Cheese Meditation Minute

11329750_10105723696852489_1755273131859855966_nI was drinking a cider and admiring a cheese.   And then I had some cheese thoughts that my friends seemed to enjoy.  Following this, I decided that the cider blog should definitely have a Cheese Meditation Minute every so often.  Because really, what is  cider without a good cheese?  The men of Compost Heap know this well.

As I was waiting for a train in Grand Central Station, I wandered into the Grand Central Market, where the Murray’s Cheese booth beckoned to me with its tempting artful piles of sculpted dairy.  My train ticket was to Beacon, a little town on the Hudson, and thus the name on a small round of cheese caught my eye: The Hudson Flower, a sheep’s milk cheese made by the Old Chatham Sheepherding Co.  Its rind was covered in hop flowers and rosemary, and I decided it would be coming home with me.  It seemed appropriate to pair a flower-covered cheese with my spring blossom pilgrimage.  Also, it was my birthday.  Some people have night cheese.  I have birthday cheese.

A train ride, a long drive, and a few days later, I finally unwrapped this beauty in the company of a bottle of Good Life Cazenovia Hard Cider and a pot of New York wildflower honey.  A perfect trifecta of New York made delicacies.

But the tastes of this cheese initiated a cascade of cheese memories.  Did you think cheese could have this effect on a person?  Now I am thinking of other herb encrusted, flower pressed cheeses that have crossed my path. One is the Hereford Hop, made by Charles Martell, who has preserved and reintroduced many heritage agriculture products of his Gloucestershire region on the west side of the Severn River, including heritage breeds of cattle, cheese, apples, and pears.  The Hereford Hop became one of my favorite cheeses when I lived in Herefordshire.  Hops were a traditional crop for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Herefordshire.  Toasted and pressed into the rind, they added a strangely robust nutty floral taste to the hearty cheddar-like cheese.  I purchased it for my farewell party when I left the UK – I think I wanted the memories of farewell to mingle with the taste of Hereford Hop, washed down with bottle-conditioned Dabinette from Mike’s cellar.  I still think about it in moments of gastronomic anglophile reverie.

The other cheese that rose to my mind was the Juliana by Capriole, a goat’s milk cheese made with rosemary and herbs in the rind.  This is very similar to the Hudson Flower itself, but the Capriole was a little more sharp, with a goaty kick.  The Capriole is made in Southern Indiana, and I used to buy it at the Bloomington Farmer’s Market as a special treat.  Once, I visited the farm and creamery down in the rolling countryside north of the Ohio River.  I was always proud to know the Hoosier state I called home could produce such a cheese. Three cheeses, covered in herbs and flowers, made near three beautiful rivers, in three places close to my heart.  Now that feels worthy of a satisfied sigh of creamery nostalgia for a breezy May day. This has been your Cheese Meditation Minute with Maria.  Good Evening, and Bon Fromage!

Cider on the Prairie

IMG_2624I decided to pay a visit to a place very close to my heart: Conner Prairie Living History Museum, where I worked for about five summers during college. I had not been back in many years, and I was excited to find, in addition to familiar memories of my first experiences in orchards, some pleasing new connections to cider and wine.

Just north of Indianapolis, this museum has several recreated historic areas depicting the development of European settlement in the state of Indiana during the nineteenth century: an 1816 Lenape Trading Post, an 1836 Prairietown village and a Civil War era farm.  I spent a lot of time here wearing excessive amounts of clothing  while doing period cooking over an open fire, and it was here that I first fell in love with historic agriculture and cookery.

Though there are many historic and reconstructed buildings in the museum, the only building original to the property is the 1820s farmhouse built by William Conner – fur trader, settler, farmer, and entrepreneur – which overlooks an agriculturally advantageous horse-shoe bend of the White River.

I’ve always loved houses of this period: the high ceilings and large windows let in so much light and air.  Even on a hot day, they are flung open, allowing the outdoor and indoor worlds to co-mingle.  The kitchens, based around a hearth and a worktable, have room to move in – theatres in the round of culinary action, based around moving bodies instead of appliances.  And there is nothing so alive as an open hearth, where cooking is a matter of well-honed instinct for the smell of baking (or burning) bread, and a sense of temperature according to the skin, rather than a thermometer.

One of the things I loved about working there was the effect it had on the senses.   There are many criticisms to be levelled at living history museums – that they tidy up the past into a theme-park fantasy, focus too much on white rural settler narratives at the expense of other American experiences, and create awkward scenarios for visitor interaction.  But I still believe in their fundamental purpose of introducing history as something that can be partially experienced through the body.  The trick is in moving the experience beyond simple fantasy to sympathy, where one’s bodily, sensory grasp of the material conditions of the past inspires a more personal interior understanding of another individual’s possible experience.  To walk in another person’s shoes, to cook at another person’s hearth.  To press apples the way it was done in 1836.  Sympathy is, I believe, a profoundly democratic aspiration, and a morally and socially complex approach to history.

Spending a good portion of the day working in an un-electrified environment with no running water slows down the pace of life immensely.   Sometimes, during a few slow hours, I would just watch shadows creep across the floor.  It profoundly changed my sense of light, colour, and visual perception.

IMG_2657Occasionaly on my lunch break, I walked through the old neglected orchard on the back end of the property, in an area that was at that time off-limits to visitors.  The apples, a golden yellow variety named “Early Transparent” which ripen in July, would fall to the ground and begin to rot, making the humid air thick with the perfume of pulp fermenting in the searing Indiana sun.  Since the museum’s expansions in recent years, it has been cleaned up, the old decrepit trees removed.  Currently, only a few remain, but even these produce enough for the possibility of cider-making.

I played a number of characters in the historic village, each with varying degrees of museum-sanctioned, historically accurate biography, and a lot of material improvised during the everyday interactions of museum staff, where the lines between history, theatre, and everyday life were sometimes ephemeral and shifting.   I often mused on the possible inner lives of the fictional characters I portrayed in short poems, including this one , about a young woman living on a new farm at the edge of the wilderness, dreaming of an orchard in the more settled, cultivated life she had left back east.  Settlers on the frontier are usually portrayed as looking confidently forward, into the wilderness in the American Myth. But so much of the transformation of that frontier was created by looking backwards.  The space on the zone of transformation, between forest and orchard, must have been fraught with  excitement, regret, and trepidation.

IMG_2586I was excited to find that one of my old co-workers, who had started as a teen volunteer when I worked there, was now a full time staff member who seems to be influencing things in favour or historic beer, wine, and cider making!  Witness this project in progress at the carpentry shop, a cider press apparently constructed after a historic design.  I’ve not seen one like this before, so I am keen to find out more about it.

She had success last year with elderberry wine.  The berries on the bush outside the barn look promising, and bottles labeled “Elderberry” sit temptingly on the shelves of the tavern room in the reconstructed Golden Eagle Inn in the 1836 village.

I hope to be able to report back about the progress of cider making at Conner Prairie later in the fall, especially regarding the historical research they are drawing on to portray cider making in nineteenth century Indiana.

Cider Con 2014 – Michigan Cider Bus Tour

Cider Con 2014 left the gate this year in the form of a bus tour to Virtue Cider and Vander Mill Cider in Michigan.  Two coaches full of Cider Con attendees set off, rounding the snowy southern tip of Lake Michigan, one heading for Virtue, one heading for Vander Mill.  I wish I could say we studied the landscape along the way, but most of my bus seemed buzzing with the conversations of eager cider colleagues new and old.  I was delighted to find myself in the gregarious and entertaining company of Neil Worley of Worley’s Cider, Somerset, who brought me back to the folk roots of English craft cider making.   And I had a lovely chat with Kristen Jordan from Sea Cider, about organic methods and the ways we communicate values of many kinds to our customers.  In the midst of lots of folks embarking on a frenzy of entrepreneurial American spirit facilitated by well-considered business plans, it was also really encouraging to chat with Neil and Kristen about approaches to cider making that are experimental, seasonal, and local to their particular apples, soils, climates, materials, and communities.

I’d never thought about how slow the learning curve on cider making is, until Neil described the limitations of seasonal production, where you only get the chance to practice your craft once a year. It makes you realize that the road to becoming a really good cider maker is a long one, characterized by the slow patience of seasons that spread out across the other changing arcs of one’s personal and social life.

The need to consider cider as a business first rather than as a craft, a hobby, or an art form, sometimes necessitates a cautiousness in production that can leave little room for intimate experimentation with materials and ideas and processes that lead to the distinctiveness and uniqueness of a truly craft cider.  It’s a balance – a trade off between art and business.  How much do you want to try and control processes and materials to achieve an imaginary desired, saleable product?  Or do you let the unique properties of your apples and environment direct how you respond and innovate your production?

But enough of such philosophical musings when there are tanks to envy and admire.  Upon our arrival at Virtue Cider’s headquarters in Michigan, we all strolled into the timber framed barns and stared wide-eyed at the beautiful facilities while sampling Virtue’s ciders.  My personal favorite was the Percheron, a French-style ‘cidre fermier’ which was innoculated with brett in the mysterious quarantined brett barn on the other side of the property.  I also liked the fresh, fruity character of the Cidre Nouveau, a young cider made in homage to the tradition of young Beaujolais nouveau wine.  But the farmyard full bodied character of the Percheron reminded me of what I liked best about some English farmhouse ciders – full of robust flavors, even a little bit of funk.

But let’s not forget about the tank envy folks.  Walking into the tank barn was a bit like passing over into another realm, descending below ground where these stainless steel beauties bathe in the cool even temperatures of the earth in which this bathtub of concrete rests.  Even I, someone who is not heavily into the production side of the business, was impressed by the elegance of this facility.

So we boarded the bus and went on our way to Vander Mill. It was a very warm and homey welcome we found there, complete with delicious donuts to accompany an impressive range of ciders with added flavours such as blueberry, pecan, and hibiscus.  My favorite was the cider called the Loving Cup, the peppercorn and hibiscus flavoured cider on draft. The pecan flavoured cider was actually really interesting – almost like eating a pecan pie.

I wish I could be more descriptive, but at this point in our journey the Virtue ciders had been filtering through our brain cells, and the keg at the front of the bus had been tapped.  It was a long trip through Michigan in a bus full of cider in a snowstorm.  But it was a damn good time.

Our Own Midwest Wassail

I hosted a very modified wassail for about 15 of my friends here in Indiana.  No orchards, no bonfires, unfortunately, but as it was only about 15 degrees F, I think we were happy to stay inside.  But I got out the stash of cider I have been collecting and hoarding for a celebratory tasting.  I was really excited by all the questions my friends asked about cider!  It made me realize that even amongst my friends, who listen to me rattle on about it endlessly, there was a severe lack of information about cider.  It was not something they knew much about, beyond Woodchuck, Angry Orchard, and Strongbow.  We have lots of market education work to do cider community!

We did a geographical tour of Britain / France, the Northwest, the Northeast, and closed with a couple from the Midwest.  Here’s the line-up of emptied bottles:

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From across the pond, we started out with the commercial giant Strongbow*, moved onto the Virtue/Oliver collaboration Goldrush*, jumped the channel over to Normandy for Etienne Dupont Organic 2011*.  I then broke out a John Teiser special – a single variety Damelot cider as an example of a very tannic French variety.  Then we jumped back to England for a taste of Perry – the Holmer from Ross on Wye.  People generally really loved these ciders, with the exception of the Damelot, which was unsurprisingly palette challenging.  Special appreciation went to the Gold Rush – which surprised people with its  complex tannin, and to the Ross on Wye Holmer Perry, which was of course delightful and a new taste for most.

IMG_2402Next, we headed to the Northwest Coast of North America – two from British Columbia and two from Oregon.  We began with 2 Towns Ciderhouse Nice and Naughty from Oregon, which was a bit perplexing.  I think we weren’t quite sure about the spiced flavor.  Perhaps we just weren’t in the right holiday mood for it.  We then moved on to the Left Field Cider Big Dry from BC.  Some folks found the aroma a bit challenging.  I had tried the Little Dry while back in BC, and I believe I preferred that cider’s cleaner, more fruit forward taste.  We then opened the Sea Cider Pippins from BC, to which almost everyone responded with exclamations of enthusiasm.  One person said if they didn’t know it was cider, they would have assumed it was wine.  A very complex rich flavor.  Finally, the Wandering Aengus Wanderlust* from Oregon, which we found very simple and straightforward, which split the field between those who liked a more straightforward flavor and those who liked something more complex.

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Then onto the Northeast.  We began with Farnum Hill from New Hampshire, moved onto Hudson Valley Farmhouse Cider from New York, and finished with Aaron Burr Homestead Apple from New York.  All were well liked, and my wine-distributor friend noted that they all improved with a bit of breathing.  The flavors in these three seemed to develop gradually, both with a little time in the glass and a little time on the tongue – first seeming quite simple and then unfolding on the palette.

IMG_2400And then we came back to the midwest with two ciders from Michigan for a sweet finish.  First the J.K’s Scrumpy Farmhouse Organic* and then the Zombie Killer*.  Both ciders were quite sweet – and after a tasting full of dry ciders, response was mixed.  Many found these much too sweet, but the Zombie Killer – actually a Honey, Cherry Apple Cyser, was very interesting – something I can imagine sipping over ice on a hot summer day.

Thus finished our wassail!  It was a really great way to pass on the Gospel of Cider to friends and foodies in my neighborhood.  My cupboards might be a bit bare at the moment, but it was much more enjoyable to share these lovely ciders and enjoy them with other enthusiastic tasters.  Hopefully, I’ll collect some more at Cider Con 2014 next month.

*Asterix indicates ciders which were available at a retail outlet in Bloomington, IN.  All other ciders were acquired by me and lugged home in a suitcase from some travel adventure.