Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

by Barbara Kingsolver

  So Micki and Anne acquired their own Jersey cows, happily guaranteeing their families a lifetime supply of hormone-free milk. Anne also makes kefir, which she would like to sell at her farmers’ market, but can’t. Micki’s daughter makes ice-cream-and-cookie sandwiches using their own milk and eggs—a wildly popular item she could sell to build her college fund, except it’s illegal. “We’re not licensed,” Micki said, “and we never will be. The standards are impossible for a small dairy.”

  She wasn’t exaggerating. Most states’ dairy codes read like an obsessive compulsive’s to-do list: the milking house must have incandescent fixtures of 100 watts or more capacity located near but not directly above any bulk milk tank; it must have employee dressing rooms and a separate, permanently installed hand-washing facility (even if a house with a bathroom is ten steps away) with hot and cold water supplied through a mix valve; all milk must be pasteurized in a separate facility (not a household kitchen) with its own entrance and separate, paved driveway; processing must take place daily; every batch must be tested for hormones (even if it’s your cow, and you gave it no hormones) by an approved laboratory.

  Pasteurization requires three pieces of equipment: a steel pot, a heat source, and a thermometer that goes up to 145°F. Add to this list, I suppose, the brainpower to read a thermometer. I’ve done it many times without benefit of extra driveways and employee lockers, little knowing I was a danger to the public. In fact, later on when I went poking into these codes, I learned I might stand in violation of Virginia State Law 2VAC5-531-70 just by making cheese for my own consumption. It takes imagination to see how some of these rules affect consumer safety. Many other raw food products—notably poultry from CAFOs—typically carry a much higher threat to human health in terms of pathogen load, and yet the government trusts us to render it safe in our own humble kitchens. But it’s easy to see how impossibly strict milk rules might gratify industry lobbyists, by eliminating competition from family producers.

  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 cinderblock 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 winemakers 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.

  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, placemats, even clothing imbedded 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 bacterial cheese cultures to warming our own pots of milk to the right temperature. While waxing poetic in praise of slowness, she moved fast. By the time we’d added the culture to set our cheddar, she was on to the next cheese. With a mirror propped over the stove so we could see down into the pot, she stirred in vinegar to curdle the queso blanco, laughing as she guessed on 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, fathers, 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. Remote possibilities, maybe. That many successes in one day still seemed unlikely.

  At lunch break I checked out the wildly colorful powder room, where a quote from Alice in Wonderland was painted on the wall:

  “‘There’s no use trying,’ Alice said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’

  “‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”

  It’s fair to admit, I wasn’t a complete novice. I had already been making cheese for a few years, ordering supplies and cultures from Ricki and following the recipes in her book. It wasn’t only a spirit of adventure that led my family into this line of cooking, 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 a gassy havoc. The effect is somewhat like eating any other indigestible carbohydrate, such as cardboard or grass.

  This is not an allergy or even, technically, a disorder. Physical anthropologists tell us that age four, when lactose intolerance typically starts, is about when nature intended for our kind to be wholly weaned onto solid food; in other words, a gradual cessation of milk digestion is normal. In all other mammals the milk-digesting enzyme shuts down soon after weaning. So when people refer to this as an illness, I’m inclined to point out we L.I.’s can very well digest the sugars in grown-up human foods like fruits and vegetables, thank you, we just can’t nurse. From a cow. Okay?

  But there is no animal weirder than Homo sapiens. Over thousands of years of history, a few isolated populations developed intimate relationships with their domestic animals and a genetic mutation gave them a peculiar new adaptation: they kept their lactose-digesting enzymes past childhood. Geneticists have confirmed that milk-drinking adults are the exception to the norm, identifying a deviant gene on the second chromo-some that causes lactase persistence. (The gene is SNP C/T13910, if you care.) This relatively recent mutation occurred about ten thousand years ago, soon after humans began to domesticate milk-producing animals. The gene rapidly increased in these herding populations because of the unique advantage it conferred, allowing them to breast-feed for life from another species.

  The gene for lifelong lactose digestion has an 86 percent frequency among northern Europeans. By contrast, it shows up in only about one-third of southern Europeans, who historically were not big herders. In the Far East, where dairy cattle were unknown, the gene is absent. Even now, Southeast Asians have virtually zero tolerance for lactose. Only about 10 percent of Asian Americans can digest milk as adults, along with fewer than half of American Jews and about a quarter of rural Mexicans. Among Native Americans it’s sketchily documented—estimates range from 20 to 40 percent. Among African Americans, adult milk-drinking tolerance is high, nearly 50 percent, owing to another interesting piece of human history. The mutation for lactase persistence emerged several times independently, alongside the behavior of adult milk-drinking. It shows up in populations that have little else in common other than cows: the tall, lean Fulani of West Africa; the Khoi pastoralists of southern Africa; and the fair-skinned Northern Europeans.

  And then, to make a long story short, one of those populations proceeded to take over the world. If that’s a debatable contention, let’s just say they’ve gotten their hands on most of the planet’s billboards and commercials. And so, whether or not we were born with the La Leche f
or Life gene, we’re all hailed with a steady song and dance about how we ought to be drinking tall glasses of it every day. And we believe it, we want those strong bones and teeth. Oh, how we try to behave like baby cows. Physicians will tell you, the great majority of lactose-intolerant Americans don’t even know it. They just keep drinking milk, and having stomachaches.

  White though we are, my redheaded elder daughter and me, some sturdy, swarthy gene has come down through the generations to remind us that “white” is relative. We’re lactose intolerant. But still, like most everyone else, we include some dairy products in our diet. I can’t blame dairy-industry propaganda, purely, for our behavior. The milk of mammals is a miraculously whole food for the babes it was meant to nourish; it’s the secret of success for the sheep, oxen, bison, kangaroos, seals, elephants, whales, and other mammals that have populated every corner of the blue-green world with their kind and their suckling young. For the rest of us it’s a tempting source of protein, calcium, minerals, and wholesome fats.

  It’s no surprise that cultures the world over have found, through centuries of experimentation, countless ways to make it more digestible. Yogurt, kefir, paneer, queso fresco, butter, mascarpone, montasio, parmesan, haloumi, manchego, bondon, emmental, chenna, ricotta, and quark: the forms of altered milk are without number. Taste is probably not the main point. They all keep longer than fresh milk, and their production involves reducing the lactose sugars.

  The chemistry is pretty simple. Milk is about 85 percent water; the rest is protein, minerals, butterfat, vitamins and trace elements, and sugars (lactose)—which are dissolved in the water. When the whole caboodle is made more acidic, the protein solids coagulate into a jellylike curd. When gently heated, this gel releases the liquid whey (lactose and water). Traditionally the milk is curdled by means of specific bacteria that eat—guess what?—lactose. These selective bugs munch through the milk, turning the lactose into harmless lactic acid, which causes the curdling.

  The sugars that still remain are dissolved in the whey. As this liquid separates and is drained off from the curd, lactose goes with it. Heating, pressing, and aging the curd will get rid of still more whey, making it harder and generally sharper-flavored. As a rule, the harder the cheese, the lower the lactose content. (Anything less than 2 percent lactose is tolerable for just about everybody.) Also, higher fat content means less lactose—butter has none. Conversely, sweet condensed milk is 12 percent lactose. For other products, the amount of lactose removed depends on the bacterial cultures used for fermentation. A good live-culture yogurt contains as many as five different sugar-eating bacteria. A little biochemistry goes a long way, in safely navigating the dairy path.

  At our house soft cheeses were the tricky terrain. Factory-made cheeses can vary enormously in lactose content. Fermentation and whey removal take time that mass production doesn’t always allow. Some soft cheeses are not cultured at all, but curdled simply by adding an acid. For whatever reason, store-bought cream cheese proved consistently inedible for us. But I don’t like to give up. If I could monitor the process myself, seeing personally to lactose removal, I wondered if I might get something edible.

  Soft cheeses are ridiculously easy to make, it turns out. The hardest part is ordering the cultures (by catalog or online). With these packets of cheesemaking bugs in your freezer and a gallon of good milk, plus a thermometer, colander, and some cheesecloth, soft cheeses are at your command: in a stainless steel pot, warm the milk to 85 degrees, open the culture packet, and stir the contents into the milk. Take the pot off the stove, cover, let it stand overnight. By the next morning it will have gelled into a soft white curd. Spoon this into a cheesecloth-lined colander and let the whey run off. Salt it, spread it on bread, smile. Different bacterial cultures make different cheeses. The bugs stay up all night doing the work, not you. You just sleep. Is that not cool?

  Our chevre and fromagina were so tasty, and digestible, we were inspired to try hard cheeses. These are more work, but it’s basically the same process. Most recipes call for both a bacterial culture and rennet (a natural enzyme), which together cause the milk to set up into a very firm curd in just minutes, rather than overnight. For mozzarella, this curd is kneaded like dough, heated until almost untouchably hot, then stretched like taffy, which is a lot of fun. The whole process—from cold milk to a beautiful braided, impress-your-guests mozzarella on the plate—takes less than an hour. For hard cheeses like cheddar, the firm curd is sliced into little cubes, stirred and heated gently, then pressed into a round wheel and, ideally, aged for weeks or months. We have to hide our cheeses from ourselves to keep them around this long. Over time, we’ve converted a number of our friends to the coven of cheesemaking.

  At Ricki’s workshop we really did make six impossible things, but only half of them by noon. Lunch included our queso blanco stir-fried with vegetables, sliced tomatoes with our mozzarella, and mascarpone-filled dates. We tasted, congratulated ourselves, and headed back for the next round. We put our cheddar into a mechanical press to squeeze extra moisture out of the curd, while Ricki talked about aging and waxing as if these really lay ahead of us—as if we were all going home to make cheeses. I’d be willing to bet we all did. At the workshop’s end, everyone gathered in Ricki’s office to order the cultures and supplies we’d need for our next efforts. A few dollars’ worth of packaged bacteria will curdle many gallons of milk. A cheese thermometer costs ten dollars, and the rest of the basics—stainless steel bowls and pots—already reside in the kitchen of any earnest cook. We left with the confidence to strike out on our own. Our friends who’d shared the workshop went back to their homes in Virginia, New York, and Boston. They all called me within the week with exciting cheese updates.

  Why do we do this? It’s hard to say. Some are refining exquisite products, while others of us are just shooting for edible, but we’re all dazzled by the moment of alchemy when the milk divides into clear whey and white curd, or the mozzarella stretches in our hands to a glossy golden skein. We’re connecting across geography and time with the artisans of Camembert, the Greek shepherds, the Mongols on the steppes who live by milking their horses—everybody who ever looked at a full-moon pot of white milk and imagined cheese. We’re recalling our best memories infused with scents, parental love, and some kind of food magically coming together in the routines of childhood. We’re hoping our kids will remember us somewhere other than in the driver’s seat of the car.

  Later in the summer when this workshop and trip were behind us, Steven’s mother came for a long visit. She served grandma duty on many fronts, but seemed happiest in the kitchen. She told us stories I hadn’t heard before, mostly about her mother, who at age fifteen was sent out from her hardscrabble village in the mountains of Italy to seek her fortune in America. In the dusty town of Denver she married a handsome Sicilian vegetable farmer and raised five daughters with a good working knowledge of gardening, pasta, and other fundamentals. She made ricotta routinely, to the end of her life.

  Laura was her name, ultimately known as Nonnie, and I suppose she’d have loved to see us on a summer Saturday making mozzarella together: daughter, grandson, great-granddaughters, and me, all of us laughing, stretching the golden rope as far as we could pull it. Three more generations answering hunger with the oldest art we know, and carrying on.

  * * *

  Growing Up in the Kitchen

  BY CAMILLE

  In our house, the kitchen is the place to be. The time we spend making dinner is hugely important because it gets us together after all our separate agendas, and when we sit down to eat we have a sense that the food in front of us is special. Growing vegetables from seed and raising poultry from hatchlings obviously makes us especially grateful for our food. But just making dinner from scratch gives us a little time to anticipate its flavor, so we’ll notice every bite.

  Cooking in our family helped me cultivate certain food habits that I later found out are a little unusual for my generation—for example, I can’t sta
nd to eat anything while I’m standing up. I sit down, even if it’s just a quick snack, to make sure this will be a thoughtful munching instead of a passive grab. I’ll probably carry that habit through my whole life, and nag my kids about it.

  I know plenty of families that have dinner together, and some that cook, but very few that take “cooking from scratch” to the level mine does. I’ve never had any illusions about how unique it is to have one parent who makes cheese and another who bakes bread almost daily. The friends I’ve brought home over the years have usually been impressed and intrigued by the wacky productions taking place in our kitchen. They definitely enjoyed eating fresh, warm bread at dinner and homemade cream cheese at lunch. It was a little awkward, though, when one of my vegetarian friends and I arrived at my house one Saturday when my parents were in the middle of making turkey sausage.

  “What are they doing?” she whispered, as she stared at the tube of encased raw meat that was steadily growing longer on our countertop. “Oh, that’s just sausage. Don’t worry about it.” I nudged her past the kitchen toward my room. The scenario was a little embarrassing, but it probably

  would have been more uncomfortable to come home to parents who used the kitchen for screaming and throwing dishes at each other. Anyway, whose parents aren’t embarrassing sometimes?

  The hardest thing about being raised in a household where most everything is made from scratch is that someday you move out and have to deal with store-bought bread and yogurt. My mom was quick to catch on to the leverage she got out of that. “I guess you’ll have to come home more often if you want good food,” she would tell me. Away from home, I realized I missed more about mealtimes than just the food. I missed picking fresh greens from the garden, or taking a jar of dried tomatoes from the pantry, as the starting point of a meal. It’s obviously convenient to grab a salad or package of sushi from the dining hall between classes, but eating on the fly seems like cheating to me.