Touch the cheese
A factory visit. 19th-century forearms. Minions by Prada.
Dawn broke gaudily over the cheese factory, exploding in Francois Boucher colors as milk trucks crept into the parking lot. Caseificio Gennari was established in 1953 in Collecchio, Italy and is still managed by the founding family. It is a fairytale factory, with meadow views and paths lined in rosebushes and a vintage Porsche tractor resting near a persimmon tree at the entrance.
I was part of a little tour group that arrived one morning to witness the making of Parmesan. We were met by an employee named Cristina Moroni, who handed over packets of hygienic gear and showed us the way to a locker room. The star of the hygienic packet was a yolk-yellow jacket featuring a chic collar for no reason other than ornament, which is a reason after all, and not a bad one. Blue slippers and hairnets. In our sanitary garb we looked like Prada Minions.
Inside the factory it smelled of clean mammal and controlled funk.
Trucks pulled up and unloaded milk into tanks labeled according to type of cow.
"There is milk from brown cows, milk from red cows, and milk from black cows," Moroni explained. "The red cow is the historical cow. But during the passing of time, the red cow has been quite dismissed. Why? Because he does not give us as many liters of milk as the others."
Later we would taste cheeses made from the milk of each cow, including the coveted red cow. It was implied that only a moron would fail to distinguish between the milks.
Beyond the unloading chamber was a room of 50 copper-lined steel vats containing cheeses in various states of development.
"Mind your steps because the floor is wet and fatty with milk," Moroni warned.
Men in white boots tended to the vats, agitating and cradling and splashing and slicing. They had 19th-century forearms. It was formidable work. The marquee maneuver of Parmesan-making—the equivalent of flambé-ing crepes tableside or tossing pizza dough in the air—is the division of the cheese. It is a two-man job of intense and wordless collusion
We passed into the next room, where cheese was shaped. Dozens of lunar cheeses sat plumply in ring molds—the same device you use for delicate cakes, but these were large enough in circumference that a person of average armspan could not encircle one.
"Cheese is made 365 days a year, because cows are not Catholic," Moroni quipped. The group tittered.
This was also the room in which a crucial administrative task was accomplished: the labeling of the cheeses. Each wheel was numbered—"to avoid tricky or fake Parmesan cheese," Moroni said—and stamped with a QR code that, when scanned, revealed a dizzying amount of information. A buyer located thousands of miles away—at a store in Manhattan like Eataly, say—could find out which cowshed domiciled the animal that had contributed her milk to his wheel.
While we marveled at this information, Moroni issued an unexpected order.
"Touch the cheese," she said.
We gazed hesitantly down at the domed wheels, still gently steaming from their whey baths. The surfaces bore the grid imprint of recently-departed cheesecloth. Moroni repeated her command.
When we laid down our palms, the cheeses seemed to exhale in pleasure.
"And where will this cheese go next?" Moroni asked, by way of transitioning to the following room, which resembled a midcentury German water cure spa. Inside were tiled pools of topaz-colored salt water. For 21 days the cheese would marinate.
The salt, Moroni said, came from Austria, and was the only ingredient imported from beyond a 10-kilometer radius of the factory.
Finally the cheeses would be moved to the storeroom, which smelled autumnal and contained wheels stacked sky-high on wooden racks. Each wheel would be brushed and inverted once a month for a minimum of 13 months and up to 15 years.
Here a morbid thought occurred to me: what if there were an earthquake and all the wheels toppled down? The cost—of cheese, of human life—would be enormous. I posed the question to Moroni.
"Here at the factory, we are very lucky," she said. “We have never had an earthquake with the cheese."