I remember…

by Patrick

A young tragic writing teacher I had in college once showed me how to get my pen flowing when I was in a creative rut. You just write “I remember…” followed by whatever memory comes to mind, and you keep going with that memory until it stops, then you start writing “I remember…” again until a new memory pops up.

Convenient method, because today while making cheese I had some good memories. Perhaps it began with Cinderella. As I scrubbed the floor in the dairy, my cheesy colleague Punsi commented that, stooping to labor so low, I resembled the fairytale darling. Cinderello, I edited her.

The mention of that character conjured Disney’s cartoon simulacrum in my imagination – and with that image I was in the realm of my six year-old self, who was growing hungry for a design lunch. This term, I have just confirmed with my big sister via transatlantic SMS, is the name my dad gave to the edible gallimaufry we sometimes made up when I was about that age, from refrigerator flotsam: pickles, olives, leftover cold cuts, cheese, and whatever else was at hand. Design lunches were a happening, I remember, like an indoor picnic. The goals were playfulness and instant comestibility.

After work I made a design lunch for myself: Stayman apple, hot green olives, carrot, our sheep’s milk blue cheese with spicy pineapple mostarda, and bread with butter and jam. It was a great lunch.

Designed and consumed in 16 mins

Which leaves me free to pursue a different memory. It is this: when I was in middle school, the worst thing to be called was a poser. I don’t know if the term is still slanged. It meant one who was fake – an inelegant striver for social stats – and you can imagine what its opposite was: the authentic cool dude.

This comes to mind now because I feel with every little muscle of my being that I am flirting with the authentic life of a cheese maker and a man of earthy means. The art of flirtation must be one of the most egalitarian, requiring only the wit, charm and affection that are available to the humble rustic as much as the beau or belle of high society. And as one of the most widespread arts, I think flirtation must also be one of the most misused.

Flirting with authenticity. I turn the cheeses in the evening, when they are still wet and supple, but firm enough not to break under careful handling. Getting in and out of the walk-in refrigerator where these fresh curds are resting for the night is like trying to sneak into a nursery without waking the babes. The chill air refreshes me and the steady dripping of whey onto the floor or into a bucket lends a laboratorial air that makes me feel like a true professional.

After the dairy and my design lunch I head to garden and plow sheep shit into the beds, and weed, and stretch in the sun, and spread sheep shit under the burgeoning rose bushes. And then I go back into my Etruscan lodgings and again I feel like a pea shoot growing out of a pinch in an old castle wall, alive and green and climbing up the cool world.

A dash of…..

….smoked salt. Yes, that’s it. Add a dash of smoked salt to that pot of beans and you’ll feel like you’re right back on the road again, knapsack on your shoulder, bumming rides and cooking vermin over campfires.

As per usual, when there is something I ought to be doing, I do everything else. This weekend I ought to have been rewriting my resume to send off to potential employers back in the states, but instead I was huddled over a makeshift smoker (affumicatore) in the rain loading up on man-smell and smoking some salt. There seem to be a wide array of table salts on the market these days, hailing from all ends of the earth. They’re mining the himalayas for quarts-like rock salt, scraping the seaweed tangles for authentic celtic sea salt, and even powder coating pacific ocean salt with volcanic ash to make Hawaiian salt. Go figure.

Since my world of dry cured meats is currently infused, rubbed, dosed and hung with salt , I figured I would add my favorite cologne to the world of salts, Smokey Mountain Man # 5. A little searching on the web reminded me that all things under the sun have already been done, but I wasn’t in it for glory, (not too much), so I boned up and set out. I found a 12 gallon metal barrel appropriately discarded in the creek buy my house. My bosses mom foolishly lent me an all-metal cooking pot, and Mauro, my boss, being slightly intreged by the idea of a new niche product lent me some REALY nice screens that are supposed to be use in the brine injefcting machine. I took a hack saw to the metal barrel, poked a fair amount of holes in the bottom, added some tinfoil to the screens and put them all together.  That, and a day of experimentation in the ways of the Deep South produced the following.

making fire! Bowdrill style

This little bit took a while to put together right, but it had been on my to-do list for a while now. I produced a lot of smoke and some nice ashes, but in the end what I was going for was a flame in the ball of dry stuff. I blame the extreme humidity for my failure. Luckily this little scout had a lighter in his back pocket.

Next is a series of shots showing the setting up of the whole thing-a-ma-bobber

The first picture shows the cut open barrel set up on bricks. I put balls of newspaper in the barrel and then coals on top and lit it through one of the wholes in the bottom. The pan of water was placed directly on the coals once they got hot. Then the screens were placed on the barrel. I placed the cut end of the barrel on top of the screens to increase the draft and create a chamber. The coarse-grain salt was then poored in a thin layer on the screens. The idea being that you want smoke to pass through and then escape, not sit around. I used a wood board for the top to control draft and keep off the rain. Wood worked well because moisture didn’t condense on it and fall back on the salt.  The last picture is of the soaked, cherry wood chips that I saved from a carving project, to smoke with. The finished product was beautiful:

Next stop, the salami room, to make some authentic Californese salami with my mountain man salt.

back to the resume,

Aaron

Dwelling in Milk

il maschio

Before milking

Camosciata goats

“Praised be man, he is existing in milk / and living in lilies – / And his violin music takes place in milk / and creamy emptiness…Praised be my fellow man / For dwelling in milk”

- Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 228th Chorus

I have learned that cheese making, even artisanal cheese making, is highly routinized. It seems to be necessarily so – and this says as much about the changeable nature of milk as the constancy of cheese makers. I imagine myself experimenting with my own cheese recipes one day, when I finally fulfill Kerouac’s prophetic ramblings, join humanity, and give myself over to “dwelling in milk.” Right now, though, I am part of a cheese making process that has been honed in this spot for twenty years prior to my arrival. Toni, the cheese maker, has been dwelling in (sheep’s) milk for quite a while now, and her routine accounts for all its local varieties of composition, which depend on many factors including the season, the weather, and the sheep’s birthing cycle. I don’t understand any substance that has two-volume technical tomes written about it, as milk does; I understand how to turn still-warm, slippery cheeses in their plastic molds much better than I understand milk. But I can still exist in it, I think.

Last summer I worked with Ruben and Roberta, a young Italian cheese making couple. They homestead in Champremier, population 25, in the country’s alpine northwestern region of Aosta. In six years they have progressed from living in a roadside trailer and testing their first cheese recipes in a ramshackle laboratory to selling every round robiola or crusty tomme they make. They transform milk from their 42 Camosciata goats.

Ruben kept such good work routines that even a job as humble as cleaning the stable reminded me of the Italian word opera. Like ‘opus,’ the word descends directly from the Latin for nitty-gritty ‘work,’ perhaps on a grand scale. (If nothing else, it is the apprentice’s job to tease out the etymologies of farm labor.) The giornatta di merda, or ‘the long day of shit,’ was Ruben’s dysphemism for stable-cleaning – so accustomed to the task that he sounded like an office bee remarking on ‘a day of meetings.’ In this biweekly shit-cleaning procedure, there is a ‘piler’ and a ‘driver.’ The piler uses a pitchfork to heap the soggy straw bedding into a yellow wheelbarrow, one load at a time, which the driver then expedites to the dunghill through a series of Jedi mind tricks. It’s a wobbly, smelly, and physically exhausting job that culminates when you spread out fresh straw bales with a feeling of great benevolence towards the goats. Voilà, Ruben would say, la stala d’oro!

I say a feeling of benevolence, but my memory of the giornatta is more cathartic than anything else. Just look at how much shit we cleaned! To explain the lasting effect this relatively small experience had on me, I’m tempted to assign some totemic power to the tools we used – fork, rake, broom, barrow – or special aura to the mote-strewn stable itself. But even more than these I am captured by the idea that routines, even brief ones, have an uncanny power to orient us toward satisfaction. After all, what could be both more routinized and more satisfying than the proverbial fat lady’s song?

The opera metaphor is especially true because you can fall for a good routine as a spectator as easily as you can as its main performer. These well-worn paths have a way of drawing us in. Again I come back to Ruben, who became for me an amalgam of John Henry, Old MacDonald and MacGyver. I noticed early on that he did everything well and never seemed to strain, although he probably smoked the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes a day of Old Holborne tobacco. But of course his nicotine habit became part of the opera. I was struck by the reliable speed with which he could roll a perfect smoke, just as I was impressed by his ability to milk 42 goats in an hour. In fact, he often did both at the same time, one hand working the ciggy like a piece of origami and the other a jangly udder, sometimes with his cell phone pinched between ear and shoulder – all of this appearing natural and replicable from my vantage on a little wooden stool beside his own. Not so, I learned. Like a seasoned performer, Ruben cast over that space a bit of illusory magic – call it stablecraft – which was really just a refined series of expert movements and a lot of hard work boiled down to simple, elegant routine.

I fell into my own routine, literally, on the steep meadows where we went haying in July and August. Again and again I scratched at those hillsides with quick grazes and long lunges of the rake, sweating with satisfaction as my knee-high tangle of dry grass and thyme became a messy, head-high rick. Grasshoppers squirmed through the green wave and launched themselves off like single notes escaping crescendo. One day, I was so rapt by the raking rhythm that I must have been on the verge of a fugue state myself, when I stepped on a hill of fire ants and ran around in circles flailing wildly like Aosta’s mythical Dahu under the full moon.

This spring in Tuscany I have a new work routine, a new opera: a long spell of “violin music” in the dairy (work) in the morning and afternoon, followed by a soothing stretch of “creamy emptiness” (rest) in the evening. I find that three weeks into my new apprenticeship, I am hungry for the unexpected and intangible milkiness of life. I don’t know how the routine plays into this, and I’m inclined to leave the theory I set out to describe above untouched for now. I’m off to bed, where I look for (and often find) the syncopated beat.

Spring Sense

the caseificio (dairy)

Lulu the retriever

dandelions in the pasture

wind shook the olive

green shoots, brooding sky

the view from Corzano

I am doing some walking and looking here, and most of what I encounter I cannot put an accurate name to. My working companion, Irene, pointed out that the pretty yellow wildflowers growing in the olive orchards and vineyards are jonquil, and the white ones anemone. She seemed to recall the names the same way I would recall a character actor from the Eighties – dusty knowledge, but ingrained. Indeed, she did grow up in this place of rolling hills. The land is verdant now with shoots and sprouts. It is a much more sensual landform than the flat one I found in Piemonte. With its ample slopes somewhere between gently rolling and formidably steep, and its rich patchwork of pasture, orchard, and woodland, I feel like I am traversing a huge, well-groomed body.

The farm (fattoria) is called Corzano e Paterno, and each of those names represents a different hilltop where old stone buildings endure like sentinels. You can look from Corzano to Paterno (or vice versa), your gaze crossing over a valley in between. It takes me roughly half an hour on foot to get from one to the other, on a road of hard clay and stones that meanders past some Etruscan ruins (I have not found them). But Corzano, where I am staying and where the dairy and winery are located, is less than a mile as the crow flies from Paterno, where Machiavelli once lodged during hunting season and where, today, the six hundred or so sheep are housed and milked.

Today after work in the dairy I went to Paterno to pick up a bicycle called Pamela Anderson. A guide that used the bikes for local touring groups gave each one a popular American name (Bugs Bunny, Brad Pitt) before Paterno got a hold of them. I road Pamela back to Corzano the long way – that is, around the valley rather than through it. Lulu, a golden Labrador who is in love with another dog at Paterno, accompanied me home through the intermittent wind and rain and sunshine. She found a hunk of molding bread on the road, carried it with her at a trot for more than a mile, then suddenly dropped it and never looked back.

In my walking and looking I have been struck by both the force and the subtlety of the spring, and humbled by my ignorance of so many wonderful things in it. It is a tantalizing experience to be ensconced by this onrush of unknown sensual things. Some I know better than others. Grass, Flower, Sky, Yes. Pamela Anderson?