Gilt Ain't Gold

t

Deep in the gorgeous heart of Gloucestershire sprawls a massive country estate that spends its decades slowly trickling through the various grubby hands of earls and archdukes, bankers and industrialists. At the moment, it’s held by a manufacturing heir and his wife, to whom society pages enjoy referring snarkily as “a former air hostess."  In the last few years they have transformed the old farming buildings—barn, pigsty, hayloft—into a muted fawn-and-cream paean to genteel country life.

My friend Jack makes cheddar there under conditions that would make most cheesemakers swoon until they fairly swam in their own drool. Milk from organically-pampered cows gets pumped the few dozen meters from the milking parlor to the cheese room. Jack, given carte blanche to design the cheese room, ordered wooden Dutch cheese presses that work on a pulley system and beautiful barrel-vaulted vats in which the water meant to heat the milk swishes around a thin exterior jacket made of fitted slats of wood held together by the water pressure.

Jack’s colleagues occupy similarly privileged positions. When we wake at 5:30 in fog so thick and cold so blistering that walking feels like maneuvering blindly through a frozen cloud, the bread bakers are already peering anxiously into their glowing ovens, spritzing moisture at the crusts of lovely rye bloomers and rising ciabattas (gluten-free). As our milk trickles into the vats, the arriving pâtissiers throw jagged chunks of bittersweet organic chocolate and bricks of farm butter into gigantic bain-maries, then make themselves Monmouth lattes. Jack’s helpers Pauline and Rose show up, shaking frost off, as does Pierre, the estate’s French yogurt-maker.  

One of the cows on the estate was recently pegged as a TB reactor, so Jack has no choice but to pasteurize until further notice. A TB reactor does not necessarily signify TB in the herd—in fact no lesions were found on the slaughtered beast—but it raises hell with the EHO, and has virtually paralyzed Jack’s cheesemaking. His pasteurizer, unused for years, processes milk so slowly that Jack’s only filling half a vat despite prolonging his already-lengthy day by two hours. 

Sure, no one wants foot-and-mouth. But it’s funny how frightened people are of unpasteurised cheese, which is a.) not less safe than pasteurized cheese and b.) safe, goddamn it already. More people die from eating badly-washed salad and drinking funky water than from eating cheese—I’ve hard, in fact, that it’s the safest food after honey.

Yes, pasteurisation kills pathogenic bacteria that may be present in unclean milk. But it also kills the inoculating, flavor-producing bacteria, effectively offering a clean slate for pathogens that happen to sneak in post-pasteurisation—that the ‘good’ bacteria would probably eliminate were it still around.

-------------------------

It’s a crazy place, this estate. The shop sells everything from gluten-free highland muesli and organic homeopathic moon drops to scythes emblazoned with the estate’s logo (who uses a scythe to garden with? An embossed scythe???), ridiculously costly stumps of petrified wood, and, in a converted hay barn building, a complete line of muted, earth-toned linen tunics and discreet wraparound skirts specially designed for the estate. Oh, and Doga, a book about yoga for dogs.

I’ve heard swags of stories about this place and its owners, each more outré than the last, but this one takes the cake. Allegedly, the lady behind this grass-fed organic madness decided she wanted garlands of Parma hams to festoon the farm shop, so each week she had eleven flown up from Italy on her private plane. Naturally, the shop couldn’t sell eleven Parma hams, so at the end of the week, they were all thrown out to make way for the following week’s shipment. Très sustainable, signora. Other whispers snidely recount her purchasing a bushel of gorgeous melons on sale at a shop in….well, somewhere nice (the family owns extraordinary homes in most of the pretty corners of the world). She bought them all and had them air-lifted to the farmshop. When the managers costed out the price of the melons, they realized they’d have to charge ₤45 per melon to break even. Of course, no one bought any. All the lovely melons rotted away. 

l and no The funny thing is that the farmshop and estate are proudly touted as one of Britain’s finest contributions to and showcases of organic farming and sustainability (Organic Retailer of the Year 2004 and Best Organic Trader at the Cotswold Food Awards). Huh. Bit hypocritical, innit?

(Also funny: in the shop’s brochure, Jack has been elongated to appear taller and thinner and the hairs on his arm air-brushed away—lest the thought of his swarthy arms handling their cheese curd gross people out.  A cheesemaker touching curd, imagine that!)

When I lived at Zach’s in Manor House, I remember delighting in the fact that, once beyond Stoke Newington, the 141 acted as an instant time-transporter to Turkey. It was May, and I recall a frustrated search during my lunch break for watermelon in Borough Market, to make watermelon-rind chutney with for the NYD chutney competition. Only Turnips had a watermelon, it looked like shit, and it cost ₤9.99. I gave up on the idea and, despondently, dragged my feet home…where, on Green Lanes, I bought a dazzlingly big-ass, exceedingly luscious watermelon for less than four pounds, and everything else besides. I don’t know how they do it. Twenty percent of the sum total of Turkish goods made in the twenty-first century, including fruits and vegetables, must have been airlifted out of there and compacted into the shops on either side of Green Lanes. Even the Coke cans were Turkish. And they still cost less than the f-ing British kind.

I shopped there because it was cheap and great and convenient but I did feel questionable about eating mint airlifted from Ephesis (not to mention puzzled by the economics of it) when, really, I could grow a plant on my windowsill pretty easily if I just fucking remembered to water it once in a while. 

Imagine being joined in hypocrisy by the pride and glory of organic British farming! Jack and I left the ladies in the farm shop cooing over their heirloom damsons and Brodale pears. I remembered that the estate’s pork, which they made into chipolatas and and burgers, had won excellence awards. “Do the pigs get to eat all of the leftover salmon sandwiches and arugula-beetroot soups at the end of the day?” I asked Jack. He looked slightly surprised. “The pigs live in Staffordshire,” he said. “There’s another estate, three times bigger.”

Suddenly, the Turkish yoghurt at the off-license on Chatsworth Road doesn’t seem so ludicrous any more.

Comments

[maisie]

Jesus. Can I be you and live your chesse-filled life?

[psydaytaphese]

hallo everybody administrators of site www.autobiogeography.com I not so a long ago settled in Rutherfordton
and so, that I parted with dear a man, Wright- Nicolason, and now try to find him, last that I know so it that he lives in citi, and often vi
sits the resources of type your www.autobiogeography.com, nik at negoEnergeticson
, if suddenly will see this nik write that this man knocked in my icq . I very much I miss without socializing with this man.To reason wanted to say thank you and to wish successes to the collective your resource. So to hold boys. Only little request of,sdelayte more graphic arts on pages on a subject