WGBH Radio; The Callie Crossley Show

I'm Cally Crossley This is the Cali Crossley Show. What do Homer's Odyssey slave labor and European monasteries have in common. Cheese. That's right I said cheese. In his new book The cheese and culture food scientist Paul Kinston traces cheese from ancient civilization to the 21st century. He not only tracks how he's changed the arc of human history he also examines the versatility of this dairy wonder. Turns out a pockmarked wedge of our Tizen is Swiss and the supernaturally shiny and smooth Kraft Singles are linked by milk curds that are part of cheese making 9000 year old history. From there our Wine Guy Johnson also talks us through the reds and whites that bring out the best in cheese from Stilton to smoked Gouda. But also find out why cheese and wine make for such a winning duo. Up next your radio. Wine and cheese party. First the news. From NPR News in Washington I'm Lakshmi saying the prosecution may conclude its case

today in Jerry Sandusky's child sex abuse trial in Pennsylvania. Most of his alleged victims have testified Sandusky's defense has sought to debunk the accusers claims. The former Penn State assistant football coach faces 52 counts of sexually abusing 10 boys over a span of 15 years. Oregon's supreme court reportedly is allowing the Boy Scouts of America's so-called perversion files to be released it amounts to 20000 pages of information collected from the mid 1960s to mid 80s on suspected child abusers within the group. Law enforcement authorities across the U.S. are on the lookout for a hospital surgeon who allegedly shot and killed a coworker in a Buffalo hospital yesterday. Police say Timothy Jorden gunned down a 33 year old woman widely reported to be an ex-girlfriend in a stairwell at the Erie County Medical Center. Officials say as many as 400 patients and perhaps a thousand employees are on the grounds at the time of the shooting. Jobless claims in the U.S. are back up the Labor Department says they increased

last week by an unexpected six thousand. NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports this is another indication the job market. Maybe slowing the pace of layoffs has been increasing since May on a seasonally adjusted level three hundred eighty six thousand people filed for unemployment benefits last week pushing the average for the past four weeks up. Meanwhile employers slowed their pace of hiring in the spring. The unemployment rate increase slightly last month to eight point two percent on less than expected job growth. There are now five point eight million people receiving jobless benefits unemployment benefits that were extended during the recession because so many people were unable to find work for a long time have now started to expire in some states. Yuki Noguchi NPR News Washington in the grim news continues in Europe Spain's borrowing costs have now hit the threshold that sink Greece Ireland and Portugal into bailouts. But as Lauren Frayer reports from Madrid Spain is already getting a bailout to rescue its banks and investors worry.

That may not be enough the interest rate on Spain's 10 year bonds has brushed 7 percent. That's a level considered too expensive for countries to keep raising money on capital markets. Italy's bond yields spiked at an auction in Rome today too. The hope was that an up to one hundred twenty five billion dollar loan from Europe would help ease Spain's borrowing costs. But it seems to have done just the opposite. Investors are worried whether Madrid can afford to pay back the loan plus interest. Economy minister Luis diggin dough says Spain is in a situation it can't maintain he told reporters the government would take more measures in the coming days but no word on what those might be. For NPR News I'm Lauren Frayer in Madrid. U.S. stocks gaining ground with the Dow up one hundred twenty six points more than 1 percent to twelve thousand six twenty two. You're listening to NPR News. Good afternoon from the WGBH radio newsroom in Boston I'm Christina Quinn with some of the local stories we're following. The Massachusetts unemployment rate continues to fall as the state adds more jobs. The office of Labor and Workforce Development released new figures today showing that the state's jobless

rate fell to six percent in May down from 6.3 percent in April. The Massachusetts rate was well below the national unemployment rate of 8.2 percent. The company that has been battling five years for the right to build a natural gas power plant in Brockton has filed a lawsuit alleging the city and its officials conspired to illegally block the plant and deprive the company of its civil rights. Brockton power company wants a judge to order the city to issue permits for plant construction and to pay the company more than 68 million dollars in damages. The Enterprise reports that that company officials said in a statement that they reluctantly took legal action because of the city's continued refusal to give the project a fair and full review. The financial woes of former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling continue a bank has sued Schilling to recover two point four million dollars in loans it made to his Rhode Island based videogame company. The Boston Globe reports that are citizens better known as Citizens Bank says Schilling personally guarantee the debt to the bank but has failed and refused to pay it. Sheila 38 Studios filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection last week. It laid off its entire workforce in may soon after it was late

in making a 1.1 million dollar payment to the Rhode Island Economic Development Corp.. And in Rhode Island a city of one socket is officially asking the state to take control of its public schools. TV reports the city is sending a letter to education commissioner Deborah guessed saying its school committee can no longer meet its responsibilities of educating students and operating with a balanced budget. The school department is facing a 10 million dollar budget deficit. Support for NPR comes from Ally Bank. Smart listening and Smart banking go together. Learn more about Ally Bank Ally Bank dot com. At one of the six it is 67 degrees outside of our Brighton studios under scattered clouds. Tonight we can expect mostly clear skies with overnight lows in the mid 50s. I'm Christina Quinn you'll find more news at WGBH news dot org. Good afternoon I'm Kalee Crossley what do slave labor the Mesopotamian goddess of heaven and intellectual property rights all have in common. The answer is cheese. Here with me to discuss this and more is Paul constat

author of cheese and culture a history of cheese and its place in Western civilization. Welcome. Well thank you great to be here. So you're a professor at the University of Vermont but at one time you were a food scientist with cheese is one of the issues you had to contend with but not a food historian and yet you were led to write this book. That's right. It was actually 10 years ago in 2002 when I was writing my first book American farmstead cheese which is really a science textbook that was aimed at the the traditional farmstead artisan cheese makers that had just really researched in America after having disappeared for a better part of a century. And I wrote a textbook for them. And as an afterthought I included a couple of chapters on cheese history and I thought that that would provide good context for who these new cheese makers were these traditionalist send. And I began to write these two chapters and found immediately that it was overwhelming and that there's

no way you can cover the history of cheese in two small chapters. So I went back to the University of Vermont after completing the writing of that first book and developed a course called cheesing culture that I have been teaching to my undergraduates since 2005. And out of the course in the research that I did for the course then that became the inspiration for this book. She's in culture which as you say is a far afield from simple Chief Science and Technology mire of expertise that draws in lots of of of collateral areas that are really far afield of of my own expertise in many respects. Well you've got geography you've got anthropology I mean when we say culture here when you say culture here in the title I mean you're really embracing all of this and you wouldn't think of this in this way I certainly didn't before I picked up your book but cheese as a lens to sort of mark just through time which is what you've done here is really quite fascinating. So let's go back and start the talk about some of the origins of cheese making what you know where and how it all began.

Yeah and to reconstruct that one has to go right back to the origins of agriculture itself which occurred about nine thousand years ago in the fertile crescent of the Middle East region where. Neolithic peoples for the first time settled down and started cultivating crops wheat rye barley and the cultivated fields then attracted small ruminants that are very prevalent in that area of the world. Sheep and goats that love to graze on these grains and it didn't take long before the Neolithic farmers these new farmers took these small rooms into captivity began to herd them. And over the next fifteen hundred years or so from eight thousand five hundred to about 7000 B.C. This is still the new Stone Age. They began to breed these animals for traits selectively breed and one of the traits eventually was for milk production. And undoubtedly initially they were breeding these animals to produce milk to feed for their very very young children because the adult population at this

point the human population was universally lactose intolerant. So the adults couldn't drink milk but their very young children could. And so by about 7000 B.C. there's this clear evidence of hurting animals and milk production that suddenly increases dramatically. At the same time the Neolithic peoples in this area discover pyrotechnics or how to apply very high temperatures to materials like clay. And it opens up the door to pottery and the making of stable large pots then made it much much easier to milk the animals collect the milk from multiple animals and store the milk which in the warm ambient temperature of the Middle East that milk would not have remained a liquid very long it would have naturally curdled due to the lactic acid bacteria that are always present in raw milk. And it didn't take the Neolithic herders very long to figure out that once that milk curdled and if they broke it up it separate events who miss Moffat's proverbial curds and whey the way being the liquid portion of the milk. And the Kurds being the

semi solid portion and the Kurds. If the Neolithic adults consume them they could tolerate modest amounts of the Kurds and open the door for them to then take advantage of milk production in the form of Kurds and that gave them an enormous competitive advantage that they culturally conserved from 7000 B.C. on wherever they went and and the Neolithic peoples About this time began to scatter in every direction and they took that she's making and burying technology with them and and conserved it because it was such an important advantage in terms of nutrition. So we have cheese making really connected with what I found fascinating in this story. The pots made a huge difference really of the putt are going to do absolutely just really and thought about Yeah you have to have it somewhere where you can collect it. Of course my whole thing was about what do they do about refrigeration and all of that but as we learned through your book as as these people scattered and began to think about how to

make cheese in various temperature is that they began to come up with creative ways of doing this. Before we march forward in history to get back to this goddess of heaven and how she played a part in. The cheesemaking and the interest in cheese and people's becoming interested in making cheese a product unto itself. Yeah this is this is a really fascinating part of the story I had no idea existed until I stumbled across that that we were not fast forward from 7000 B.C. to a to about 4000 B.C. The fourth millennium B.C. And at this point Neolithic peoples have moved into what is now Southern Iraq what is called Mesopotamia the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers down by the Persian Gulf. And a civilization mankind's first civilization arises in this Mesopotamian region in and around 4000 B.C. characterized by large city states these are massive metropolis as with thousands of people big walled cities with

impressive monumental architecture a huge quantum leap in the human species. Humanity had done nothing like this previous to this point and the first great city state to arise was the city state of York and at the center of your EQ was the temple complex that rose high above the city could be seen for miles across the Iraqi desert. Very impressive. At the center of the temple mythology was this goddess you mentioned mention the goddess of the harvest and fertility in Mana and in the the euro euro mythology the Samarian mythology that underpinned this civilization was first civilization. And Ana marries a shepherd boy named Muzi who convinces her to become his wife because he says I can supply you with dynamite dairy products. I can give I can give you fermented milk and yogurts I give you butter and I can give you cheeses and you know a number of different types of cheeses and in the mythology he wins in on his

heart and turns down the farmer who offers you know a whole range of craft beers How do you like that. That's interesting. So Nona chooses Jesus and she marries this shepherd in the mythology and makes him the first king of this first city state and she promises him that if he keeps her supplied with cheese and butter she will bless the harbor she will she will keep the storehouses filled to abundance and times will be good for the city state. And this becomes institutionalized in this first city state and then is transferred to other city states that arise in the region that become the Samarian civilization and basically every king of York from that point on was believed to become the husband of a nonna. And each year there was a celebration to celebrate that marriage right. And the job of the king and the ruling elite the priests were to keep in on a happy to have a system to procure to produce and procure a cheese stock pilot warehouse it and then have it available for 365 days of the year to sacrifice to an ANA. And what that meant

was that this this city state had to have a whole network of satellite farms. They had to have a contractual relationship with a whole series of shepherds that would milk the animals goats sheep and cows produce the cheese deliver the cheese on schedule. Then they had to inventory it in a massive warehouse complex attached to the temple. And all of this had to be administered and it was very complex and some of the first proto writing that gave rise to mankind's first writing comes out of an honest temples and some of these pro cuniform tablets are contracts with shepherds to oversee the production of cheese in the production of lambs and young animals and so forth and it's just incredible that that cheese was wrapped up in this in the system that gave rise to to this quantum leap in in the human condition. Well one of the strong strains in your book is tying cheese to commerce and and its influence on local economies and I thought that story about the Goddess

leave it to a woman by the way to start commerce. That's right. That was very interesting because it was very much. It had the mystical part of it it had the love of the of the food as part of the story but also this complexity that you mention in terms of how to distribute it make it all of that and to sustain all the people in those communities plus its front plus the goddess herself. It wasn't just religion it was it was the economy of the city that was built around this this redistributive system. Yeah. So speaking of religion which is you have so many quotes biblical quotes referencing cheese. You know I've you know I've been the Sunday school I just never paid attention to this before so I was amazed that in Biblical times there are so many concrete references to cheese talk about cheese in biblical times. Yeah and one of the things that really surprised me as I wrote the book was the recurring themes in a number of recurring themes that crop up time and time again that influence cheesemakers and she's history and the religious practices the spiritual history

of humankind is intertwined almost from the beginning with Cheez history. And I was looking for a way to link this 9000 year narrative together and as a as I looked at all these different quotes from the Bible that you just referred to that could be used to sort of frame different epics in the cheese story. It became this wonderful unifying factor that that you know right from the beginning Cain and Abel the story of the origins of humanity and the Garden of Eden that that Cain Tilda feels able kept the flocks and that that that that begins this whole Neolithic farming era that then gives rise to cheesemaking and then Abraham coming out of earth the great city of Mesopotamian city of Cally's which was a sister city to York which we just talked about part of that same civilization he came out of. He came out of a city that had enormous sacrificial systems in place with cheese and butter to their gods. So he was familiar with that

and when he he migrates to the Levant to what is now Israel and Palestine. You see that reflected in you know some of the biblical stories of serving cheese or Kurds to to his angelic hosts in the Lord and Lord of hosts who come to visit him. David and Goliath another thousand years later bringing cheese to the to the army of Saul fighting the Philistines which then you know raises. David's career media meteoric Lee and he becomes the great king of Israel. But you know and on and on and on Job and his has his references to cheese and and and likening the birth process to the curdling the milk coagulation process right into the Christian era so the Bible has a lot to say about cheese that was really intriguing. Well and you are the man to know about it. Much more with U.N. and a conversation really about New England and its cheese history and cheese current

times. I'm Kelly Crossley we're talking about cheese with puck instead. He's a professor of food science at the University of Vermont. His new book is cheese and culture the history of cheese and its place in Western civilization. You're listening to eighty nine point seven WGBH Boston Public Radio. That's. Right. We love our contributors. That means you. And Skinner auctioneer's and appraisers

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Python famously points out how like a Manson cheese pizza. Yes certainly celebrate a life well the televisor the whole Red List. Danish. Sumo. Stockings sheep's milk cheese. For those waiting believe it you know. Today Santa. Well let's keep it simple. How about shut up. I'm afraid we don't get much call from these parts of. The single most popular cheese in the World Cup for all spots. Here with me to talk about chatter and more is Pollack instead. He's a professor of food science at the University of Vermont his new book is cheese and culture and history of cheese and its place in Western civilization. I happen to know that you grew up eating a lot of chatter. Professor That's right I grew up in Massachusetts right here and we always had Vermont cheddar that we absolutely loved and I I still do to this day. China actually has a really important place in the cheese making history and as does New England and I wonder if you could put New England

cheesemaking in context for us about how what was happening here that was maybe different from other places and why. Yeah the New England colonies Massachusetts Bay being the first one was settled by Puritans who were religious dissenters that were seeking a city on a hill as John Winthrop put it a new a new new beginning a new culture a new society. And they the puritan movement in England was heavily centered in East Anglia which is northeast of London and that region in the 200 years or so leading up to the Puritan immigration to Massachusetts had become the most intense dairying region in cheesemaking region in England they basically had a monopoly on the London market which which was the mega market for all foodstuffs in England at the time. And so the Puritans had a strong representation of dairy dairy farmers and cheese makers with them as they emigrated to Massachusetts along with a strong representation from the merchant class from London. They were

prosperous they were well capitalized they came here set up the Massachusetts Bay Colony and then spread out to form Connecticut and Rhode Island the Greater New England colonies thereafter. And she's making was an important part of the agricultural economy the problem that they experienced right off the bat was that their colony Massachusetts is not a very fertile place and the winters are cold and you can't grow the kind of cash crops that were being produced by other colonies in the in the south and in the West Indies and so forth. So very quickly they ran a trade deficit and ran by the 16 40s into into an economic depression and they had to find a way to to to export products that had a market and the market that was developing them. The mega market of the time was the West Indies and this was because the sugar plantations that all the major powers England France Holland were developing relentlessly because of the enormous popularity of sugar on the continent in Europe and the sugar plantations had a very very

labor intensive huge labor forces that very quickly became havens for the the end and. And result of the slave trade that developed around the plantation system and it's one of the absolutely tragic epics of American history that that this slave trade in the slave plantations developed and became such an important part of the economy but for New England. What New Englanders could produce were food products cheese butter initially wheat salted fish that began to be sent down to the West Indies to feed the population of the slave population. And what the merchants were able to trade their agricultural products for was molasses that could then be brought back to New England fermented and distilled into rum which became a very highly sought after distilled spirit and very profitable. And so the economy of New England by the 16th sixty six thousand seven hundred sixteen eighties was

already really focusing on this connection with the West Indies supplying the West Indies with food. Producing rum which had markets in the colonies themselves in Newfoundland to the north and then into England but the real. Lucrative market was on the west coast of Africa Africa and the tragedy was that that run was then used to trade for slaves that were being sold that had been kidnapped from the interior of Africa sold on the coast and then transported to the West Indies to keep the slave sugar plantations running. And that became the backbone of the of the the the New England economy for over 100 years. And cheese feeds into this economy as well as other agricultural products and it just you know there's this insidious relationship with the slave trade human trafficking trafficking that we find so appalling now was just just the way the way the economy ran. And that for then brought slaves to New England you don't think of New England as being exactly A.J. you know it was a lot of people down. Yes a lot of people don't. But

slaves black slaves were part of every aspect of the new energy economy. The numbers weren't huge but they were pivotal players in every aspect of the economy including cheesemaking and in particular regions like Rhode Island they became the predominant cheese makers on very large plantations that developed around the Narragansett Bay region. Built on the rum trade the slave trade and all the wealth that accumulated. About a dozen families became large landowners of big farms with thousands of acres that were called in are get cancer plantations and they were run by slaves. And they produce two products horse breeding. The Narragansett Brigade which was very very and much in demand everywhere in the New World and dairy farming and cheese making and the black African dairy maids the women became the great cheese makers of the time their cheeses the Rhode Island in Narragansett she was famous throughout the colonies. And that bit of information

just stopped me in the book I had never heard that it stopped me to I had I had no idea and it's part of the story of cheez history that needs to be told that American cheese making you know the foundations are built upon black hairy women slave slaves that really really refined the cheese making technology. Let's pause for a moment to talk about you know that slave labor. Those are slaves who were trained to be dairy maids. But you've done a lot of time talking about the development of dairy maids in general. And I D I actually you know other than there in the song The Christmas Song. I really have not thought about them any real so there's no need to milk maids a milking but I hadn't really thought about them in any real sense being in trickle to commerce. I mean it was down to the point where you have a piece of information and a letter or a suggestion from folks over in Europe about what the dairy maid ought to be

like. It says that they're made out to be loyal of good repute and claim this is obvious to me anyway so I don't know where work and what relates to issue ought not to allow under dairy maids or anyone else to take or carry away milk buttercream whereby the cheese will be less and the dairy will lose. But my point is you spent a fair amount of time talking about these women were the cogs in making this cheese. Absolutely and especially in sort of Anglo cultures in England and Northwest France in particular the women the women were the were the cheese makers and they became the professional cheese makers on the on the medieval manners and the monastic manners that dominated the economy of north west Europe and in England and they became the sort of the repositories of the expertise and the craft that was passed on from mother to daughter. And from from from from dairy maid to Mistress over the over the millennia and tradition of women being the

cheese makers had a 15 year tradition then gets transplanted to America and the women became the cheese makers in America for the next couple hundred years all the dairy maids. That's just that was mind boggling to me about how important they were in this. So we've learned through your book that there's geography matters that sometimes mysticism and religion matters in terms of getting emphasis on this food product. And workers matter labor there's an impact not only here in this country but around the world as we start talking about slave trade and how it becomes a piece of the cheesemaking story and commerce of course is all wrapped around this. What I was also fascinated by Could you spend a fair amount of time and maybe perhaps you had some insight as a food scientist prior to this is how the shaping them actual making of the cheese now begins to change in response to not only our needs as consumers but you know what

what the folks who are making the cheese can do in an efficient way to make money. And that also leads to then various varieties of cheese because I got to say growing up I'm probably just new chatter. Oh yes oh yes. And now we see how so much is developing from the beginning when you talk about the curds and whey that seem to be just the same style for a long time it is start to change. Yeah cheesemaking evolved over this long 1000 year period in US as cheese makers moved into new geographical regions they they had different constraints placed on them by the environment by the temperature and humidity conditions by the availability of salt by the economic conditions and who was who was going to be consuming the cheese someone right next door or someone very far away. And cheese makers responded and changed their technology in ways that that made sense for their their cultural context and their environmental context. You can you can follow that in different regions of Europe in particular and sort of see why cheese makers

went in a particular direction why in the mountains the Alpine regions they developed these these hard wheel shaped cheeses that we know of as you know the Swiss Greer to separate the rind on it and I know that yeah and they were they were tailor made for that cultural context versus the. The soft soft ripened types the you know the the dirty socks washed rind really aromatic cheeses in the blooming rind of the breeze in the Cammy Kember's in very different cultural and economic and environmental context. She's makers were adapting their basic technologies in ways that made sense until we get to the 19th century when the scientific revolution kicks in and particularly in America also in Holland. But I'll just refer to America because that's our that's our our main focus right now. Yeah yeah. That we as a culture embrace change and technology to it to an enormous degree that once new technologies and the industrial

revolution kicked in and new equipment was available and the factory system came into being in terms of cheesemaking in 1851 change became part and pop parcel to surviving that as new technologies developed to make cheese on a larger scale more economical a lower cost. Everybody jumped on the bandwagon and implemented the technology and cheeses changed constantly. Well this is actually legit which is my point of bringing this up to the Kraft singles. That's right. And that's I mean that was the ultimate to me like marrying technology with commerce and what needed to happen for people to be able to get us and we did this we did this with gusto and that you know change was progress even when I was growing up that was still my parents grew up in a depression always talked about progress even if they didn't like what was happening there. Well I guess that's progress well all of all of the food system in all of American society was on this treadmill of progress and lots of good came out of that in a very abundant food

supply and cheap the cost of cheese came down to very low levels as the scale of production you know reached the point where we now have plans to produce a million pounds of cheese a day. A single manufacturing plant and can produce very low cost but it did change the cheese. But what's interesting now is it changed the cheese to sort of go in you know Kraft single way which a lot of people feel is very commercial. And now we're back to the handmade stuff that sort of where it all started because people have want more to know where their food comes from who's making it blah blah blah. And so here you are a guy it's all embodied in your whole life history group next to a dairy farm you grew up eating cheddar. Maybe you're not a snob about Kraft Singles and now you're about the business of raising up the artist and all cheeses that we hear about so much. Yeah. Part of that is because I'm a professor at Vermont where you know that has been at the at the forefront of this resurgence of artists will cheesemaking and they have

become my stakeholders over the last 30 years and I've come to really appreciate and brace what they're doing as an important part of the future of agriculture in Vermont and in the United States this alternative approach. And it's it's really you know the consequence of a lot of concerns about the food system particularly among young people and the way we've been doing business the way we've been treating the environment. You know the way that we've centralized food production particularly out west and then truck everything back east and the sustainability of that and concerns about about animal welfare and worker welfare and all these values that are very legitimate and of very much concern are being projected onto these alternative types of agriculture that do business differently and a lot of it is moving back a step and reassessing some of the technologies and approaches that we've we've very quickly applied without really thinking of the consequences so the artist

will choose movement is just just the tip of the iceberg in a much larger cultural shift that's occurring in terms of the food system itself. I think it's really exciting. And from a consumer standpoint is it just me or it seems to me that America is now a nation of cheese heads and I mean not just Kraft singles but they've expanded their palate with regard to these kinds of many varieties of cheese. Absolutely. In Vermont we have you know 150 different cheeses made that are just doing spectacularly We across the country artisan cheese makers making types of cheese that I would never have been able to access as a kid I would never have wanted to because I didn't appreciate them at the time. Now are available and in every every market major market in the country and at the Vermont Institute of ours and cheese that I serve as co director we train new cheese makers who want to become ours and cheese makers. And for the last eight years it's just been a constant flow of new new folks interested in becoming the next generation of ours and cheese makers.

This is a movement here to stay and there is no end in sight. Well a lot of information in your book. Got to know favorite cheese at the moment what's yours. I have to go back to my childhood. OK. I like a raw milk cheddar aged a couple years two to three years of being wonderful. And there you go that's from the man who knows about cheese. I've been talking to Pollack instead about his new book cheese and cultural history of cheese and its place in Western civilization. Thank you so much for talking today. Thank you for having me. Coming up Johnson also tells us what wines compliment the variety of cheeses we've been talking about. The conversation continues on eighty nine point seven WGBH Boston Public Radio. Funding for our programs comes from you. And fruit lands museum discover the

heritage nature and art of New England at fruit lands museum in Harvard mass. The concord band performs Americana music every Thursday evening in July. More information at fruit lands dot org. And celebrity series of Boston. It's for people who don't want to consume artistic junk food. Jack Wright director of marketing and communications. It's the kind of thing that makes you when you pull into the driveway makes you stay in the car longer than you planned on. That's the kind of thing we want communicated that we represent. GBH is helping us to present to this audience to learn more visit WGBH dot org slash sponsorship. On the next FRESH AIR. A far right Christian radio talk show host who is trying to influence the Republican Party. We talk with New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer about her new article profiling Bryan Fischer the talk show host whose anti-gay comments led to the resignation of Mitt Romney's foreign policy spokesperson Richard Grinnell who is gay. Joining us.

This afternoon to Huron eighty nine point seven WGBH. Thank you. Community campaign has ended here at WGBH. Isn't that great. Super. Really really cool. And you are responsible for its great success for other ways to support your community through WGBH visit WGBH. Born slash volunteer and Fang. The ramp up. You threw the first ball out. It's Fenway Park. Very first ball out ever ever. 100 years of legend and history of Fenway Park. Fridays on WGBH is MORNING EDITION. Welcome back I'm Cally Crossley. Jonathon also has with us he's our wine guy and the founder of the Boston Wine School. Jonathan why do wine and cheese go together.

Why do wine and cheese go together what a great question. Well one thing is that you know they're the answer to the same question. You know you've got a thousand gallons of fresh milk you know agriculturally that's really good news. But you know let's say it's like the year 600 or something you know what are you going to do with that. M. What are you going to do with those calories. Well you turn it into cheese and you can eat it two three five eight ten years from now. And wine is the same way you know if you let a vineyard just. You know if you just leave a vineyard to its own design your vineyard will give you eight Tim 12 tons of grapes per acre. That's a lot of grapes. You know the question is What are you going to do with those grapes and how are you going to preserve them and how are you going to. You know push those calories into the future so that you don't lose them today and you're able to consume them later. So two two foods of the earth. A much a part of the

locavore movement is opening a bottle of wine. And just for the record the record that's what they're there and they go together because you know they're they pair well together in complimenting. They're both coming from the earth. Exactly yes. And they've been growing up side by side for you know as Paul was saying they've been growing you know wine and cheese have been together as a food match in a food idea for eight thousand nine thousand years. You know when you think about tomato you know entering the Italian food culture what 500 years ago. You know that's relatively new as a food and wine match you know compared with wine and cheese which have been go in together and we been working on this thing for eight thousand years so we finally started to get some of it start to get some of it right. Well as my first guest just mentioned you know just the everybody's moving around and developing new techniques led to all these varieties that didn't exist way back

when when it was just your curds and whey. Yeah but that means that there's also a variety of wines in which you can match with the variety of cheeses. Yes and you have some geographical matches you know just like you would. You know what's you know what's the perfect beer match with Texas barbecue. It's you know it's Lone Star Beer. Right. Texas beer Texas barbecue just goes together. We do the same thing when it comes to matching a wine and cheese will really do that in a geographic way. And you know the closer on the map where the cheese is made the closer it is to where the wine is made. It's almost always a sign of a really really good May while repairing Vermont cheeses with I mean their wineries as we know in every state in the union. But well you know now Vermont I mean when you say Vermont cheese as a pariah any of your city has wide range there's immediately you think of Cabot and they make a great you know cab it makes a great range of cheddar cheeses from very mild you know young

chatters to some of those older almost almost crunchy clothbound older chatters that are really great with wine cheddar is one of those cheeses that can kind of kind of go either way. You can have it with a really really strong white wine like you could have it with a really powerful you know shard. Or a really powerful. There's a great new. Great great from grease called SEAR to go which is a white grape but its sounds like our word assertive. And that's exactly what the grape is like it's really all wrong white right. So in terms of cheddar you can go with these strong white wines or a rose a wine or a light you know red wine like Beaujolais Pino NYR is a great match. I like you know in our chairs but the thing that's great about Cheddar and the thing that people love about it is that it's really well as you see it's really really flexible you know there's not you know there's not one you know I mean it's even great

with beer you know dark malty beer. It's a super compatible cheese so cheddar is kind of the typos that the typo the universal donor you know there's a recipient I can't remember. But it's kind of a typo of cheese you know it goes with everything. Is this chatter you brought in OK so I brought this in what I brought his two wives and two cheeses Let's try the first one here. This is first of all the wine we're having is Ezell Bach Riesling German Riesling a little bit. Little is at 9:00 Eastern. Yeah a little tiny basically sugary and we're matching it with. There you go and we're matching it with. An aged gouda So this is good. So this is a help yourself. This is a twenty six month aged gouda so this good that we're having here this wine is for 2010. This is from 2009 so precious pretty close so the season is actually strange as it may seem the cheese is actually older than the wine that we're

pairing within and geographically. You know this is this is a Ryan wine. These goodies are made on along the banks of the Rhine maybe a little bit farther you know north from where this German Riesling comes from. But we're making a natural natural geographical match here. Well I'm happy because you know I'm not a short person and I like to think about how you would you know how cheese goes with otherwise. So happy to hear about the Greek wine and this recently. I don't think I would have gone with a slightly sweet. Yeah yeah well yeah. But the night is very good if you know you feel that crunch. Yeah yeah as as as these cheeses age like an aged gouda or an aged parmesan what happens is that so when people talk about being lactose intolerant what that means is that they have difficulty metabolizing lactose as the milk sugar. Well one of the things that cheese does in the cheese making process is you know the fermentation you know

metabolizes and breaks up the lactose so great so. So cheese you know not just making cheese doesn't just preserve cheese forward into time you know making cheese makes milk edible for a huge portion of a huge portion of the population that is naturally does not metabolize lactose. OK. But that's of the one you got. So now so I've got a second one here that I want to try with this red wine. The second cheese you see it's kind of a frightening blue cheese because I'm not a big fan. But it looked pretty. It's very pretty. It looks really extremely blue it's actually very mild and buttery and this is a French cheese This is called form Dom bear and it is from the south of France from the town of bear. So when one has French wine then. Exactly and so what I've brought here is a wine called Circus and it is from the south of France and it's a blend of Sirach and

cabernet. So we've also done you know not only do we have this strong intense powerful blue cheese but we're putting it with a strong intense powerful red wine to help make the match here. So are there pretty much you can just do since we have so many varieties of cheese now and so much different kinds of wine. So there's any kind of pairing that you could make. I see people all the time sort of doing table red wine and Chardonnay that's it. Table red wine is right we. Well you mean in terms of just meaning like terms of the wine selection Yeah yeah. You know people and we talk we've talked about this many times on the show and we talk about this in the wine school all the time is that people are. You know wine is over whelming wine is complicated wine is in 12 different foreign languages. You know a lot of times when people find something that they like you know Chardonnay they will latch on to it and you know on the one hand

you know drink what you love drink what you enjoy you know don't don't don't feel compelled to go feel compelled to change your wine world. But on the other hand what does happen is that people you know after a while shark and they reach a point where they say hey I am you know I am ready for something else you know what you know what else is there in terms of white wines. So let me just say from a person who really does not like blue cheese. Yeah this is really good news there isn't it with this red wine and it must be just because they're both both there. Exactly and one of the things you know red wine has that gritty sort of dry kind of abrasive texture to it. That's what we call a tan and you know it kinds from the skin in the seeds and stems of grapes. And on a biochemical level Tannen binds with protein. So Tannenbaum and she's president yes. As in cheese as in meat. You know as in anything with a high protein content. So we get this really creamy and it's quite the cheese is quite buttery. You know it's not a dry from Italy Michel Louis

much creamier blue so it's super high in fat super high in protein. And so we have this is extremely you know red wine that that kind of goes with it. You know it's working on it's worth and it's working on a molecular level. It is actually. And yeah yeah. And this is so this form Don Baer this is the oldest continuously made cheese in France. Wow. Not not this I mean it looks like it but not very nice. It's today was introduced by the ancient Romans 2000 years ago and they've just been making it ever ever since. So let me ask you about a couple other varieties of cheese and what wines you might be OK. So extending out to this blue cheese is often some of the stinky cheeses are kind of what stinky cheeses are intense. They think they can be very intense and there's and there's there's like the stinky bleu cheese. Yeah and then there's like the stinky Munster right kind of kind of cheeses and again there's two ways to go you can either go with like what we've got here

where you know these cheeses are like way off the chart. So you go with a wine that's way off the chart. Maybe something like port you know that's very that's very black very sweet very high in alcohol you know very extreme in every way. You would put that extreme extreme wine with an extreme extreme cheese you know it's like you know you don't have a heavyweight boxer in a flyweight boxer you know that's not an interesting it's not an interesting bout you know when you've got a heavyweight cheese you know you know you want a heavyweight wine with it. Or people go the other way you go with something more like this Riesling which can be light and fragrant and flowery and sweet. So that so that now you're you're you're putting together opposites. You've got this strong stinky overwhelming cheese and then this really really you know like Henry Kissinger and his girlfriends you know you get this really ugly component and you put it with this beautiful

component and I somehow it works and no one can really explain it. I'm going to take it from me. I said you're not moving on I'm just reporting on the judging I'm just reporting I had a guy here talking about just stuff you should try you know in your life right. One of the things that he had was a combination of Marco and OK aged parmesan cheese and champagne. Oh yeah. And so I just went out and got it all and and tried it. It is incredibly delicious to get together in a bowl or how do you know if you ate it all together just to see what would be so great about this and it was wonderful Let's talk about champagne and cheese if you're well and well the people have a lot of really strong ideas about champagne and sparkling wine and what it should be and what it shouldn't be. I mean some people feel like you know champagne is so delightful and so fantastic and so delicate you know. You know remember that you really should not even have shoes on while you're drinking it you know it just it should just be in this pure kind of raw state. But

you know champagne and sparkling wines. I mean I think our great great food wines I mean they go as you say with that with the aged parmesan which again starts to develop that crunchy like crystallized sugar thing and that sugar is really nice with the sparkling wine and then you've got the Marconi all MN's which have a nice a little bit of oil and salt. So you know essentially you're getting all your food groups you got your salt food group your sugar food group your wine food group. So it already well just really goes great together. But people do not people are shy about sparkling wine with food. They tend to tend tend to have sparkling wine kind of on its own and if you do that you're just missing out on some great food matches because I mean you know it's great with pizza. OK you are doing wine and pizza fantastic fantastic absolutely. So a lot of the fatty cheese because you think about champagne cloning sort of the fat from foods you know which fried chicken

too as people now. Yeah. So that works as well. Yeah so what about Brie. We eat a lot of carry around here yeah. Brie I mean it's the it's the most famous cheese of France. You know it's some ways it's the national France's National Cheese and brie is sort of you know what we were saying before about the cheddar in terms of its flexibility. Some people like well like brie with a with it with a cabernet you know with a really yeah that's strong and that is that is very strong and that's kind of the extreme reach of where you go with Bree Bree is the kind of thing that again you can have with strong white wine you can have it with you know you're right in the middle of the spectrum strong white wine you know rosé and then some light red wines I mean I think that personally I think the best Brie match for me is the simplist which is Brie with which is you know the

classic Bistro wine you not just it's not too heavy it's got you know it's got fruit flavor it's got weight. You know but it's not a really intense red wine there's there's some room you know there's some room there for some. You know it plays well with others right. Because it's got it's got a relatively light presentation and you know one of the things with cheeses is that you know you know the flavors of cheeses get so strong so quickly that they really get out of the white wine realm right away you know they become so strong that immediately we default right towards red wine. But again you know Brie is right in the middle where it can be really you know really flexible. I mean will serve Brie sometimes with just some you know with some honey on. Yeah it's a little bit of honey on top of it to give it a little sweetness. You can have that with kind of a sweet dessert wine too and turn that into a little bit of a dessert. I have to say you mentioned a couple wines here today that have some sweetness to morning didn't expect in the in the

pairing with cheese I would more think of a drier wine. Yes typically yes. I think I think you're right. But one of the things that we know we like is we like sweet and salty. Well I think your other point I like to comment and you know a lot of these cheeses are. You know there's an Italian cheese called recall Salata. Yeah and Salata means salted it's packed in salt to dry it out. So. So it makes it a little bit drier and it gives it a real Tang saltiness. And you know what's really nice with that is you know again something like this Riesling that's got a little bit of sweetness and a little bit of fruit a little bit of fruit with it as well. So yes sometimes we pear flavors you know sometimes we pair complementary flavors in like we were saying before big big red wine big red meat big crazy freaky cheese you know that you know you know that makes you on time. Sometimes we like to match you know and get some nice contrast too you know.

And by the way just to add I'm adding So you don't have to OK. Cost of this is a you could have a very reasonable price once you get a good match Absolutely. We're just saying that so thanks I think I made like blue cheese no nothing else so happy tears OK. We've been talking wine and cheese with Jonathan also he's our one guy and the founder of the Boston Wine School. Thanks again. You can keep on top of the Calla Crossley Show at WGBH dot org for Follow us on Twitter at Kelly Crossley become a fan on Facebook. Today Show was engineered by Antonio only are produced by Chelsea Myers will Rose live and Abbey Ruzicka hour in turn is Sloane Piven where production of WGBH Boston Public Radio.