“Above us, Appleton Street and Huron Avenue both slope down to this corner,” Gurdal says. He is hunched at the shoulders in a temperature-controlled subterranean cellar, prime conditions for the labyrinth of underground caves Gurdal built to store a curated stash of one-of-a-kind wheels. “This was my office in 1995,” says Gurdal, who co-owns Formaggio Kitchen with Valerie Gurdal, his wife. How fitting, then, that the first stop on my journey is an underground cave in the middle of West Cambridge cradling one of the country’s leading storehouses of rare European cheeses. The earliest New England cheesemakers imported ample inspiration from across the pond. It’s even featured in a mural at the Vermont property. Cheese, says the author, is “milk’s leap toward immortality.” What have New Englanders come to immortalize? To find out meant a pilgrimage-with a few other stops along the way.īayley Hazen Blue is a signature cheese from the team at Jasper Hill Farm. It’s from a 1957 book of essays by Clifton Fadiman.
There’s a quote most cheesemakers know by heart, Stamp says. New England cheesemakers are now responsible for some of the most exciting, forward-thinking work in the industry-and are finally getting the recognition they deserve. We even see it in pop culture: In an episode of Top Chef earlier this year, chef-judge and star restaurateur Tom Colicchio called Jasper Hill’s Harbison his “favorite cheese in the world.” (The team that used it, which included two Boston chefs, won the challenge that episode.) We see it on the global stage: New England–made cheeses took top honors in eight categories at the most recent World Cheese Championship Contest, and many more finished elsewhere on the podium. We see the result on menus: Massachusetts’ Great Hill Blue is now widely sought by the buzziest restaurants, from New York to L.A. What is new: the rapidly increasing global acclaim afforded to our products, the talent of our makers, and the innovation of our processes. It makes sense, then, that one of New England’s specialties is farmstead dairy-and the cheesemakers who turn milk, something quotidian and short-lived, into a product that’s storable and lasting.Īll of which is to say that our region’s fixation with cheese isn’t exactly nascent.
This all means our landscape is better suited to raising ruminants such as cows and goats than it is to growing laser-flat expanses of almonds, artichokes, and romaine lettuce. And it’s rugged here: cold and rocky, the land carved up by hills, coastline, and mountain ranges like the Whites and the Long Trail. Cheese begins on land, and New England’s number one crop by acreage is, by a long shot, forage-grass, hay, and pasture. New England’s artisanal cheesemaking thrives at Jasper Hill Farm.
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