Cato Corner’s Local Cheese

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Standing in a ninety degree room with your back bent over the side of a six by four foot vat and raking through pound upon pound of unpasturized milk my not seem like an ideal weekend away from the city, but then again, it just might. The kind people of Cato Corner Farm in Colchester, Connecticut were kind enough to let me have a hand at cheese making. The farm is located in southeastern Connecticut, a ten minute drive or so from the shores of New London. The farm is also about ten minutes from where I spent most of my childhood and hanging around with the animals there and working on the cheese made me realize that this is the cheese that comes from my land. Cheese, like wine, has a distinctive element of terroir to it and if there should be one cheese and one cheese alone for me to eat, this stuff would probably be it. Traditionally terroir has had something to do with the make-up of a people who eat the particular food, tastes that are genetically embedded are passed down through generations according to what is available given the land and the climate. In America this is certainly an altered concept that seems to be coming back into fashion.
Essentially eating locally is about eating the food you were always meant to eat given your particular environment. I consider it to be the “honey principle”- for me it began there. In honey we can find the easiest and most natural way to alleviate allergies, the local honey contains small amounts the very pollen that is causing all of your sneezing. The honey reflects the possibility of a symbiotic relationship with our food sources. If we eat what are meant to eat there is a good chance we will have less problems with our physical health.
To come out and say these things, is for me, something of a breakthrough. There was a definite phase during the blur of my undergraduate years when I took the word “natural” to have those strong quotation marks surrounding it. I am not at all ready to give up these quotation marks completely, but in terms of my food, I think I am ready to cross over -to natural. Not only does the cheese in Connecticut reflect the entire ecosystem that surrounds it but it tastes good and feels nutritious.
It has taken us a while to reach this point in America perhaps because high-brow food culture is only now becoming comfortable with true American cuisine. There is no need to desperately turn to the Continent in search of something equally decadent and high quality. Cato Corner Farm produces cheeses of varied styles which in turn reflect American food culture. As a friend pointed out to me one evening over Chinese food, where else in the world can we eat with chopsticks and think nothing of it. We change and rearrange our eating habits constantly in America, our food traditions are innumerable. What remains and what we must hold strong to is the quality. And if we are taking from many traditions we must also remain true to each of those respective traditions; we have our work cut out for us.
So standing there, with my hands is scaldingly hot milk made a lot of sense for my health. Those particular cows have spent their lives amidst the same vegetation and air that I have, we have inhaled the same salty breezes and probably eaten some of the same dirt. The nutrition they can provide me with is already aligned with my body’s regular patterns. I will still enjoy eating all kinds of imported cheese, but now nothing will feel as (“?”) Natural as the milk with which I have shared a geographical lineage. (A)

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Filed under Cheeses we like

Tags: Cato Corner, cheesemaking, health, local