136 animal, vegetable, miraclepeople 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 fl ash 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, laugh-
ing as she guessed on the quantity. There’s no perfect formula, she in-
sisted, 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 subver-
sive to flout the professionals and make a thing yourself. Our nostrils in-
haled 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 mak-
ing 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 intol-
erance is a common inherited condition in which a person’s gut loses, af-
ter childhood, its ability to digest the milk sugar called lactose. The sugary
molecules float around undigested in the intestine, ferment, and create a