Maffe, Ville du Fromage

cheese, originally uploaded by azurenath.

The one thing that may keep me from becoming an artisan farmer is how goddamn early they all wake up. This cycle of 6 a.m. wakeups after 3 a.m. bedtimes is getting utterly exhausting. Maybe I’ll develop and market nocturnal beekeeping or nighttime cheese.

Thankfully, everyone driving a car at 6 a.m. is going into Brussels, not leaving it. I reflected on that for a minute. I’m pretty sure the reason for my interest in the country is directly related to the fact that I’m from a city. And if someday I make it my business (literally) to valorize artisanal food production, I’ll still be someone from the city doing it. Is that acceptable? Sylvester and I talked a lot about this, since after all, we were in this very pose. In his opinion, traditions fall to pieces unless someone, usually from the outside, points at the money that can be made from keeping them around. I felt some remorse about our deal in Italy, because there I was, teaching people how to make a type of Leccese cake that I’d only learned myself the month before (and profiting off the circumstances). But if I hadn’t taught it to them, no one else would have either, do you see? Here I feel better, because even if I do come from the city, I’m approaching these people with an honest curiosity and the earnest conviction that they can teach me something meaningful. This isn’t a new approach—I approached the Card Club women the same way, and Italy too. What’s different is the artisans’ reactions about my interest in their traditions from those of the Card Club women, who couldn’t comprehend why I found them so fascinating, or of the Italians who thought we were crazy for spending three days on friselle when everyone now buys it from the store. The artisans here are proud of what they’re doing. They take pleasure and satisfaction from their work, and they think it’s important and worthwhile. I respect that in a country, in a people. The thought that comes to me is: finally.

Anyway. When I got to the farm, Mr. Guyet and I took off to go get milk, both whole and skim. The sun was rising, but behind a cloud cover so thick it was hard to tell what direction it was coming from. Ah, Belgium. The cows had been milked half an hour before and were lazily munching hay, misty shapes staring into the fog with eyes glazed over. The farm cats recognized Guyet, in his torn bomber jacket and beret, and came closer. He pumped the milk into his tank, and foam gurgled out of the top hatch, a thin stream dribbling down one side. The cats lapped up the falling drops and stole off, disappearing too into the gray haze shrouding the barn.

On the way back we passed a field of grazing Belgian beef cows, the blanc-bleus, which are bred so drastically that they lose the capability to calf without C-section. Their butts are seriously four times the size of a normal cow’s. Scary. We were in the area where the two Belgian F-16s had their midair collision midair last year. Considering the fact that Guyet recognized everyone we passed—joggers, farmers, construction workers—the flood of media that followed must’ve been the biggest thing the village had ever seen. Other funny small-world connection: the artisanal “nutella” that the Pain Quotidien in New York City sells comes from the farm next door.

Back at the farm, Guyet poured the milks into two 500-liter vats. His eye was so precise that he’d only gone a liter and a half over. He set in motion a large paddle to keep skin from forming on the milk, and hot water coursed inside the walls of the vat around it, bringing the temperature up. The milk frothed and bubbled. “Have you ever bathed in milk?” I asked. “I’ve always wanted immerse myself in a big bowl of cereal, Cheerios maybe, big as inner tubes.” He hadn’t.

We went outside to wash out the tanks, my first clue towards the eventual sobering realization that cheesemaking is 30% cheese and 70% cleaning up. Governmental policies mandate, among other things, that Guyet checks a little box after the completion of every task. We didn’t wait for the laws to do our jobs right, he seethes, eyes flashing. We were doing everything they now tell us to before they passed their stupid decrees. It wouldn’t be so bad, he supposes, if they weren’t so useless, time-consuming, and fundamentally condescending.

The whole city vs. country pickle’s called up again, and I feel a tangible tension in the air, not between he and I (I’m a sympathizer, after all) but just the nature of situation, the power of the bureaucrats and industry over the small farmer. It’s true, though. Industrial cheesemaking requires personnel enough to assign people to specific tasks, and they can stay in one place and do them. But in artisanal production, usually one person’s in charge of the whole thing, so it’s much more difficult obeying the laws to the letter. “I’m not going to change my clothes every time I go between rooms,” says Guyet. “It’s not the fucking carnival.” The bureaucrats say they’re just trying to bring the artisans’ hygiene standards up to par with the industrials’. That’s crap, says Guyet. Because he operates on such a small scale, he believes his production is far safer than the industrials’. When a cow’s sick, Guyet’s farmer knows it directly, because the flock is little enough; if the milk looks or tastes strange, Guyet notices, because the differences show up more in 500 liters than they do in five million. He reads the milk like a novel. “Il est paresseux (lazy),” he says when it takes slightly longer to curdle, or notes nuances in acidity or fat content.

Maybe industrial production isn’t easier, though. I’m struck by how easily we complicate our life with one set of machines and simplify them with others, or maybe it’s the other way around. Supposedly modern machines make it easier to produce cheese. But actually they only make it easier to produce a lot of cheese. Really, you could just wash your hands thoroughly, milk a cow, and make cheese out of your bucket. When you factor in all the cleaning you have to do when you use machinery, how many tubes stuff has to flow miles through, how many separate movable pieces are involved and thus apt to fail, it’s probably equivalent. The problem is when you try to impose regulations that make sense for the industry on artisans—then the match becomes unfair.

In any case, I can attest: Guyet is the cleanest cheesemaker I’ve ever seen, and I come from a Swiss cheesemaking family. The guy’s hose is his third arm. (Not like that. In fact, he’s sterile. Yep. Another one of those details that comes out when you spend an intense day with a stranger.) After the tanks were clean and the milk sufficiently warm, he stopped the turning blade and added lactic enzymes—powdered bacteria, basically—to the milk, and later, another enzyme (présure), which comes from calves’ stomachs and helps them digest milk. This turns the liquid proteins into solids. The milk must stop moving to curdle, though, otherwise when it solidifies it looks like what Guyet poetically calls un cahier a lignes, or lined notebook paper.

Guyet makes over twenty kinds of cheeses, aged from 0 days to 6 months, but the day I worked with him we turned 1100 liters of milk into fifty one-kilo Bruzy entiers and sixty Bruzy maigres, which take two weeks to age. Even in the entier, though, he puts a little skim milk, because it helps the crust form better. The taste isn’t quite as good, but the cheeses sell better. His cheeses are more popular in Flanders, actually, because the Flemish eat more cheese than the Walloons, who are reputed for their charcuterie, do. In forty-five minutes the milk was solid, the consistency of Jell-O, or soft tofu. We dove our hands in and pulled them up slowly to see the quality of the break. When it looked ready, he cut the cheese with slowly rotating slotted paddles; counterclockwise, the sharp edge sliced the curds, while clockwise the smooth side mixed them. We were looking for curds cut down to the size of corn for the entier, smaller for the maigre, and watched the paddles slice in spirographic patterns, again and again like a surrealist Kitchenaid. Slow cutting retains the cheese’s acidity and keeps the grain from getting too small too quickly. As the curds separate, and sink to the bottom, a green liquid emerges: serum. We evacuated the serum, which, rich in minerals, eventually gets strewn in the fields (or is made into ricotta), and added cold water until the acidity was at the right level. Once all the liquid was drained, we had ten minutes to form the cheese before it hardened.

We’d prepared a hundred or so molds fitted with cheesecloth so the whey could drip out. We filled these with big humps of this cottage cheese and pressed it down. Liquid poured off the tables, dripping onto our aprons, our rubber boots. The atelier was scattered with little curds, as if snow had begun to fall. It’s only when you remember that we started with over a thousand liters of milk and end up with only 100 kg of cheese (a 90% loss) that you can imagine how much liquid pours out.

We went upstairs for lunch: cheese, of course, with fresh bread, butter, and coffee. The cheeses were good.  We ate one like those we’d made that day, one a smooth and creamy riff on goat milk, one two-year-old flaky, hard round with a piquant aftertaste, and a Parmesan-like cheese called Li Fi Cinsy (“The Old Farmer,” in Wallon). It’s true that raw-milk cheeses have a clarity that cooked-milk industrial cheese can’t have. Pasteurization (a combination of heat and pressure) kills bacteria that makes cheese develop flavor, and the mixing of milk from so many cows blurs the particular taste one small terroir. He gave me what was left to take home, and I’ve been eating exclusively that ever since. The butter is superlative, best I’ve ever had.

Over lunch I learned that Mr. Ruyet, besides the full-time cheese work, maintains a flock of twenty sheep, twenty rabbits, some pigs, horses, a vegetable garden, fruit orchard. “We rarely go to the store to buy things,” he said breezily. “Just, you know, sugar, flour, salt, coffee.” The funny thing is he started out as an engineer. (His wife teaches religion, splitting her time between the eight small schools in the region, sometimes teaching grades 6-12 at the same time, Little-House-on-the-Prairie-style). On the weekend they and their twins take the horses and chariot out for rides in the country.

Ruyet has never been on an airplane, and has no real desire to. “Je suis lié a mon terroir, moi,” he said. I am tied to my soil. But he was measured, considerate, well-spoken, wise. In no way provincial. He and his co-workers—Nicole, who helps out two days a week, and Marc, who runs the business side of things—enjoy an easy camaraderie. They genuinely like each other, like working together, like working. They labor seriously, carefully, meticulously, but seem to take deep pleasure in the work and each other. And boy has he mastered his craft. Typically cheesemakers can lose up to 20% of their stock, due to various problems. This year Ruyet has lost 2%. It’s hard work, he said, but I like it. I never have to deal with traffic or suits, I’m my own boss, I do something I believe in.

I was totally impressed.

We turn the cheese around every half hour so it forms a regular shape, and eventually toss it in a salt-water bath (la saumure) whose water was last changed over three years ago. It smells like hell in there, but the bath is what gives cheese its character. Wheels stays in there four hours for every kilo they weigh. And then they're aged in basement caves until ready.

My Swiss grandfather was a cheesemaker by profession, my uncle too. Shortly after my grandfather died, my uncle quit making cheese, got an office job, works nine-to-five in a suit, and has been a changed man--more jovial, kinder, smiling--ever since. It’s not for everyone, I guess. But how heartening to find people who value their own traditions (even without an outside stamp of approval), and enjoy maintaining them. Finally.