Next up on the essays shelf:
Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink
Secret Ingredients is a collection of food writing from The New Yorker. I love these collections. So far, we have excerpted from the following collections: Life Stories, The Fun of It, and The New Gilded Age. There are a couple more collections out there that I do not own, sports writing, humor writing, fiction.
I’m not a foodie, but I love this collection because 1. it gives snapshots of different eras, 2. the writing is great.
A fascinating piece from 2002, it is both a profile of “the cheese nun” (a nun who makes cheeses and specializes in the microbiology of cheese molds), and a look at the “raw-milk underground” in the 100% pasteurized United States. There was a documentary made about Mother Noella Marcellino (“the cheese nun”), who hails from the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut (the only such cloistered community in the United States). And hmmm, another nun from Regina Laudis is a bit famous as well. Just a bit. Regina Laudis is a Benedictine cloister. I’ve mentioned I have nuns in my family, only they were Dominicans. They also were based in Connecticut, university professors of the classics, and Greek and Latin. I asked my great-aunt Joan if she knew Dolores Hart, and she didn’t, although she of course knew of Regina Laudis. But they were in their hey-day at the same time and in the same state (pre-and-post-vatican II, Connecticut).
Mother Noella works at the abbey, making cheeses. She is going for her Ph.D. in microbiology. She gets scholarships to travel through France, studying fuzzy cheese molds in cheese caves and then studying the results. Fascinating.
The piece is full of statistics: “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 …” “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 cheese be aged for at least sixty days.” It is that last statistic that has basically killed the raw-milk cheeses in this country, since so many of those cheeses deteriorate before the 60 days is up. You need to eat that stuff right away. So there’s a passionate underground of people who sell raw-milk cheeses, and you have to know the farms and the farmers to know where to go. The fear of E. coli is real. Studies are done constantly to try to make food safe for consumption. But in doing so, many Americans have no concept of what real cheese even tastes like, how yummy it can be, how the raw-milk cheese and the shrink-wrapped stuff you buy in grocery stores are not even in the same species.
Mother Noella is passionate about all of this stuff. She is not just a cheese fan. She studies the molds under microscopes, she writes papers for scientific journals. Understanding how molds work is key to the whole process. She performs studies on the abbey’s cheeses (made from the milk that come from their own cows – the abbey is entirely self-sustaining. In the documentary about Dolores Hart, most of the footage you see of nuns, they are tromping around in work boots and hard hats, driving tractors, etc.)
Here is an excerpt, where, due to a mistake, Mother Noella discovers something important about the cheese she is making. It involves a sawed-off whiskey barrel for the mixing of the cheese.
Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink
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 gave 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 said. 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 bacteria that is often associated with food poisoning, which causes fever, aching muscles, but brief and 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 said. “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 diary. 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 too 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 it 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 la,” Lydie always said.” Stay where you are.
