Reclaiming the Kitchen
(Page 5 of 8)
June/July 2008
By Barbara Kingsolver
Useful Microbiology
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Ricki was sympathetic to that position, having traveled the world and seen a lot of people working without major milking-room specs. In Greece, for example, she watched shepherds make cheese in a cinder block shed right after they milked, making feta over a fire, pouring out the whey over the stone floor to wash it. The specific bacteria that thrived there created a good environment for making the cheese, while crowding out other, potentially harmful microorganisms. French wine makers apply the same principle when using their grapes’ leftover yeasty pulp as compost in their vineyards. Over the centuries, whole valleys become infused with the right microbes to make the wine ferment properly and create its flavorful terroir (the qualities a product owes to its unique location).
Many of our most useful foods — yogurt, wine, bread and cheese — are products of controlled microbe growth. We may not like thinking about it, but germs crawl eternally over every speck of our planet. Our own bodies are bacterial condos, with established relationships between the upstairs and downstairs neighbors. Without these regular residents, our guts are easily taken over by less congenial newcomers looking for low-rent space. What keeps us healthy is an informed coexistence with microbes, rather than the micro-genocide that seems to be the rage lately. Germophobic parents can now buy kids’ dinnerware, place mats, even clothing embedded with antimicrobial chemicals. Anything that will stand still, if we mean to eat it, we shoot full of antibiotics. And yet, more than 5,000 people in the United States die each year from pathogens in our food. Sterility is obviously the wrong goal, especially as a substitute for careful work.
That was our agenda here: careful work. Ricki moved in a flash from terroir to cheese cultures to warming our pots of milk. While waxing poetic in praise of slowness, she moved fast. By the time we’d added the bacterial culture to set our cheddar, she was on to the next cheese. With a mirror propped over the stove so we could see into the pot, she stirred in vinegar to curdle the queso blanco, laughing as she guessed the quantity. There’s no perfect formula, she insisted, just some basic principles and the confidence to give it a try.
Confidence was not yet ours, but we got busy anyway, we maverick dairywomen, buffalo ranchers and dreamers. It does feel subversive to flout the professionals and make a thing yourself. Our nostrils inhaled the lemony-sweet scent of boiling whey. The steamy heat of the kitchen curled our hair, as new textures and flavors began to rise before us as possibilities: mascarpone, fromagina, mozzarella.
Mother’s Milk for Life?
I wasn’t a complete novice. I had been making cheese for a few years, ordering supplies from Ricki and following her recipes. It wasn’t only a spirit of adventure that led my family into this, but also bellyaches. Lactose intolerance is a common inherited condition in which a person’s gut loses, after childhood, its ability to digest the milk sugar called lactose. The sugary molecules float around undigested in the intestine, ferment and create gassy havoc. The effect is like eating any other indigestible carbohydrate, such as cardboard or grass.
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