Blue and yellow; soft and hard; moldy and smoked. The aging process is rough on everyone.
Part III: Smell Me
In most of the world, throughout the history of man, the presence of mold has been an omen; a sign of disease and uncleanliness. Mold has necessitated the purest of bleaches and the hardest of sponges. The chance discovery of mold would lead your average man or woman to recoil, bind the offender in saran wrap, and burn the house down—move to a new country, change names, get a tattoo of a dog drinking coffee—but not in France.
No, in France the discovery of mold perked more ears than noses. In France, the presence of mold necessitated wine instead of bleach; forks instead of torches; bread instead of dog tattoos. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that mold—for lack of a better word—is good. Mold is right. Mold works. Mold clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the affineur spirit.
Mold, as you’ll have it, is a product of a Frenchman saying, “I am still hungry and it is still food. I shall eat what I please; I am French.” With a wisp of lethargy, he’d swirl the air with his disinterested finger and lean into the lap of a lover for a communal backrub.
The French have approached life with an apathy and haughtiness that is somehow transfixing and desirable, despite these being two of the worst traits a human could possess. Because of this inexplicable allure, people ‘round the world have listened when the French said, “Oh, a cheese saturated in mold like a body rife with tumors is not only preferable but superior; a cheese soiled by mold is better for you, because I say so; I am French.”
This so-called “superior cheese” variety—the blue cheeses—was an accidental discovery, in a manner similar to [but more sinful than] cheddar. Hundreds of years ago, in a bleaker age of hairier men, a proto-Gaul tribe stored their homebrew cheese mounds in a damp cave for two months too long. Though the cheese became laden with bacteria, the resultant mold was rather tame, due to the stable temperature and humidity of the cave.
Mold thrives in such dark, dank, and steamy places. You’ll typically find mold growing in a refrigerator drawer, under a kitchen sink, on the upper crust of an unfinished basement, or anywhere in your bathroom, assuming you still don’t turn the fan on during your showers, Jason. Anywhere with plenty of moisture and still, stale air is a breeding ground for mold. Historically, humans desperate to survive the winter would combat the quiet, cold air with preservative techniques. Salting, pickling, smoking, and bottling have been the more popular methods for plugging Old Man Winter’s soggy mouth, slowing or outright-preventing the growth of mold and similar microbes.
There are thousands of varieties of mold, all of which feast upon organic matter—rinds, spines, membranes, starch, cellulose, etcetera—slowly decomposing and recycling it into bare nutrients, which are then reintroduced to the soil. Some molds are complex enough to consume lesser microorganisms, and these are known to infest crops and sicken bodies if ingested.
Some folk are so susceptible to mold that they cannot manage a whiff of these microbes without developing migraines, coughing fits, itchy and inflamed sinuses, rashes, fatigue, or asthma. Most people experience similar symptoms after ingesting mold, yet there are a few rare molds that do NOT fight the body. These molds—while still quite toxic—instead seek combative microorganisms such as Gram-positive bacteria (including Clostridium pathogens, known for causing botulism, tetanus, gangrene, and diarrhea) and spirochetes (helically-coiled bacteria responsible for syphilis, yaws, and Lyme disease).
NOTE: When I set out to write about smelly cheeses, I did not expect to be outlining the root causes of diarrhea and syphilis, and yet here I am. It’s like Sir Alexander Fleming once said: “One sometimes finds what one is not looking for. When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did.”
Fleming had been investigating the bacterium staphylococci, in 1928, and his lab was a pigsty. He returned from a month abroad and found that his petri dishes—containing cultures of staphylococci—were overcome with fungus. Fleming noted, quite humorously, how the bacterium nearest the fungus had been consumed, whereas the bacterium separate from the fungus was carrying on business-as-usual — so he isolated this fungus and brewed a pure culture of it, resulting in what he called “mould juice.”
He put his “mould juice” to the test, successfully killing a series of disease-causing bacteria including staphylococci and other Gram-positive pathogens (AKA hearty boys with thicc cell walls), particularly those responsible for meningitis, pneumonia, scarlet fever, and diphtheria, as well as the Gram-negative (AKA pussy-ass bitch) Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Thereafter, with such triumphs under his fungal belt, Fleming figured he ought not keep calling it “magical mould juice” in his papers, and so—in March of 1929—he renamed it “penicillin.”
Fleming published his miracle mold discovery later that year, but he was a notoriously horrid communicator and he failed to express the gravity of his discovery; nobody in the scientific community cared. On top of that, cultivating the mold Penicillium was laborious; isolating the antibiotic within it was rather difficult; and observations of treatment on live subjects was underwhelming. Even those who showed the slightest bit of interest were turned-off by the impracticality of its study.
As the years went on, even Fleming himself found penicillin too cumbersome to invest in. He surrendered its study to two Oxford chemists, Ernst Boris Chain and Edward Abraham, who were being funded by the British and American governments to find an antibiotic worth mass-producing.
Through trial and error, Abraham determined the right structure for the molecular order of penicillin, thereby making it duplicatable. Fellow chemist Norman Heatley suggested lowering its acidity and hydrating it, which made it possible to conduct live animal trials with injection. In 1940, they cured a mouse's bacterial infection with this penicillin concoction. (To be fair, that mouse would not have had a bacterial infection had the chemists not first injected him with one. Seemed redundant, if you ask me.)
Chain and Abraham's department head, Howard Florey, brought this penicillin to a nearby hospital for the first phase of human testing. In 1941, they injected a policeman with penicillin in an attempt to cure the infection that was raging through his horribly-wounded face. The policeman's condition drastically improved, and everyone was elated — until they ran out of penicillin, and the policeman died. #sad
A later patient, suffering from sepsis, was treated with penicillin; his care required, at that time, half of the world's supply. With this lesson harshly learned, penicillin was subsequently stockpiled before human trials, and dozens of patients thereafter were treated successfully. Following the Cocoanut Grove fire in December of 1942, many of Boston's burn victims became the first trauma patients to survive thanks to penicillin.
The proof was in the pudding, and the world was ready to embrace the mass-production of “mould juice.” In the summer of 1943, the Allied War Production Board commissioned for a full supply of penicillin—enough to stock every soldier in Europe twice-over. The only issue (other than those damn Nazis) was the actual mass-production.
Corn steep liquor—a byproduct of corn wet-milling—was selected as the growth medium, due to its rich constitution of amino acids, vitamins, and minerals, which all provided an exceptional base to support the growth of mold. As for the mold strain that would serve as a ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ for the world's supply of penicillin, well… that would require a more precise selection than pointing to a grain silo and asking if there's any leftovers from the corn harvest.
An intercontinental search began for the ideal natural source of penicillin—a darling molecule that would resemble, with the utmost accuracy, the mold that had first been isolated in the Oxford lab. Samples were brought in from the Caribbean, Australia, and—of course—France, but the Chosen Mold (as was foretold in the prophecies) ultimately came from a rotting cantaloupe found at a farmers market in Peoria, Illinois.
The good-boy scientists at Pfizer introduced this cantaloupe's mold strain to Zap Taggart & his Deep-Tank Fermentation Method band, which went on to tour the psychedelic scene of England and—as the result of a near-fatal boating accident with a young Mick Jagger and an unidentified college mascot—would later perform at Woodstock, where an impromptu jam session smoothly morphed into the bedrock of their eventual chart-topping rock anthem “Big Mold Money.”
The United States had mass-produced nearly 700 billion units of penicillin, year over year, by the end of World War II in 1945. Within two years, penicillin had gone from a “Name ten people who want mold in their veins, and then we'll talk” to an “Attention all servicemen: penicillin cures gonorrhea in 4 hours” level of availability.
Sir Alexander Fleming remained humble about his part in the discovery of the world’s first antibiotic; he’d say it was the work of many, built upon his one chance moment of cognizance. The Penicillium mold could be found anywhere organic matter was abandoned; if Fleming didn’t find it then and there, somebody else would have found it eventually. Maybe they wouldn’t have called it “penicillin,” but in all likelihood…they would have.
The Penicillium genus of ascomycetous fungi got its name from Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link who, in 1809, decided the fungi’s wispy spores reminded him of a camel’s hair pencil—then, a high-falutin buzzword for an artist’s fine paintbrush. Being the self-pleasuring scholar he was, Jo-Hein-Fried-Link named the mold “Penicillium.”
He thought he was merely filling books with sketches of mold. He could’ve never imagined what better scientists, in the near future, would find his camel-hair fungus capable of…
Of course, I’m referring to cheesemaking.
Penicillium mold culture is liberally introduced to a cheese in its infancy, thus allowing the fungus to penetrate its soft curdled body and carve networks of veins throughout. These fungal caverns turn blue as the mold strengthens, and a particular odor develops. (Sometimes the Penicillium mold is introduced to a cheese after it has curdled. The fungus then grows more across the surface, in bluish-grey spots and splotches—just like the floor behind the toilet.)
The mold digests the cheese before you do, breaking-down the nutrients of the casein, resulting in a sharp and salty flavor. The bacterium Brevibacterium linens spreads as a byproduct of these released nutrients, and Penicillium largely ignores Brevi linens in favor of the cheese. Brevi is the bacterium responsible for the foul odors that arise from unwashed feet, slick pits, sweaty gooches, and blue cheese.
Blue cheese is often spread or crumbled onto other foods, though some people eat it by itself, because reasons. You’ll never catch me willingly eating it (because it’s literally mold) but other humans have been doing it for thousands of years and I doubt they’ll stop anytime soon. Take, for example, gorgonzola — one of the world’s oldest blue cheeses, first created in Italy in the early ninth century. It was cultivated with blue veins around the turn of the millennium, with the ever-crumbly and creamy “Stilton” style perfected in an English village by the early 18th century.
George Orwell (author of Animal Farm and 1984) once wrote an essay declaring Stilton as the greatest of all cheeses—ranking it well above the French cheeses. Another English author—one “Gilbert Keith Chesterton,” who you’ve never heard of—wrote a fucking sonnet about his love of Stilton. He expanded on this feeling with a series of essays on cheese, with a particular attention to the lack of representation of cheese in historical artwork.
Now, color me hypocritical, as I am also writing a series of essays about cheese, but this was the kind of guy who looks like a guy who would write about cheese; the kind of guy who, if you saw him on the street and someone whispered to you, “That guy fucks cheese; I’ve seen it,” you would agree without a whiff of doubt. Gilbert Keith Chesterton fucked cheese—probably. He weighed nearly three-hundred pounds throughout the Victorian era, he carried a cane-sword, and he was both a Catholic apologist AND a frequent ouija board dabbler. I may be no certified biographer, but he was the kind of guy who fucked cheese, I can tell you that much.
“Sonnet to a Stilton Cheese,” by Gilbert Keith Chesterton:
Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour
And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby;
England has need of thee, and so have I—
She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour,
League after grassy league from Lincoln tower
To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen.
Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men,
Like a tall green volcano rose in power.
Plain living and long drinking are no more,
And pure religion reading “Household Words,”
And sturdy manhood sitting still all day
Shrink, like this cheese that crumbles to its core;
While my digestion, like the House of Lords,
The heaviest burdens on herself doth lay.
(A ‘fen’ is a low, lifeless bog—which accurately describes most of England.)
Daniel Defoe—the English trader-turned-traitor known for his 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe—later wrote, on a tour of this national fen, “We pass’d Stilton, a town famous for cheese, which is call’d our English Parmesan, and is brought to table with the mites, or maggots round it, so thick, that they bring a spoon with them for you to eat the mites with, as you do the cheese.”
Nowadays people eat Stilton smeared on celery, pears, crackers, or biscuits; or they’ll crumble it over a soup or salad; or they’ll melt it and sauce-up a steak; or they’ll pair it with a fork and a tart sherry, to wash the fungus out from between their teeth. Often around Christmastime, “poor people” will hollow-out the center of an entire Stilton cheese wheel and fill the germy curd basin with port wine. English elites consider this barbaric, yet they’re the ones who purchase “Stilton cheese paste” in aluminum screw-top tubes—as if it were Tom’s of Maine—to make their hors d’oeuvres both easy and squeezy.
Derivatives of the Stilton practice resulted in the Danablu and Cambozola, which were England’s responses to the Roquefort—a blue cheese from Mediterranean France, south of the picturesque Marais Poitevin—as the French were often not on trading, speaking, or friendly terms with the English throughout the second millennium.
Cheeses known as “Roquefort” are dictated, by European Union law, to have come from sheep’s milk aged with Penicillium in the natural Combalou caves of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. The modern-day affineurs of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon acquire the Penicillium roqueforti mold (necessary for legitimate batch-brews of Roquefort in factory settings) by leaving bread in these caves for six to eight weeks, giving the fungus ample time to eat and breed. They then harvest the bread, dry it, and grind it into a powder, to be sprinkled in with the curd batch.
As the legend goes, the first Roquefort was an accidental creation: a boy abandoned his lunch in these caves, in order to chase after a pretty girl, because he was French, and that’s what French boys do. This particular boy had been eating spore-depraved bread paired with a cheese freshly made from the milk of an ewe—and when he returned to the caves a few months later, he found that the bready mold growth had consumed the cheese and transformed it into blue-veined fungal curds — and he ate it anyway, because he was apathetic, and French.
The Danish, as one would expect, have approached their blue-cheesemaking in a more scientific fashion. At the turn of the nineteenth century, affineur Marius Boel (the first famous “cheese danish,” heh heh) sought to concoct his own Roquefort. He brewed curds with full-fat cow’s milk and cream, shaped it into a drum, and ran copper wires through the form. He then shoved a sampling of Penicillium roqueforti into some of the curd tubes, and the mold proliferated throughout the aging process.
The fungal tubes led to strong, deep blue veins within the otherwise semi-soft and creamy cheese. “Danablu,” as it was called, reveals these sturdy veins when the form is finally cut. It’s as creamy and salty as any blue cheese ought to be, but the savory depth of its two contradictory flavors is unrivaled in the cheese realm.
Gorgonzola was the first cheese to be run-through with copper wires, so as to better distribute the mold spores. The cheese form was then aged for three or four months (though the maturation could always be shorted for a Gorgonzola that crumbles easier over a salad). The Milanese perfected their marbling technique by the 11th century, resulting in a firm-yet-buttery cheese form with greenish-blue spider veins for a salty sting. This technique has been practiced steadily and unmodified for a thousand years.
Limburger, on the contrary, was never saturated in mold nor was it aged for longer than a few weeks. The Duchy of Limburg—a territory of rolling green hills between the Vesdre and Meuse rivers, now co-owned by Belgium and the Netherlands—first brewed its own cheese in the 15th century, washing it with herbs and Brevibacterium linens before stashing it in one of the Herve countryside’s many dank cellars for a fortnight.
Though the bacterium is blanketed over these cheese bricks before their abandonment, the washed-rind process and the shorted maturation give Brevi linens no time to perforate the form’s tough exterior. This leaves the interior rather soft and sweet, whereas the casing emanates Limburger’s infamous stank. With age, this stank begins to infiltrate the cheese; by the end of a third month of aging, Limburger reaches a point of “maximum stank.” Because of the strength of its flavor, people tend to eat it then with dark bread, brown mustard, and beer — and by “people” I mean old Wisconsonians and the hearty boys of Belgium.
A northbound wagon could take you from the Limburgian ‘Land of the Herve’ to the Dutch town of Gouda in half a day. There you'd find a central marketplace—a lawn overtaken by clapboard and canvas, later paved-over with cobblestones—selling produce, wares, and tools to children of all ages. (It was the 12th century; they didn't yet have the MPAA.)
The market at Gouda was the one place where farmers could buy and sell cheese in the County of Holland; a feudal agreement had divided the sale of various goods to different villages, so as to force—er, encourage—trade and travel. Gouda had the monopoly on cheese, and so the cheeses of Holland became known as “gouda cheese” — cheese bought in Gouda.
Over time, the “gouda” process homogenized and—by 1184—it was the chiefmost type of cheese one could buy at the Gouda market. There were seven different varieties of “gouda” cheese, all dependent on the age, as the taste transformed with every additional month of maturation. The task of cheesemaking belonged to the women of the Netherlands, who taught their daughters the process—and so on, and so on—keeping the gouda tradition pure.
Husky young men seeking a seat in the artisan guild would act as cheese-porters, taking a handcart out to a farmer’s plot, loading upon it their finished cheese forms, and wheeling it then into the town of Gouda for sale. They’d each wear a straw hat with a uniquely-colored ribbon tied around it, to indicate of which farm they acted a proxy. Under the clocktower of the stately Gothic town hall, with its white stone facade, blue slate roof, and red-white shutters, the cheese-porters would engage in a ritual of salesmanship.
With prospective buyers, they would negotiate a price through the “handjeklap” dance: first, the sampling of cheese; then, the intention to purchase; lastly, the clapping of each other’s hands in accordance with the shouting of prices—higher or lower—until an agreement was made. The cheese would then be carted off, across the cobblestone plaza, to the Goudse Waag weighing house, for the officiating of the sale. (The Goudse Waag weighing house is now home to the Gouda Cheese Museum. Tickets are € 17,95 per person, or ~20 USD.)
The process homogenized at Gouda began with cultured milk, first curdled and then drained of half of its whey. Water replaced the whey, washing much of the lactose from the cheese, making it sweeter and less acidic. The resultant goopy cheese was pressed into circular forms and left to sit overnight. These forms were then soaked in brine and left to dry. Maturation ranged anywhere from a month (for ‘young’ cheese) to well-over a year (for ‘very old’ cheese).
The longer the gouda sits in a cellar, the longer the brine-soak has to develop cheese crystals, which give gouda its caramel-like sweetness. “Cheese crystals,” as they’re called, hold a sort of dairy magic within them. They form throughout and around the cheese—like a gritty coat—marking its age with a distinct hardness. The crunchier, the better.
The Dutch love texture; the Belgians love stank; the French love wet fungus; and Gilbert Keith Chesterton loves Stilton—a little too much.