Cheese

15th May, 2023

I have recently returned from a six day cheese course in Italy. The course run by an extraordinary woman called Erica, whose earlier career was in archeology living in Cambridge, then she moved to Italy some years ago and never left. She runs courses that are less touristy and are focused around the production of artisan foods - cheese, salumi, bread, olive oil, truffle and gelato.

The course I was participating on focused on visiting cheese producers, to gain practical and hands-on experience. When I signed up for the course I had paid little attention to the specific locations I would be visiting, other than I knew it was around Tuscany, and did not anticipate the exceptional and dramatic landscape that I would be travelling through, visiting farms and cheese producers in the mountains of Tuscany and across the rambling hills of Emilia Romagna.

We visit small cheese producers who Erica has got to know personally over the years, relationships she has nurtured to give us access to small family run businesses. Visits usually start early in the morning observing the cheesemakers prepare their milk. All these small cheese producers we visit are woman, while the men of the family take care of the animals that produce the milk – goats, sheep and cows.

We visited Marzia, who has a very small cheese operation which she runs from a tiny room annexed to her home in a small town just above Bagni di Lucca. She adds rennet to the heated milk, and when the curds form (the consistency a bit like panacotta, but less firm) she cuts them, slicing through the curds with a long knife, and then more rigorously with a whisk until finely broken up. The curds eventually settle at the bottom of the pot binding themselves together, then using both hands she collects up the curds from the bottom of the pot, lifting them to the surface and out of the liquid into cheese molds.

We leave the small cheese room and enter her home next door where we sit down to dinner with her family for a home cooked meal, everything locally sourced or made by her family – home milled chestnut flour for the pasta, cured meats from their animals and of course the cheese…. Once we have eaten and are full of wine, we return to the cheese room to watch her make ricotta from the whey (and just as a note ricotta is not cheese!)

Some of the locations of these farms and cheese producers are incredibly stunning.  One morning we head up into the mountains above Lucca. We arrive in the middle of woodland, a stream with chestnut trees lining the banks and wild flowers carpeting the ground. A stone building perched on the river’s edge next to a stone bridge where Vitalina and her husband greets us, along with her three collie dogs, one of which is pregnant and lies in the sun with its belly spread out across the ground.

We are taken into a small stone out building where there is a tin lined copper pot full of fresh raw milk being heated over a gas burner. There is no clutter in this room, only what is needed to make the cheese. The simplicity of this beautiful space seems to reflect Vitalina’s calm and measured personality.

We are taken through the stages of making her cheese.  From heating the milk to separating the curd to make caprino (goat cheese), and then reheating the whey and adding a small amount of salt to make ricotta. She takes us into another small stone room where she stores her cheese on wooden shelves covered in fine muslin to keep the flies off. She has fought hard to keep her wooden shelves.  The regulations are to use metal, for hygiene reasons. However Vitalina has convinced the regulators that her wooden shelves are fundamental to her maturing process, and assures that they are kept spotlessly clean. The temperature and air is perfect for the maturing in this room. The door is adjacent to a small window which she can opened to adjust the air flow. The cool but moist air from the river gives her cheese it’s unique flavour and consistency. Her ricotta is the most creamy I have tasted, and yet she adds no extra milk or cream, which is a trick of other producers, who never seem to get this creaminess.

Her cheese is made from goats milk, and her and her husband have their own herd. The milk is never chilled, it comes straight from the animal every morning. The milk is the product of the animals well-being, its health, its food intake and its environment. The goats produce less milk at this time of year as they are feeding their young. Everyday the milk will be slightly different, depending on the goats body temperature and mood. It depends mostly on what they eat and where they are in the lactation cycle. Also, by avoiding any travelling of the milk from one location to another, no pumping through pipes, sloshed around in a milk trucks – so the milk is calm and relaxed. Vitalina tells us that the goats don’t like the rain, they prefer to stay in the barn, so on very wet days she lets them stay home.

We are taken to see the goats which are kept just above the house, up a small track in a barn with an attaching pen. Each adult goat has a bell attached to its neck, so when they move together they produce music from the different tones of each bell. The kid goats have their own area in the barn, warm and cozy, the floor thick with fresh straw and hay. I have fallen in love with these creatures. They have so much character. They nibble at my clothes and my fingers and are incredibly bold and playful.

The adult goats are taken out to pasture each day, if it is not pouring with rain! It is only drizzling today. We watch them being herded into the road, across the bridge and disappear out of sight, under the control and care of Vitalina’s husband and their obedient collie dogs. The sound of their bells disappearing into the distance. The scene is cinematic…

Over the duration of the course we – just to say, 'we' is me, Erica, and the other participants, most of which are cheese makers or people who are starting out to becoming one. There is 8 of us. I’m the odd one out, as always! But Erica gets why I’m here, and when the cheese makers inquire what we all do and why we are on the course, I can hear with my limited understanding of Italian Erica explaining that I am an artist, with a fascination for hands on engagement with materials, and artisan food production. Well I hope that is what she is saying….!

When I returned to Rome I sit in my studio, make some sense of the whole experience. I keep thinking about the cheese as living matter. You witness the care and responsiveness between cheese handler and their materials throughout the process, in particular the moment when the cheesemaker collects up from the bottom of the pot, the sunken curds into a big material ball. The fine rice size pellets of curd that have been cut up form into a lump at the base of the pot, and then are gathered and raised to the surface as if the milk, pot or both are giving birth. We saw this being done in two very different circumstances.

The first time was with Linda and Lisa, sisters that make large formed hard cheese together. Linda crouches down reaching both arms deep into the pot. Milk up to her arm pits. She is gathering the curds from the bottom of the pot into a ball, feeling her way slowly and carefully until all the curds are bonded together. This is a slow and delicate action, so not to disturb or break up the material. Then slowly she lifts up the large mass of curd, getting her forearms under it and raising it to the surface of the liquid. With all her efforts she lifts the curd mass out of the pot, stands up cradling it in her arms, and places the entire material cluster into a large plastic cheese mold on the table next to her. Its steaming and alive. She then pushed all her weight down onto the cheese in the mold to push out the liquid, which escapes through holes in the mold, rotating it between the squeezing. An action repeated flipping the cheese in the mold every minute or so until as much liquid as possible drains away. I watch this rich yellow whey trickle away into a large bucket. The cheese once dry and firm will be removed from its mold and start its maturing process in the maturing room.

The rennet and cultures added to the milk brings it to life, the material is continually transforming and changing through the application of heat and physical manipulation, aided by tools and technology. Small producers are very hands-on and the equipment is simple. The bigger the production the greater need to use technology to move the material around. This living matter from raw milk to maturing cheese is in endless transitional, from the young and fresh to the old and mature. The appearance, consistency, smell and taste changing every day until the moment of consumption.

This cheese birthing, I experience on a very different scale the last day when we visited Parmigiano Reggiano producers in Emilia Romagna not far from Bologna. This was the first time we visited a large producer, though still very much artisan using raw milk, but on a much grander scale. 23 copper lined large pots each containing 1,000 litres of milk, each at 2 minute intervals of production. At the beginning of the day all 23 pots are filled with raw milk and the rennet is added to the first pot, then 2 minutes later the second pot has the rennet added and so on. This means that the small team of six can work all milk pots consecutively.

We watched the dairy team heat the milk adding the starter culture. Once heated the curds start to form, and with large curd cutters, they begin to slice through the curds, then chopping more rigorous while stirring until the curds are in small rice size pellets. The curds soon sink and rest at the bottom of the pots knitting themselves together. A large wooden paddle the size of a rowing oar, is plunged to the bottom of the pot. It looks like it is made of some kind of special red wood, a rich red/dark brown, beautifully crafted. The paddle is used to bring the mass of curds to the surface. I watch the handler scoop up the curds – the curd mass is bigger than I expected. It bobs to the surface, then two people catch the curd in a large piece of muslin cloth and hang it over a metal bar resting on the edges of the pot. The shape of the curds is formed by both the base of the conical pot and the cradling cloth. It is then sliced in half using a long blunt knife, to be maneuvered into 2 muslin cloths. The method of separation is choreographed perfectly. The handlers manipulate the cut cheese, rocking backwards and forwards to create the separation, then quickly they introduce a second muslin cloth and one of the halves is flipped into it. Two formed cheeses now ready for their molds.

I watch this process over and over again as they work along all 23 pots. The actions are well rehearsed and yet each time they separate the curds there is an anticipation and urgency to get it right, not to drop or harm the material. So much care is taken, care you give to living things – to cradle, to not puncture, to keep whole.    

Offal

10th April, 2023

I spent a day with Liza Dieckwisch this week, who has become my cooking pal and food collaborator here in Rome. After a successful day working with vegetables together, using a range of seasonal produce from the local market – such as agretti, cardoons, and puntarella, we planned a day of offal. We particularly wanted to tackle the innards of a lamb, taking the raw material, prepping, cooking and eating it. We both have a need and fascination to understand and experience food through our bodies (handling and eating), to develop a physical relationship to the materials we use and encounter.

Liza is also an artist and like me is spending 9 months here in Rome. She is based at the German Academy, and although I am rather jealous of her enormous studio which makes my studio at the British Academy seem a little small and humble, we have found a friendship that is linked both through our art practice and our love for all things food….. both of which are totally entangled.  We have decided to cook together regularly, after finding it impossible to get direct hands on experience in Roman-Italian restaurants or with food producers. There is a lot of bureaucracy and health and safety restrictions that prevent us working in the food industry here. So me and Liza are doing a lot of stuff together – cooking, visiting foodie places and talking a lot about it all.

Since being in Rome I have gained an interest, respect and taste for offal. Before arriving here I would probably have only eaten liver and kidneys, familiarized through my husband’s liver and onion dish, and my mums steak and kidney pie. Finding offal such as tripe and sweetbreads something I would have avoided. I think the texture combined with my psychological block about these less common consumed organs had stopped me from being open to trying them in restaurants, or cooking with them at home. Ridiculous really! Rome loves offal and there are so many dishes to eat here that use the different innards of the animal.

The first time I had offal here was in Testaccio market, where a food vendor sells hot steaming offal sandwiches. You see people, particularly manual workers queueing in the morning for their super food breakfast sandwiches. When trying a offal sandwich, the tripe was so soft and not at all chewy, which was very different to previous experiences I had had eating tripe in Italy, and also when I visited Japan – where I recall a very chewy experience where the meat would not break down in my mouth and was impossible to swallow. I’m really not sure it was that bad, but my head had rejected it before it entered my body. This is what has changed for me here – I no longer distinguish between meat types, as in judging what is more or less acceptable and palatable to eat from an animal. Handling to understand the meat I eat, has really helped me to challenge my eating habits.

I’m exploring all sorts of cooked innards in restaurants now. I appreciate the fact that all the parts of an animal are being used. Often people only want the prime cuts – such as fillet steak, prepped and prepacked. Liver for example sold in the UK has been the same price for years, due to its low demand, and yet in my opinion it is as tasty as an expensive fillet steak.  I do think if you eat meat you should gain an understanding of where your meat comes from, and try and expand the range of cuts you buy. Being in Rome has really opened my eyes and my stomach in this field.

Buying offal to cook with Liza had to be planned, as very few butchers have these ingredients ready available. We ordered the innards of a lamb. It included - heart, spleen, lung, liver, sweetbreads, trachea and intestine. The organs came all attached (apart from the intestine that had been cleaned and washed in salty water.) We noticed the kidneys were absent. The butcher must have removed them and sold them separately – naughty butcher! The first thing we did is explore handling and look at the lambs innards - holding the linked organs up to see which part was connected to what and where things were placed in relation to the trachea (windpipe). We also ordered beef cheeks and sweetbreads, and caul fat. Caul fat is the lacy fat membrane that surrounds the internal organs of most animals - ours was pigs judging by the size of it.

Each part of the lambs innards was very different in shape, texture and colour. The heart, robust and the hardest organ - it’s shape just as you expect. Cutting through revealed the dense muscle and the pale coloured entrance and exit tubes. A lambs heart is small about 5cm long, and can sit in the palm of your hand. Leading down to the heart was the trachea with the sweetbreads attached on either side. This is a very loose and long organ, lumpy, squidgy, pale in colour and very soft. Although, trying to cut through the transparent membrane that houses this organ is almost impossible. The sweetbreads we had from the cow had such a tough membrane we could not find a knife to cut through, and even with scissors it was difficult. The lungs came next, the largest organs of our lamb innards, rich pinky red flaps. The spleen is very different in colour and texture, deep dark red with a blue shimmering almost metallic membrane.  

I apologies now to those of you who may be a bit squeamish when it comes to raw meat, but I’m telling you, once you go beyond the materials origin and associations, and handle this stuff, you can exploring its materiality, like you would any object.

Cutting through each organ reveals the structure, veins, arteries and fat running through. Each a perfect structure that makes up a perfectly designed machine - flexible and agile while also robust and resilient. I did not find myself thinking much about the living animal this material had come from, as I explored the dead fleshy matter, instead I was absorbed in the forms, textures, colours, smells and material details of each inside and outside part. I find it humbling to think about all flesh as material, a grounding and levelling between humans and animals. We are all pretty much made up of the same stuff – but on slightly different scales.

After handling the lamb material to explore how it felt, moved through our fingers and looked like in the sunlight, we divided our organs in to 3 dishes - one for making sausages, one for wrapping in caul fat and one for making Coratella. We were going to make two types of sausages, one with the beef cheeks and sweetbreads with a range of herbs and spices, including, pine nuts, sultanas, garum, cumin, sage and rosemary. The other with the full range of lambs innards with just salt and pepper.

Pushing each batch of meat for the sausage meat through a mincer we then added cooked basmati rice to bind both batches into a firm consistency. We did a number of testers, small shaped patties quickly fried, to taste our mixes. The lamb one was seriously rich and very delicious, the beef was more ordinary – so we added a few more ingredients to jazz it up. You can really add anything to a sausage mix. What happens when you add dark chocolate, seeds, cheese? Why not!

Whatever process you apply to a piece of meat will reveal different material qualities that it has. Pushing sweetbreads through a mincer machine (not a pretty sight!) demonstrated its soft elasticated qualities, looking more like slime than mince, with the membrane getting caught up in the metal template where the mince is extruded. Whereas the beef cheeks came out as you would expect mince to look like. Each type of meat we put through the mincer came out at a different speed, with different pressure needed to push the meat through the machine. I could have made a graph to illustrate each cut of meats density based on this process.

We made our sausages with the lambs intestines and also used our caul fat to wrap some of the mixture. Caul fat is an extraordinary material. It looks like lace. Between the fatty lacy strips is a fine membrane. It reminded me of the thin skin that you can peel off your body after being sun burnt, like fine paper. When ripping it, it tore a bit like very thin tissue paper and the sound was similar. The caul fat cooks like crispy bacon when frying it around meat cuts or sausage meat, contributing an intense extra layer of flavour to the sausages.

The other dish we made was Coratella, this is when you cut up the innards into small pieces and fry with a lot of onions. The important thing is to add the liver last as it cooks very quickly. The Roman way is to add artichokes but we left those out. I added white wine and some vegetable stock, and after tasting added a bit of honey to sweeten, as offal can be a bit bitter. After cooking a while the dish went a very dark colour – almost black – must have been the blood from the organs.

We made so much food, so were pleased when Liza’s neighbours were interested in coming to eat some of it. Someone brought vegan sausages for us to cook for their vegetarian children. I looked at the ingredients on the package of the tofu sausages and was horrified by the long list of indistinguishable ingredient, food additives and flavourings. Given all the debates around whether to eat meat or not in protecting the planet, I’m not sure a vegetarian/vegan option is necessarily a better ecological decision, based on this product!  

We ended up doing two dinner sittings for all the food we had produced, each time guests contributing to the meal with cooked artichokes, salads and wine. Also, I watched as one of the children ate our offal sausages. I asked them if they liked it and they nodded frantically as they grabbed a second.

Me and Liza are planning a dough day next…

Layers

6th March, 2023

What keeps returning to me over and over in Rome is the layering of this city.  Layers going up and layers going down. The more your investigate the more there is to be discovered below ground. Over centuries buildings have been crushed or filled in to make space for new buildings and this process has been repeated over and over again. Basilicas built over churches, churches built over houses, houses built over barracks, barracks built over mausoleums, mausoleums built over…..

I have visited a number of sites below ground in Rome, excavations that reveal buildings and lives lived from the past. Often there are multiple layers uncovered of different types of dwellings, religious sites, government buildings, burial grounds and humble homes.

What I find so exciting when visiting these subterranean worlds, is the juxtaposition of archeological remains and the materials that were used to fill in the sites, in order to build on top. Standing in the ruins underneath the Basilica of St John Lateran, on a visit set up by the archeologist who is heading the excavation, you can see beautifully decorated rooms of wealthy villa owners, walls painted with delicate frescos and intricate floor mosaics, all of which have been carefully excavated and cleaned up, but are still colliding with the remains of the rubble that was poured into these spaces to create the foundations for the new buildings that were constructed on top. I guess it is not impossible to remove all this rubble, due to structural constraints, and the fact that it takes a long time to remove it without damaging what is underneath, which is why you are often left with this dramatic contrast of delicate archeological ruins and raw rough matter.

What we are witnessing is the excavation process, the careful removal of infill to reveal the architecture below. The remains of these brutal rubble mounds of filler I find beautiful as well as invasive. They are a reminder of what these sites have gone through and witnessed. Somehow, when things are cleaned up too much I lose a sense of the history of the site, the stages between each building’s construction. Surely, it’s destruction is as important as its realization, in terms of understanding it’s material history and context. 

Also, the rubble and concrete matter that was poured into these sites to form the foundations for the new, expose different building methods and also the gesture of its obliteration - one that can appear violent, destroying the old in order to make way for the new without much regard for what was being buried. Mind you it is easy to bring my contemporary values to these excavations, to be shocked by the destruction of beautiful artworks and architecture. In the case of the Lateran the Roman emperor of the time needing to build barracks for his soldiers in an elevated location of the city, of which this site could provide. So worrying about saving the old buildings already there, was of little concern. What we now think is extraordinary and worth preserving was then quite ordinary and replaceable.

Seeing the piles of rubble in these excavated sites exposes how they poured the rubble in from above, the direction of the infill matter caught in motion as it cascaded into the spaces, capturing what it might be like to be trapped underground during a disaster. I think about the people trapped in buildings during the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria. How quickly exits can be blocked and buildings can be crushed. As we go deeper under the Lateran I try not to think about what is above me, all that weight of architecture, the basilica with its huge marble sculptures all bearing down on top of me. I’m always impressed by the engineering of underground constructions, how it is possible to build tunnels without the above caving in! I’m sure in the past things did collapse when underground structures where not strong enough.

When visiting St Clement Basilica, a church that is built over two previous churches. Below a 4^th century basilica that had been converted out of the home of a Roman nobleman, and below that a 2nd century church that briefly served as a mithraeum. I weave down through the layers, descending narrow stairs. I can hear water running, the noise travels throughout the site and I’m eager to find its source. In the very depths I find the fresh flow of water exposed running along a channel in the floor - an underground stream. This water flow whilst its contents are fresh and ever changing, its direction is ancient. Like the Lateran excavation, the experience of seeing these multi layers is somewhat confusing, in that this is not an experience of the individual buildings, what it would have been like to occupy them when they were in use, but an archeological experience, a collapsing of histories, which dare I say satisfies my contemporary need to ‘have it all at once!’

What I mean by this, is that we are very familiar with the presentations of condensed histories, such as in museums, compact cross sections of history and timelines delivered in simplified formats, neatly packaged for quick consumption – a time plan on a museum wall, a 10 minute interactive light show to sum up an entire age. I was watching a YouTube clip this morning about the history of Garum sauce, a fish sauce made from fermented fish with salt, very common in Ancient Rome. The guy presenting the programme delivered an entire pocket history of Ancient Rome with cartoon diagrams in 5 minutes, about the maximum time we give to any YouTube video.

These excavations can feel a little bit like a theme park, pulled into the excitement and drama of the multi layers, and less of the layers themselves. Having said that these tours are super interesting and unforgettable.

On visiting the Domus Aurea, Nero’s Palace in the depths underground, you are given a virtual tour, 3D virtual glasses that transport you back to the time of Nero to explore his living pristine palace. It is pretty amazing as you float through rooms observing their decorations, gliding into the outdoors amongst virtual blossoming trees, to the edges of the garden and the limits of the virtual environment. It is really seductive and helps to understand what this building would have been like in its hay day. But I’m pleased when the 20 minute tour comes to an end and I return to my own physical interaction and imagination. 

As I walk from one space to the next below St. Clement Basilica, I am drawn to the light sources, spot lights rigged up, one or two in each space. The intense localized lights have created what must be the perfect environment for certain plants to grow, each light is surrounded by bright green moist spongy moss, and dainty leafy plants growing out of the walls. Like the stream running at the base of the site, these clusters of nature bring new life to the space. I love how nature can take advantage of the smallest opportunity to take root and thrive.

The damp conditions and bright electric light are seemingly perfect for these mini wall gardens. It was interesting that no one had removed these growths from the historical remains. Perhaps there was an appreciation of what this succulent greens brought to the tourist experience, or no one could be bothered to remove them! Maybe the plants are important to the ecosystem of the site and are contributing to the preservation of the space, or more likely not! I will never know, but for me these beautiful moments in these dark damp spaces brings something very special to my experience. It made me think about time beyond that of the building and myself – the plants were acting as an interface between the building’s time and my time, their growth slow but prolific, and interwoven into the spaces. It was also a reminder of how all buildings are in constant transformation, even when appearing to be frozen in time.

I have just come back this afternoon from visiting the Vatican Necropolis of St. Peters Basilica. After passing through high security to access the site, I joined a small group and was led down through the layers of architectural history below the basilica, guided by a very knowledgeable historian who brought diagrams and maps to explain the complex shifting histories of the site.

This was a very cleaned up excavation compared to others I had experienced, no leftover tumbling rubble or gritty floors. In the deepest depths of the site a pagan cemetery, a street running between each mausoleum still intact. You could see how the buildings had been cut into the hillside to create terraces. The guide explained, when the Roman emperor Constantine the Great built his church on top of the necropolis in the 4^thcentury, he merely sliced off the pediments of these buildings, and cut off the top of the hillside, filling these topless mausoleums with the rubble and earth from the hillside, in order to create the foundations for his new church. The walls of the mausoleums providing strong foundation structures. The current basilica, which stands in its place now was built much later, completed in 1626.

Saint Peter is buried on this site, and with the aid of a laser pointer our guide focused us on some of his remains housed in a small glass container within a wall. The story of Saint Peter’s grave and how they found it is fascinating – definitely worth a read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Peter%27s_tomb

Visiting these multi layered excavations, is always wrapped up in excited expectations, due to their hiddenness from above. I now find myself peering down through the floor iron gratings in all churches and basilicas I visit, to see if I can get a glimpse of what lies below, sometimes met with returning eyes of underground visitors looking right back at me.