Cheese

Cheese is milk teeming with bacteria, and everything else is wishful thinking. The first time I saw cheese being made was at a dairy in the interior of Venezuela, hot as the Sahara, in a germ-filled shed where six cows were distractedly waiting their turn to be milked, chewing their cud and flicking away flies with their tails. Part of the milk, destined for the well-named “hand cheese,” was mixed with curds; the heat multiplied the bacteria, and as soon as the liquid curdled it was strained through a large sieve. The whey went straight to the hogs, who were right beside the milking shed, which explained the smell, a bouquet more far-reaching than cow dung. The rest of the milk went into the round tubs where Don Maurizio, a gigantic half-Indian, half-African, naked from the waist up, sweating and singing, plunged his arm in up to his armpit and conscientiously stirred. Don Maurizio, a great cheesemaker, had a battery-operated radio tuned to a station where joropos, salsas, and country songs gauged the time needed to turn the curds into cheese, and his timing was so exact that the result was always identical.

Since then, I have had the opportunity to visit industrial computerized cheese-processing plants where hygiene is as strict as that of the operating room and the barns smell of pine forests. The cows have been fed so many hormones that they moo in soprano and any one of them could produce enough milk to fill the celebrated bath of Cleopatra; the cheeses, nevertheless, do not seem as perfect, or nearly as tasty, as those made by Don Maurizio. He molded them into round loaf shapes, left them to set in the shade, and after a few hours they were ready to be sold and eaten. After picking out the flies, which tended to get stuck in the surface, we ate the cheese with cachapas, warm corn tortillas right off the coals. It is one of my most pleasant memories of that difficult period as an immigrant in a foreign land. And that hand cheese must have been aphrodisiac, because all I have to do is recall its delicate flavor and the sweat slipping down the brawny arms of that king of cheese, Don Maurizio, to feel adulterous impulses.

There are cheeses for all tastes; it would be impossible to list all the flavors and consistencies, as they are nearly infinite. Each region has its favorites. In Switzerland you eat the best Gruyère and Emmenthal, in Italy Parmesan and Gorgonzola, and in Holland Gouda. In a premeditated act of gluttony during his childhood, my brother Pancho peeled a good-size Gouda cheese as if it were an apple and patiently devoured it down to the last crumb; we were sure he would die of incurable indigestion, but he has lived in good health for fifty years. I have few more colorful and sensual memories than those of the cheese and flower markets in tulip season in Amsterdam. In England, Cheddar is very popular, as is Stilton with its gray and green veins, served by the spoonful, beginning in the center of the cheese and accompanied by a glass of sherry.

In France, where every province produces an important variety of delicious cheese, no meal worthy of the name can end without a tray of several kinds, served before dessert along with the best robust and aromatic red house wine. Some, like Gruyère, take three or four months to ripen, and its quality depends on the regular distribution of its holes. The gourmet will choose the Brie of the day, testing it as if it were a fruit, and Camembert by the smell, which indicates its maturity. This latter cheese was invented by a French peasant woman of the eighteenth century, whose statue rules over the small village of Camembert. My grandfather, who adored that cheese, although his doctor had forbidden him to eat it, bought it on the sly and hid it in his clothes press. Sometimes the odor was so nauseating you couldn’t walk into the room.

Dry, strong-flavored cheeses like Parmesan are thought to be the most stimulating, but some of the softer ones, like goat cheese and mozzarella, have an equal reputation in that regard. As for Parmesan and mozzarella, the essential ingredients of a good pizza, this is the moment to recommend them to those of you who long to flaunt posteriors as sensual as those of the damsels painted by Rubens and Botero. At the beginning of the seventies in Chile, I made a brief incursion into the theater world with a pair of musical comedies. One of them, Los Siete Espejos, or The Seven Mirrors, incorporated a ballet corps of several beautiful fat young women who acted as a Greek chorus, telling the story as they danced and giggled and jiggled. It was the era of Twiggy, that English model who looked like a survivor of a concentration camp and whose picture was splashed across the covers of all the fashion magazines, she of the toothpick legs and orthopedic shoes and starving expression. By one of those aberrations of history, this twiglet became the decade’s feminine ideal; there was no woman alive who didn’t aspire to the androgynous wormdom of the famous Twiggy. The fat women in The Seven Mirrors were a direct challenge to that aesthetic, a hymn to abundance. I learned from any number of theatergoers that they came to the performance more than once just to applaud the obese chorus girls. These women, who had attained their voluminous proportions thanks to good teeth and a sedentary life, were now skipping dinner and for two hours flitting like dragonflies across the stage. As a result, they began dropping pounds at an alarming rate. The director of the company saved the play from disaster by putting up a sign in the foyer saying: PLEASE DON’T SEND FLOWERS TO OUR CHUBBY CHORINES. ORDER PIZZA.

When you consider that the sole ingredient of cheese is milk, then there can be nothing aphrodisiac about it, but when accompanied by bread, wine, and pleasant conversation, the effect is the same as if there were.