Le Regard Libre N° 25 - Loris S. Musumeci
After the fingers had caressed the creamy udders in an intimate milking, the bucket was generously filled with white, pure, fat milk. The cow, overflowing with her gift, moos a new song. The morning dawns: calling forth, with the tenderness of its first rays, a breakfast that provides strength and courage to face a whole day, in the throbbing sweat of fields and stables.
The coffee is ready, the milk still warm and the bread just hardened from the night before. The usual bad broadcast news keeps us company during the frugal meal.
Once the sleeves have been rolled up, the fire is already crackling under the pot of precious liquid, for a quantity of thirty-five liters, for example. Brought to the approximate temperature of thirty-seven degrees, three teaspoons of rennet, extracted from the rennet of ruminants, are added to the sweet drink. At this point, the mixture is left to rest for an hour, followed by the fire, which sleeps for the same length of time.
When the time for patience has passed, the gas sounds to reawaken the conflagration. Then four handfuls of fine salt snow into the container: the kind that gives more flavour to human existence. And the clearer and clearer water stirs, separating from the dense lumps of cheese birth. The cream violins turn, the milkmaid's stick turns, the flames of the warm hearth turn.
Supple, powerful hands plunge the cloud-hungry colanders one by one into the majestic substance. In and out of the pan, it's extracted, shaped and washed: back and forth between the loins of the perforated bowl. At the very least, that's what a Gainsbourg would say.
Dives and counter-dives completed, the cheese, panting with pleasure, waits for its final bath. Like a Ganges, the serum purges the white block of its excesses and sins, the better to preserve it in the bliss of noble aging.
From the dawn of a draft to the twilight of a cruel grater, what a singular path! The poor thing, starting out as a liquid, has gone through so many trials to become tasty and solid, ending up as tiny crumbs on some tomato sauce or other hot dish.
Cheese is good because it's ephemeral. Only the memory of its sapidity remains through the ages, because every morning the charming milkmaid got up, free and happy, following this recipe.
No one will ever eat cheese the way they used to: food consumption is now giving way to an experience that combines spirituality and eroticism, namely tasting.
Write to the author: loris.musumeci@leregardlibre.com
Photo credit: © Loris S. Musumeci for Le Regard Libre
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