Eatin' Words

On Spitting

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 17:21:00 -0400

When tasting wines or judging cheeses, it is prudent to spit. A swirl of the glass, a deep slow sniff, a quick sip, will provide a seasoned wine taster with sufficient information to judge a wine’s color, bouquet and flavor. Similarly, an experienced cheese judge can detect even a subtle flaw with just a whiff and a few mincing bites. Swallowing is unnecessary, and can lead, with wine, to impaired judgment, and with cheese, to impaired gastrointestinal function.

With practice and proper technique it is possible to spit wine with dignity, even elegance. Tuck long hair behind the ear, press ties or necklaces firmly to the chest, tilt head forward and slightly to the side, and in a single confident jet, spit. A successful spit will pierce the surface of the spittoon, or crachoir, with hardly a splash, like an Olympic diver. Even the crachoir itself is often an attractive, collectible objet d’art of ornately painted porcelain, fine crystal or filagreed silver.

It is not possible to spit cheese with dignity or elegance. Cheese spit is a viscous, lumpy string. Ballistic trajectory is difficult to predict or control. Cartoon spitting noises—ptooey, ftang, etc.—are unavoidable. Springbacks are common, and manual retrieval is often required. And a cheese spittoon is just a chicken bucket full of cheese spit.

(note madcap dairy scientists in upper right corner)

Style speaking: rubi’s guests bedecked in cool. She...

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 10:45:00 -0400

Style speaking: rubi’s guests bedecked in cool. She wears a leather piece raising the concept of “fanny pack” to new heights. Petria Post.

My First Seven Dates with Julie Rivard

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 11:16:00 -0400

9 January 1998 Biba, Boston

Wine: Trimbach Pinot Gris

Appetizer: Tuna Sushi with Pumpkin Dumplings

Appetizer: Stracchino Pizza

Wine: Etude Pinot Noir

Entrée: Venison with roasted onions, carrots

Dessert: Warm Chocolate Cake

Cognac: A. de Fussigny Heritage

Comment: Ordered venison, rare, to establish manliness. Failed to record what she had. Established that we both drove 1986 Volvo 240 Wagons. Pre-date sedative: Lagavulin, 16 years old, served neat.

14 January 1998 My Apartment, then The Blue Room, Cambridge

Wine: Louis Roederer Champagne

Cheese: Soumaintrain Fermier, with dried cherries.

Beer: Fraoch Heather Ale

Appetizer: Scallops in Hoisin

Appetizer: Seared Mackerel Tail

Appetizer: Salmon Cakes

Comment: No recollection of this date. Statute of Limitations on illegally imported Soumaintrain Fermier now expired.

16 January 1998 Chez Henri, then Chez Moi, Cambridge

Entrée: Fries

Dessert: Hot Chocolate

Recipe: 1 ½ cups whole milk

½ cup heavy cream

½ vanilla bean

6 heaping teaspoons Valrhona cocoa powder

6 teaspoons sugar.

Comment: Accompanied by “box of cookies from Provence.” Date shortened by resultant coma.

20 January 1998 Les Zygomates, Boston

Wine: Veuve-Cliquot Champagne

Appetizer: Lobster Bisque

Appetizer: Cod Cheeks

Entrée: Veal Medallions in Port Sauce

Entrée: Seared Scallops with Foie Gras Butter

Wine: Domaine Méo-Camuzet Vosne-Romanée Les Chaumes 1992

Comment: Still paying off the wine.

22 January 1998 Her Apartment, Norwell

Entrée: Alaskan King Crab, Red Bliss potatoes

Beer: Wild Goose

Dessert: Mixed berries and whipped cream

Wine: Nino Franco Prosecco

Comment: Established she does not like beer. Notes indicate a “shitload” of butter on the potatoes. Notes also indicate that no bowls, utensils or glassware were used in the service of berries and cream or Prosecco.

24 January 1998 Chez Henri, Cambridge (Her 28^th Birthday)

Appetizer: Escargots

Entrée: Venison

Entrée: Monkfish

Wine: Seigneurie de Posanges Bourgogne

Wine: Saracco Moscato d’Asti

Comment: No recollection of birthday present. But must have given her one, right? Sweetie?

25 January 1998 My Apartment, Cambridge (Super Bowl Sunday)

Entrée: My famous Tuna Spinach Curry, rice

Comment: Established that she doesn’t care for football. Established her habit of raising important life questions during critical plays, including “shall we have kids,” “should I convert,” and others. Established that she doesn’t care for my famous Tuna Spinach Curry. Date marks last time I made Tuna Spinach Curry. Denver won, Elway’s first.

Style speaking… Amy Wong, rubi’s barrista-nista....

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 10:31:24 -0400

Style speaking… Amy Wong, rubi’s barrista-nista. Each stitch bends to her vision. Petria post.

My Connoisseurship: Early Antecedents

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 20:55:00 -0400

Each Chanukah from 1968 to 1973 I requested a cheese and meat gift basket from the Sears Catalog. I do not recall the precise model.

Though my taste at this stage was poor, my demonstrated early interest in cheese and meat gift boxes is a clear antecedent of my later professional interest in cheese and meat gift boxes, and will be useful to future scholars and biographers.

Note each of my requests was denied. I received instead electric trains, a telescope, a box of hats, Dr. Denton’s and a Ted Williams football.

(Source: Wishbookweb)

Photo

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 16:44:00 -0400

Let Me Through, I‘m a Cheesemonger

Thu, 31 May 2012 22:50:00 -0400

If you will permit me, I will blog.

I will write about food, mostly.

I will write about cheese, and about cheesemakers and the farms and dairies where cheeses are made.

I will write about wine, though mostly of its relationship to cheese. I will collaborate with my friend Cat Silirie on a regular segment that we’ll call, “This Cheese, This Wine.”

Once, for exactly a year, I wrote in a notebook everything that I ate. Everything. I won’t do that again. It was a horrible burden.

I will write about restaurants where they inspire me. I will praise and describe the ones I like and ignore the ones I don’t.

I won’t write much about cooking, at least not my own cooking. I am a middling cook. But I will write about ingredients, and cuts of meat and interesting fishes.

I will often write about goats. I enjoy goats. I will write about cows too, which I also enjoy. I will write less often about sheep. Sheep are dullards. But they seem to know my name, and I prize their cheeses above all others.

I will write about the Berkshires where I live, and New York City where I sort of live. In the event that I ever go anywhere else I will write about that too.

I will write about my childhood, but just the food parts. I will write about my wife, but just the food parts.

I will write about my store and cafe, but I will not try to sell you anything, at least not explicitly. I will write about the business of food, offering witty anecdotes of my life in retail [warning: EXPLICIT].

Petria May, trafficker in vintage couture, will join me now and again to document the style of the Rubiner’s and rubi’s customer. They are a stylish bunch, and fun to look at.

I will take pictures, though my hand might be shaky and my composition crude.

And I will try to be positive and fair, ignoring advice to “write what you know.”

On John Loomis, Zingerman’s Cheesemaker

Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

John is tall and handsome in a rugged, weathered, bushy eye-browed sort of way, like a slim Lee Marvin in a hairnet. He has a curmudgeonly reputation among the Zingerman’s staff. Paul Saginaw refers to him alternately as Curly Loomis (presumably an ironic Three Stooges reference) or Smiley Loomis (again, presumed irony). I do not notice. Or perhaps my own vaunted curmudgeonliness blinds me to this trait in others. I find him affable, passionate about his craft and full of humorous anecdotes. And much less likely to shoot you than Lee Marvin.

John comes from a line of dairymen. Sort of. His father worked for Sealtest Dairy in Detroit. He and his brother Bill worked there every summer, screwing tops on Reddi Whip cans. I asked if he remembered Twin Pines, the dairy of my suburban Detroit childhood. “Remember it?! I went to school with Milky’s son!” (For you non-Detroiters, Milky was Twin Pines’ mascot, a frightening I Pagliacci-style clown who incanted “Mine’s Twin Pines” and seemed to drool black ink). He declared it the “the worst job ever” and vowed never to work in dairy again.

Failing in his resolve, John and Bill started Loomis Dairy in 1990 in Manchester, a town twenty miles east southeast of Ann Arbor.

On Prairie Fruits Farm

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I-57 from Chicago to Champaign is mostly straight and very flat. The land opens not far from the city into vast fields of soybean and corn. Signs along the highway lobby for ethanol, like Burma-Shave billboards, phrase by phrase. Grain elevators in the distance look as tall as the Sears tower.

Once this was tall grass prairie, a sea of deeply rooted grasses and wildflowers—big and little bluestem, indian grass and prairie dropseed, blackeyed susans, echinacea and prairie gentian among hundreds. But prairie is rare now. In 1837, in the town of Grand Decatur, Illinois, John Deere invented the self-scouring, steel-bladed plow that broke through the tough prairie sod and plowed it under.

Every state has an official state soil. The soil of Massachusetts, where I live, is the sandy Paxton. In Michigan, where I was born, hardwood forests grow tall in Kalkaska soil. Maine’s is Chesuncook. California’s is San Juaquin. The state soil of Illinois is Drummer.

“Drummer is the best soil in the world,” Wes Jarrell told me, as he unearthed an alfalfa root with a pocketknife and showed me the little white nodules that “fix” nitrogen from the air and fertilize the soil. He pointed to a small rise beyond a grazing paddock that he and his wife Leslie Cooperband are restoring to prairie.

Wes and Leslie are soil scientists on the faculty of the University of Illinois, which spans the nearby towns of Champaign and Urbana. They met at a soil science convention in Las Vegas.

In 2003 they started Prairie Fruits Farm, on land carved from the surrounding fields of soybean and corn. Their neighbors are large-scale, cash grain farmers, some descended from original Illinois homesteaders. This spring one neighbor tested out his new ethanol-financed 8-wheel tractor with its 65-foot articulated cultivator on Prairie Fruits’ new grazing paddocks. He cultivated 32 acres in 45 minutes.

On Twig Farm

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Michael Lee and Emily Sunderman make goat cheese in West Cornwall, on land carved from Emily’s parents’ farm. Their farmhouse, which my wife described as chartreuse and mocha, is smart and modern. “We were going for dark celery”, Michael told us, “the neighbors find it startling against the winter snow.” Inside it seems more Manhattan loft than Vermont farmstead, with walls of books, clean wood floors and a baby grand.

Michael was turning cheeses in the cellar when we arrived.

He has adopted a minimalist system of nomenclature for his cheeses. The square bundles on the left are called “Squares”. The little mold-covered plugs are called “Little Plugs.” The soft, pinkish, washed-rind cushions are called “Soft”. And so on. When I asked how they named their farm, he replied, “There were lots of twigs here”.

Michael led us through grassy and browsy pasture to meet his goats. Along the way he narrated the grasses and plants: brome, rye, trefoil, clover, canary grass, sedges, chicory and Queen Anne’s lace. The soil here is heavy clay. In spots bedrock is only six inches down. Limestone knuckles rise through the clay here and there, ideal for goat perching.

We entered a thicket of dogwood, buckthorn and juniper in which, somewhere, Michael’s thirty Alpine goats were browsing. The buckthorn lends the cheeses occasional notes of Jordan almond, Michael tells us, and the juniper maple cream. As we went deeper into the woods, the goats emerged from the morning shadows, like partisans, and surrounded us. One runty doe named [ ] rubbed her scent on my shirttail, finding at last someone she thought she could dominate. Others stood on their hind legs, swollen udders sticking straight out, front hooves perched on trunks no more than two inches wide, and demonstrated their crude pruning skills.

Michael’s cheeses, though comparatively new, are among the finest in the world. All of them—natural rind, washed rind and blue—are made from raw milk and aged co-mingled in his cellar.

On Orb Weaver Farm

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Marjorie Sussman and Marion Pollack have made Orb Weaver cheeses on this farm for more than 27 years. They are pioneers and legends in the business. I tasted their cheeses only once or twice before, years ago. I recalled them being sheep milk cheeses. I was disabused of this memory by six Jersey cows and Marjorie’s scolding, “People think women can’t have cows.” Marjorie and Marion seem surprised and amused by the growth of the American artisan cheese industry and by the many new young businesses that have cropped up around them. “We never really thought of this as a business,” Marjorie told us. “Maybe that’s why we never made any money,” Marion added.

Orb Weaver cheese comes in two styles—one a milky, moist, yellow-waxed dome, the other a harder, more concentrated natural-rinded, cave-aged version. Marjorie and Marion only make cheese from November to May. “Who wants to be in a hot, humid make room in the summer?” Marjorie asked rhetorically, adding that the sweet, green hay they feed their cows through the winter makes a better cheese than summer pasture. They don’t make much cheese, around 6000 lbs a year, and what they make is mostly earmarked for sale in Chittendon County. I wonder if my charm is sufficient to coax a few wheels for my store. It is not.

During the summer they grow vegetables for sale at their market garden. Their shallots are the size of a fist, their onions as big as honeydews.

They showed us their little make room with their old wooden cheese presses. I could not picture them scooping curd from their high-sided steel vat. They are not tall women and drowning feet up in curd seemed a hazard. Their cheese cave is dug into the hillside, buttressed by giant slabs of local stone. One is adorned with a perfect fossil of some ancient spiraling marine gastropod.

On Crawford Farm

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Among all the cheesemakers we met, only the Crawfords were traditional, “old-line” dairy farmers in the business of selling fluid milk. Jim, Cindy and Sherry Crawford raise and milk red-and-white Ayrshire cows, not just to preserve this historic breed or for the unique qualities of their milk, but because their family always has, for four generations. Ayrshire milk is naturally homogenized and forms very little cream line. Its fat globules are tiny and easy to digest. Antique Ayrshire milk bottles proclaim the milk to be the “best for babies and invalids”.

Three years ago, to help cushion the buffeting of the brutal, volatile fluid milk business, the Crawfords began to divert some of their milk to cheesemaking. They make one cheese, Vermont Ayr, a milky, nutty, pliably firm Tomme-like wheel made in an old Harvard University Dining Hall soup kettle. Some of the cheeses they ripen in their own cool aging room. Other cheeses they sell young to the Cellars at Jasper Hill Farm, where visionary cheesemakers and ripeners Mateo and Andy Kehler wash their rinds and age them in their ambitious warren of ripening caves dug into the hillside of their Greensboro, Vermont farm. The Jasper Hill-aged cheeses are more pungent, more succulent.

On Shelburne Farm

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I know of no more beautiful place than Shelburne Farms and feel impoverished to describe the splendor of its buildings and its lands. Built by William Seward and Lila Vanderbilt Webb as a model agricultural estate, and sculpted by Frederic Law Olmstead, each turn of its winding crushed-stone drive reveals a different vista, one more stunning than the next. Brown Swiss cows, whose ashy brown color seems to shift in the sun like velvet, graze its rolling wooded pastures.

When we arrived, the courtyard of the massive turreted Farm Barn was a flurry of activity—a farmer pushing a wheelbarrow of straw, bakers scurrying about with arms full of loaves, a girl chasing a calf that came loose from its tether—and seemed like a Breugel painting, updated and come to life.

Cheesemaker Nat Bacon was stirring and warming 600 gallons of milk, the combined evening and morning output of 100 Brown Swiss. Nat mostly makes block Cheddars, rindless and unromantic aging in their plastic bags and cardboard boxes. But they are very good block Cheddars, and as they age they develop complexity, breadth and piquancy, not the monolithic “sharpness” of so many. They also, periodically, make a few excellent clothbound Cheddars, the size and shape of a military drum, wrapped in larded muslin.

Smoke rose from a few of the thirteen chimneys of Shelburne House, a hodgepodge of Queen Anne, Shingle and Tudor, set on a hill above the lake. Eight years ago, my then very-soon-to-be wife walked down that hill, and married me on the grassy lakeshore below.

On feta

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The origins of Feta are easy to surmise. Dairy farming in Greece, even to this day, is a rugged business. Greece is mountainous and its farms remote. The soil is parched, the land is steep and stony and vegetation is harsh. It is country for grapes and olives, figs and dates and browsing, sure-footed sheep and goats. To preserve their precious milk, herders would have had need of a simple, preservable cheese that could be made in small batches from little flocks milked in the field. Feta, cured in salty brine, can last for years.

In Greek villages, Feta is still made with simple methods that the Cyclops might recognize (if he hadn’t lost his one good eye). Sheep and goats of ancient breeds—the long black haired Sarakatsaniki, the Chios with its chestnut patchy face, the plump white Boutsiko, the Roman-nosed Karagouniko, the little grey Vlahiki goat, the red-brown Skopelos—are milked by hand, one-by-one, a sheep here, a goat there, into pails (“he sat and milked the ewes, and bleating goats in order”). Custardy curds are swaddled in cloth and hung to drain on the bough of a tree.

On flavored cheeses

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

My acceptance of flavored cheeses, which I reveal publicly for the first time in these pages, comes late in my career as a cheesemonger. I had long considered myself a purist and traditionalist. I did not, as a rule, stock flavored cheeses in my shop, except for certain locally made herbed or peppered goat cheeses.

My awakening came in August, 2007 when I was honored to be selected as a judge for the annual American Cheese Society Competition held in Burlington, Vermont.

Among my judging assignments was the dreaded “Open Flavored Cheese” category, to which cheesemakers submit cheeses that do not fit neatly into the more narrowly defined “Flavored” categories, like “Flavored-Peppercorn” or “Flavored-Jalapeno”. It is the freak show of the judging categories, and bizarre is the norm.

Yet as I tasted through this challenging array of contestants, struggling to swallow both cheeses and prejudices, I found to my surprise and delight, that, aside from the truly nauseating (one strange amalgam of milk and chopped vegetables that seemed less cheese and more bowl of cream-of-vegetable soup left out to sour and harden) and the patently silly (balls of sweetened cream cheese rolled in coconut. Delicious, but if this is cheese then cheesecake is cheese), many of these flavored cheeses were quite tasty. The cheeses that formed their base were clearly well made, their flavorings were of high quality and their pairing was thoughtful and effective.

I realized at once the absurdity of my purist position and that, provided high standards are met (discussed further below), my new acceptance of flavored cheeses was in no way inconsistent with my well-honed cheese connoisseurship.I am lover of beef. I seek out heritage-breed, dry-aged, obscure cuts and revel in their subtle animal charm, but I do not refuse the Sauce Bordelaise or a pat of beurre maitre d’hotel. I adore the subtle briny contact of an oyster, but I don’t spare the mignonette.

I enjoy bitter chocolates of rare provenance and varietal, but don’t mind the introduction of a sliver of almond or a sprinkle of fleur de sel. And rarely do I enjoy my beloved Pecorini, of which I have written so gushingly in these pages, without a dollop of pepper jelly. Cheese professionals and the lay cognoscenti delight in selecting for their cheeses the perfect food and beverage companions—crusty nut-studded bread, a drizzle of chestnut honey, a paste of sweet quince, the combined perfumes of Alsatian Munster and Gewurztraminer, Parmigiano-Reggiano with the dark, brooding sweetness of Amarone, or the hearty friendship of cloth-bound Cheddar and bitter ales.

What fundamental harm, then, in combining cheeses and their accompaniments into a convenient, ready-to-eat format?

On being a cheesemonger

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I am strange among men in that I have devoted my life to the pursuit of good cheese.

Cheese is my unabashed, consuming passion. I know in declaring this I risk a snickering readership, but so be it. I have been dubbed “cheeseboy” for much of my adult life and my skin has thickened accordingly. I find peace in dank cellars, brushing mites from Stiltons. I pump my fist in victorious exultation when my Parmigiano breaks perfectly, like a diamond, coaxed open by my wedges and spikes. When I cut through a giant Emmenthaler, and streams of sweet whey and butterfat pour from its many eyes, I too shed a tear.

I have spent so much time among the thick, fetid aromas of Munsters, Epoisses and Forsterkase that fresh clean air smells odd to me, dull and thin. I’ve long since stopped caring whether the milk in our fridge has soured. It just tastes better and better to me, more complex and mature.