are often likened to those of the human
body in its various parts. A French poet famously referred to the aroma of certain
cheeses as the
“pieds de Dieu”
—the feet of god. Just to be clear:
foot odor of a particularly exalted quality, but still—foot odor.

Sister Noëlla told me about another
cheese-maker friend of hers, James Stillwaggon, an American living in France, who holds
unusually frank views on the subject of cheese olfaction. She had recently quoted him at
the end of the draft of an article on the microbiology of cheese rinds, though she
wasn’t sure if his remarks would survive editing. The quote came from an exchange
the two had had on the question of why the vocabulary used to describe wine is so much
richer and more nuanced than the vocabulary used to describe cheese. Wine talk is full
of vivid metaphor—comparing wines to specific fruits and flowers, for example—whereas,
as Stillwaggon pointed out, the flavors of cheese usually elicit only vague, generalized
comments “like ‘Mmmm, good!’ ‘Interesting!’
‘Fantastic!’

“If we address frankly what is evoked
by cheese, I think it becomes clear why so little is said. So what does cheese evoke?
Damp dark cellars, molds, mildews and mushrooms galore, dirty laundry and high school
locker rooms, digestive processes and visceral fermentations, he-goats which do not
remind of Chanel … In sum, cheese reminds of dubious, even unsavory places,
both in nature and in our own organisms. And yet we love it.”

In its very suggestiveness, cheese is both
like and unlike many of the other foods humans cook or ferment. Whether by fire or water
or the action of microbes, one of the ways humans transform the edible stuff of nature
is in the direction of greater allusiveness—in taste or smell or appearance. Just as we
take pleasure in enriching our language with layers of metaphor and allusion, we
apparently like to trope what we eat and drink, too, extracting from it not only more
nourishment but more meaning as well—more psychic nourishment, if you will. It just so
happens that the more vivid, odiferous tropes that cheese makers have teased out of milk
can verge on the indecent, taking us places polite society doesn’t like to go.

But the question arises: Why would we want
to go there in the
first place? Why don’t cheese makers stop
with the sweet, freshly showered scent of mozzarella, rather than press on to the ripe
raw-milk Camembert with its suggestions of, well, negligent hygiene?

Compared with some other mammals, we humans
have long been alienated from our sense of smell. From the moment we began to walk
upright, the eye took precedence over the nose. This, at least, is Sigmund Freud’s
theory for why humans have repressed so much of the sensory data supplied by the nose,
and why our vocabulary for describing smells is comparatively so thin and generalized.
(
Mmmm, good!
) The smells we are repressing are of course those of the lower
body and the earth, which walking upright allows us to transcend, or at least overlook,
in humanity’s age-old top-priority project of putting space between itself and all
the other animals. But that project has a cost. The reason those smells so transfix
mammals that still walk on four legs is that they contain deeply compelling information,
information the high-minded biped is missing. Freud never said this, but Stillwaggon
conceivably might: A strong cheese puts us back on all fours.