Cliches are wonderful and dangerous things. They are wonderful because they so often encapsulate some important truth in a pithy and memorable form (by its nature a cliché has to be easy to lodge in our brains); dangerous because they can so easily short circuit further thought. Frost comes to mind here again, as he so often does in this new world of country things:
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
I am realizing that these little snippets of life on the farm are like so many trees: interesting, maybe even fascinating in themselves, but in the Big Picture, the Long Run, The Grand Scheme of Things (clichéd metaphors all!) they are side shows. The main point of this undertaking all along has been the creation of cheese as good as I can make it.
I could easily have written about wiring the loafing barn, something Zach and I have spent several hours this week doing. We did it because Shane, our sawyer, is temporarily out of logs big enough to cut siding from, so we are stymied in our goal to finish repairing the scar made to the old barn when half of one end of it was destroyed in order to erect a silo – itself made useless by the march of technological change. Instead, I want to write for the first time about making cheese – the real reason for doing all the other things we are doing.
I have been milking a few of our goats since we arrived on the farm back at the end of May. Milk production has been modest – a gallon and a half or so a day – but it has been enough to allow me to hone my skill in the production of chevre, the simplest and freshest of all fresh goat cheeses. I have not been able to expand into the production of other types of cheese since they all require an aging space with controlled temperature and humidity. In Rhode Island I used an old refrigerator, modified with an external thermostat that allowed it to stay at around 55 degrees. The plan here has always been to construct an aging cave along with the cheese-making room, but we have not got to that yet. Non – if I can refer back to an earlier posting – sine patientia.
Chevre is not a complex cheese, and its freshness is fleeting, but that is part of its charm. Decades ago, when we lived in Italy and I was a medievalist, Kathleen and I (and baby Robertino) made a day trip from Milan, where we went to church, north into the Brianza and hiked a couple of hours up to the aptly named San Pietro al Monte: St. Peter’s on the mountain. It is an abandoned Benedictine monastery, important in the 11th and 12th centuries, and famous among Medieval art historians for it frescoes.
They were worth the trek, but the point of this story is that on our way back down the mountain we came upon a rustic taverna in the woods. It was largely patronized by Italian hunters and there were piles of shotguns leaned against the trees at the entrance. We went in for some refreshment and found, along with the wine, an ancient cooler with chunks of white stuff. I asked the proprietor what it was and he replied formaggio fresco di capre, fresh goat cheese; what the French call chevre. We ate some with our wine, and took the rest home to enjoy later. Two days after, it was inedible. As I said, chevre is a fleeting pleasure. (I also have to say that our chevre is good for a couple of weeks before it goes goaty, and I now know that that Italian mountain cheese had been treated badly. But I don’t care; it was memorable.)
So I am on a quest to make a chevre that highlights the tangy freshness of the milk. I have been experimenting with various flavors, trying to avoid the most common trap of cheesemakers, which is relegating the cheese itself to a vehicle that carries the real flavor, which is whatever has been added. I am trying to bring to the foreground the cheese itself, with hints of additional flavor, like an echo that is heard in these mountains. The ones with staying power so far have been honey-lavender and herbes de Provence with extra lavender; in both cases the lavender comes from our farm, as well as the cheese. And that is the point.