Making milk the most versatile food

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, food, regional foods, cheese, memoirs

I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've had really fine cheese. I guess I'm not much of a foodie, and I very seldom attend the sort of party where I'd be served something snootier than pizza and soda pop. The cheese I put in my sandwiches is typically packaged Cheddar or Jack cheese that we buy by the block, a pound or two at a time. The typical American eats thirty pounds of cheese yearly. I figure I come in closer to half that.

Therefore, Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge by Gordon Edgar took me to entirely new territory, a land of milk producers going into a "value added" trade, of the network of relationships and trust (or its lack) that flows through a retail establishment and keeps it going, of handmade (the cutesy word is "artisanal") food products that can cost from $10 to $40 per pound, of patrons who budget for their cheese purchases the way so many of us budget mortgage payments.

The author backed into the cheese business, much the way most "soul mate" professions are entered. Few indeed are they who grow up saying, "I want to be a brain surgeon," attain it, and love it all their lives. Many more look back and say they can't really understand how they got into this or that field, but are sure glad it worked out that way.

The style of this memoir is engaging, a synergy of "life of a former punk rocker" and riffs on the ins and outs of the cheese business. Each chapter ends with a short discussion of two cheeses, and I confess I never heard of any of them except Roquefort, the name-controlled French blue cheese that can only be produced by the molds and bacteria of certain caves…and any number of aging rooms that were inoculated with stolen microorganisms, but whose products cannot, by law, be called "Roquefort". But of others with names like Hopeful Tomme (by Sweet Grass Dairy) or Explorateur, a triple-cream Brie, the names are just a string of letters on the page. Oh, yeah, there is Cheddar in one blurb, but of course it is Montgomery Cheddar, quite a bit tastier (and I believe the author when he says so) than the much, much cheaper factory Cheddar I'm used to.

Mr. Edgar comes across as a great drinking buddy, someone I'd undoubtedly like immensely were we to meet, as long as we don't discuss politics. It is a pleasant surprise that, while he remarks on the conservatism of many of his dairy farmer friends, he does not put them down. He recognizes that political viewpoint frequently is a product of one's environment, and his rampant punk liberalism simply would wither in a farm setting. But I would not trot out my Reagan-Bush-Bush sympathies in his presence.

He is a natural storyteller, and if you buy cheese from him, you'll likely get a bit of a story along the way, and maybe learn something about your expected repast. He has learned what to tell and what not to tell. Not everyone can handle the story of rennet, as told in the chapter "Rennet, What's in It?" (an enzyme extracted from calf stomachs - see, I told you). Rennet, and its many substitutes, particularly those that cater to vegetarians, have a lot to do with the way a cheese will turn out. But rennet and all coagulants are mainly acidic substances that make the milk protein, and some or most of the fat, curdle out into a semisolid mass that is further processed into various cheeses.

A bigger taste determinant is the type of milk used: cow, goat or sheep, and whether it is whole or part skim, plus pasteurized or raw. But the biggest taste contribution comes from the microorganisms, whether mold or bacteria, and frequently both in sequence. It is the bugs that distinguish a Brie from a Gouda, a Cheddar from a Jack, Swiss from Mozzarella (I didn't check whether the milk is the same, but there'd be a difference anyway, and it might be interesting to use Gouda bugs on a different milk. I reckon someone's made the experiment already).

I hope I learned a few things. Perhaps I'll even risk an extra couple of shekels at the "real" cheese section of the store and learn a new taste or two.

...and a side of local culture

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, regional foods, hamburgers, burgers, fries, french fried potatoes

I remember when the plain McDonald's burger cost 15¢, they'd just sold their first million nationwide, and hamburgers most anywhere else cost at least a quarter. A decade later, my first year of college, the big Hardee's burger was almost seven inches across, and when the first Arby's opened (the first widely successful loose meat burger place), their Super was as big. Today, go to an Arby's for a Big Montana, and it is almost as big as the old Super; there isn't a seven-inch burger available from Hardee's or any other fast food place, and there are about ten kinds of burger variety at any of them.

The Boomer generation is about nothing so much as about variety. The 60s kids didn't invent cultural diversity, but act like they did. At least, they had a hand in making it a positive, rather than a stigma.

There are about four things you can do to make a burger different: add various things to the patty, put different things on top, use various breads to hold it, and cook it different ways. Just a fun bit of combinatorics:

• Patty additives: cheese (inside the meat), chorizo, peppers, onions, sugar (5 items).
• Toppings: mayo, tomato-y mayo, mustard, lettuce, tomato, bacon, cheese, peppers (8 items).
• Buns: Kaiser roll, soft "burger" bun, potato roll, French bread (4 items).
• Cooking: Grilled on wire, grilled on flattop, deep fried, broasted, steamed (5 ways).

The above list just scratches the surface. However, let's ask two questions: First, pick one cooking method and bread, and zero or one item from each of the other two lists; how many combinations are there? Second (harder), pick one cooking method, one kind of bread, and any or all from the other two lists; how many combinations are there? Answers at the bottom of the post.

John T. Edge, who seems bent on eating his way across America once for each kind of food with regional variations, has followed his earlier books Fried Chicken and Apple Pie with his newest, Hamburgers & Fries. He opens with a bit of research, and we are not surprised to find that hamburgers, at least of a kind we'd recognize as such, began in poverty, with many additives and toppings initially chosen to make the poor fare palatable. Some bread-loaded burgers are more like meat loaf sandwiches, for example. (As much as I like meat loaf, it is really an exercise in feeding four hungry people with a half-pound of ground beef...or a quarter pound in a pinch.)

At the outset, the dozen or so recipes in the book make it worth the getting. From the Onion-loaded burgers of Oklahoma, born of depression-era cheap onions and costly meat; to the "Deconstructed" (loose-meat) burgers of Iowa; to the Hawaiian "local burgers", sugary, like a few other varieties; all attest to the creativity of legions of cooks doing what they can to feed their folks, and perhaps make a buck or two in the meantime.

There is just a bit too much "looking for the perfect burger" going on in the book. Otherwise, it's a great window into the many, many things people have done to ground or chopped beef, to produce one of America's favorite foods. By the way, he tips his hat to fries, but we don't do nearly so much with them, so a couple short chapters exhaust the author's enthusiasm for them.

Answers to the quiz above: 1,080 (single item from each list) and 109,200 (any mix&match). That's just with my short lists above. Put together all the variations that Edge remarks, and there are easily millions of varieties of the humble burger.