According to the 2020 Census, 80% of the United States’ population lives in urban areas (“defined as densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas”). There are currently 1.9 million farms and ranches operating within the country, many of them family-owned and operated. That might seem like a lot, until you consider the current resident population of the United States is 334,735,155 people. It seems only natural, then, that most Americans do not have a strong understanding about where their food comes from. Thankfully, oral history fieldwork projects – like those found within the American Folklife Center’s archives – can provide insight into the daily work of some of the country’s agricultural producers. In fact, Season 6 of the Center’s America Works podcast is entirely focused on food, featuring excerpts of interviews with the American workers responsible for growing and producing food. The final episode in the season features Dale Baumgartner, the Head Cheese Maker at the Tillamook County Creamery Association in coastal Oregon. [Note: Season 6, Episode 8, with Dale Baumgartner, releases on October 17]
Dale’s interview is part of the collection “Tillamook: Cheesemakers in Coastal Oregon” (AFC 2021/11), which is, in turn, part of the larger Occupational Folklife Project (OFP). The Tillamook project, led by folklorist Jared L. Schmidt, documented the dairy farmers, factory workers, food scientists and marketing specialists who make the Tillamook cheese and ice cream products that American consumers can now find in supermarkets throughout the country. Since Dale’s episode will be available the day after National Cheese Curd Day, I thought it would be good to share a few of the other AFC collections which feature cheese (and those who make it).
In addition to the Tillamook collection, several other collections within the Occupational Folklife Project include interviews with dairy farmers and cheese makers. Andy Kolovos and Gregory Sharrow’s work with Vermont farmers resulted in the Grassroots Agriculture in Vermont (AFC 2014/022) collection. As part of the project, Gregory Sharrows interviewed Jonathan Wright, whose farm – Taylor Farm – has become known for producing maple-smoked Gouda and other specialty cheeses. Wright originally focused solely on milk production, but realized the changing market required a shift in focus:
“We realized we needed, along with the tourism piece, we needed to manufacture a product that would be more profitable for us. So in the late 90s, we started making cheese here on the farm. And this was the early beginning of the artisanal cheese movement here in Vermont. We worked with a wonderful consultant named Peter Dickson, who has helped many of the Vermont cheesemakers, and he literally came to the farm and sort of held our hand through the process. We started making batches of cheese in our kitchen, then eventually we were able to build a small cheese room here on the farm. And little by little we have kept expanding that piece of the enterprise. We’ve actually now downsized the cows tremendously. We’re milking 22 cows right now, but we put all of our milk into our cheese production, which is just a much more profitable use of the milk for us. We still belong to Agri-Mark, our local milk cooperative, and we have the opportunity to ship milk occasionally, but by and large the commodity price of milk is so low that we try to put as much milk into our own cheese production as possible.”
Part of the choice to make Gouda, rather than another type of cheese, was the desire to make a product that was different, as there were already a number of companies making great quality cheddar. In addition, Wright said:
“Gouda’s a wonderful cheese, in that it is – can be very diverse. You can add flavors to the cheese. You can age the cheese. It’s a cheese that you can cook with. It melts beautifully. So it lent itself easily to a lot of different applications.”
An early experiment, in conjunction with Grafton Village Cheese, led to what might be Taylor Farms’ signature cheese – a Maplewood smoked Gouda. The maple, Wright explained, “gave it a very subtle and delightful, unique flavor. And that was the cheese that immediately won national awards. So we just, by luck, hit upon something that we will probably always be known for.”
Anne and Jack Lazor, who run Butterworks Farm in Westfield, Vermont were also interviewed for the Grass-Roots Agriculture in Vermont collection. While Anne and Jack primarily produce yogurt with their milk, they also occasionally make cheese:
Jack: In the old days, we had other products that we’d make. Even right now, I mean, at Christmastime, we always take a week off at Christmastime. And give everybody the week off, try to give them a week’s pay, if we can, and then, but we’ve got seven days’ worth of milk to deal with. So, you know, we’ve got to, you know, usually make cheddar cheese out of it, and we’ll either, you know, use – Shelburne Farms has helped us out a lot, and Grafton Village Cheese has helped us out. So that’s been a great balancing. Another thing we’ve done a lot in the past is we’ve made a lot of cottage cheese. I make good cottage cheese. It’s a large curd and it’s really tasty, but you know you always had to hand pack it and people don’t want to do that anymore.
Anne: Well, it’s not cost-effective. By the time you’ve hand packed it, you take five people to pack the cottage cheese, and it takes us two or three hours, and you don’t even break even, if you look at the actual finances of it.
Jack: But the new machine we’re getting will fill cottage cheese.
In 2012, folklorist Hannah Harvester’s Archie Green Fellowship resulted in the Dairy Farm Workers in New York’s North Country collection (AFC 2012/). The collection includes an interview with Joseph “Joe Shultz and Sue Shultz, who own and operate Ara-Kuh, a dairy farm and cheese curd business in Lowville, New York. At first, Sue Shultz made cheese curd on her stovetop. It was a small operation, mainly intended for their own home use or given away to friends.
The cheese was so popular, the couple expanded operations and began producing and selling it on a larger scale. “People do ask us if we can sell them whole milk,” Joe admits, “but the cheese is such a popular thing here in Lewis County and I think we are able to sell more pounds of milk worth of cheese rather than number of gallons to people.” At the time of the interview, Joe and Sue Shultz were using a third of their milk production to make their own cheese curd products and sending the rest to the local dairy cooperative. For now, the cheese business is both successful and something the couple enjoys:
Joe: Even with our cheese business we made a decision right off the bat that if we are not enjoying it, we are not going to continue to do it. We sell out every time we make it through the summer, so people say make it another day. And we could, but we did – when we had a smaller vat and we were making it three times a week, and it was taking too much out of us, and so we –
Sue: With chores and crops and everything else in the busy season, it’s too much.
Joe: So we got our bigger vat so we could go back to twice a week and we’ll never go three times a week on a regular basis with a bigger vat. ‘Cause then, when it gets to be something you don’t enjoy, then it’s not worth doing.
One of by-products of Ara-Kuh’s cheese curd business is an abundance of whey. While some farms might turn this into another marketable product, turning they whey into protein powder, Joe and Sue’s excess has a different destination:
Joe: It all goes down to our Amish neighbor. He has a wagon with a big tote and he brings it here first thing in the morning. And about noon when we’re done he comes and picks it up and feeds it to his pigs. That’s a good service to us because we don’t have to worry about it. It used to be the old cheese plants would dump in the river, dump it somewhere and get in trouble. We can put it into our gutter system and into our manure spreader and we can spread it, but it’s such a good feed value to his pigs. Then in the spring he gives us three little piglets because we raise our own pigs, so it works good for both of us.
I was amused to learn that pigs appear to play an important role for several smaller cheese-makers, as Jonathan Wright also mentioned them in his interview: “We’ve been now making cheese fifteen or sixteen years and, you know, we still bump up against little nuances that are unexpected. Occasionally we have total failures. Luckily, not very often. And that’s one of the reasons we raise pigs here, because they’re a good way to dispose of the byproduct.”
In addition to cheesemakers in rural Vermont and New York, the OFP collection Food Processing and Food Legacy Trades (AFC 2015/042) includes an interview with Benton Brown and Susan Boyle, co-owners of Crown Finish Caves, located in Brooklyn, New York. Whereas previously mentioned OFP interviews featured dairy farmers who were making their own cheese, Crown Finish Caves focuses solely on affinage – the aging of cheese. Specifically, the business replicates the Parisian model of affinage, where cheese is produced outside the city and aged inside the city. The interview provides insight into both the specifics of affinage, as well as creative, adaptive use of an old building. The building which houses Crown Finish Caves was once home to Nassau Brewery. When Brown and Boyle purchased the old brewery complex, they renovated and re-zoned the property, creating residential and commercial components in the above-ground sections of the building. Eight years into owning the property, they began looking at ways to utilize the building’s three large lager tunnels.
In 2010, working with the idea of converting the tunnels into cheese caves, Benton traveled to Vermont to learn the process of cheese-making. Since they did not have ready access to animals or milk, Brown and Boyle realized they needed to shift their approach. Instead of making the cheese themselves, they would need to work with cheese producers and move the cheese into their tunnels for the aging process. Over the course of his affinage study, Benton traveled to France, where he visited an old train tunnel that had been converted into a cheese-aging cave, very similar to the building he would be working with back in Brooklyn.
Recognizing that smaller creameries and cheese producers did not have the space or time to age their cheese, Crown Finish Caves began working with small farms. This remains part of their business goal, even as Brown and Boyle admit that it is not possible to work exclusively with smaller businesses. “What we’ve learned,” Susan clarified, “is we kind of need to balance that with some larger producers, so we can work with smaller producers, so that can work. That’s part of the vision, so we can fill this niche and need for small farms that might otherwise be – not be able to produce as much cheese and become more successful.”
“It’s a balance of bigger operations to supplement the smaller operations,” Benton agreed.
Surprisingly, Benton and Boyle were not the only city-dwelling cheesemakers who can be found in AFC’s collections. Another story can be found in a completely unrelated OFP interview – that of Michael LaTrace, interviewed as part of Illuminating History: Union Electricians in New York City (AFC 2016/035). LaTrace, it seems, had held a number of different jobs in his youth, before he became a licensed union electrician:
“I was a milkman for a couple of summers. I would work from 11 o’clock at night to 7 in the morning delivering milk, and coming from the city, delivering milk in the country, in the rural areas was quite frightening because I didn’t know about raccoons and possums and these other things, so it was an interesting job, it really was. Believe it or not, for one summer, Italians, we love the, we have this one cheese we call mozzarella and for one summer, I made mozzarella cheese, it was interesting. Making mozzarella, you have to put your hands in very hot water, so when I first started, I could barely touch the water. By the end of the summer, I was a pro.”
Twenty-seven years earlier, another Italian-American cheesemaker was interviewed for AFC’s collections – this one in Vineland, Colorado.
In 1990, between July 28th and July 30th, AFC fieldworkers visited Joe Vasile‘s goat dairy, to document the making of ricotta cheese. Joe had originally worked at a local mill. When he retired, he decided to start a goat dairy. He had learned to make cheese years ago, from his friend Frank Nigro. Fieldworker Paola Tavarelli wrote the following in her fieldnotes:
“Joe has been waiting for us since 8 o’clock. There must have been some misunderstanding about the time he was supposed to make cheese. He told me several times that 9/9:30 was a good time for us to go and see the process of cheese making, but I realize now that this is the time he starts to make ricotta cheese, while the goat cheese, the harder cheese called ‘caprino’ in Italian, is the first one to be made and we are too late to see the first part of its making.
The cheese house is a cinder block building that looks very anonymous to me. There are no signs indicating that it is a cheese factory.”
As they moved around the inside of the cheese room, it became apparent there was nowhere to set the tape recorder down – both due to the lack of free surfaces and, likely, the need for the working surfaces to remain sterile – so Paola wound up carrying the recorder with her the entire time. This is not the only hardship that she wound up enduring during the interview:
“Joe washes the plastic ricotta containers before filling them with the cheese. Uncle Frank asks Joe to put some ricotta cheese in one of the bowls he brought from his home and he crumbled a slice of bread in it. Then he moves to the other room, opens the front door to get some fresh air in, and sits in front of the door eating his ‘ricotta soup.’ I move to the door too: the temperature in the cheese room is almost unbearable and I need a breath of fresh air.”
Thankfully, Tavarelli got a bit of a reprieve from the cheese room later, when the group visited the “junk room” in a neighboring building, where Joe Vasile showed them a basket his cousin sent him from Calabria. In Italy, cheese makers use baskets like this to drain ricotta cheese. Sadly, Joe was unable to use it for his business here in the United States. From the fieldnotes, we learn that “Joe wanted to use them but a health inspector told him that he would have to shut his operation down if he used these kind of baskets.” Although he doesn’t use the baskets, Vasile skirts the law in another way, as Tavarelli writes, “Joe told me that according to the law you cannot sell cheese before these 60 days, but he has clients who like the cheese when it is fresher, so he sells it even before the 60 days have elapsed.”
This wasn’t the only time that cheese makers documented in the archive admitted to playing a little loose with the law. Remember Jonathan Wright from Vermont, from the beginning of this post? In addition to the financial stability that comes from diversifying his farm, Wright admitted to another hidden benefit of making cheese:
“I got stopped a few nights ago for a speeding violation,” he confessed, “and the state trooper said – I have logos on my van – and he said ‘Taylor Farms! Oh, I love your gouda! Your smoked gouda!’ And he – I shouldn’t say this, but he gave me a written warning and I think it had something to do with the cheese.”
Want more cheesy goodness? Check out the following from the American Folklife Center:
- View more photographs of Joe Vasile making cheese in Vineland, Colorado as part of the Italian Americans in the West Project collection (AFC 1989/022)
- Listen to a description of making cottage cheese from the American English Dialect Recordings (AFC 1986/022) – timestamp 11:14
- Read more about the Tillamook occupational folklife collection in this guest post by AFC Folklife Specialist, Nancy Groce: New Occupational Folklife Project Documents “Tillamook Cheesemakers in Coastal Oregon.”
- Visit the AFC Reading Room to read Down on the Farm: The Last Dairy Farms of North Stonington, from the Markham Starr collection (AFC 2013/031)
- To learn more about the history of cheese factories and how the price of milk was established, listen to this interview with Robert Thompson from the Diary Farm Workers in New York’s North Country collection (AFC 2013/33)