Blessed are the Cheesemakers

Sometimes it seems frivolous to write about recipes and the small events of my own life, when in other parts of the world, awful things are happening and other people's families are being ripped apart. Sometimes the knowing seems to demand a response, or even a responsibility, to look up from my own affairs for a moment, to say yes, I see this, however powerless I feel to do anything about it.

And I wrote that paragraph yesterday, thinking of the chemical attacks in Syria. But now there's Stockholm. And whichever day you read this, there will be something else. The task of making peace seems too enormous to contemplate.

Maybe we should make cheese instead. Many years ago, I stayed with a family in Romania who became my friends. I spoke very little Romanian, though some of them spoke English, and many things in their house were very different to mine. Welcoming as they were, it was hard to feel at home until the evening we made a cake. Sitting together, passing a bowl of thickening cream around as we took turns beating it with a hand whisk, simply melted away language barriers and cultural differences. It's hard to be a foreigner to someone you have cooked with.

Unfortunately, I had no one new to share my first experience of making cheese with. But it was a cheese from a different culture, if that counts. Theo gave his baby bottle away and unexpectedly decided that this meant his milk intake should fall to zero. So I had 8 pints of whole milk to use up in a hurry. My Indian cookbooks assured me that paneer is very easy to make, so what did I have to lose? I boiled the milk for the requisite five minutes, added a few spoonfuls of lemon juice - slightly sceptically, I have to admit - and to my surprise, it separated neatly into lumpy curds swimming in a yellowish liquid. I drained it in a net that I usually use for making jelly, squeezed it flat with a saucepan, and I had my very own paneer! I felt like the pressing could have been improved on, as it was a bit crumbly, but it tasted fine.

Blessed are the peacemakers. They need all the help they can get. But when making peace seems far too difficult, maybe we can be a blessing by making cheese together instead.

Dove image: By Darolu Dove siluette from Vervexca Peace Dove.svg (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Comments

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions. The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?" This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them. Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone. That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of. Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died. And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was. His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...

Birmingham: Temples to many things

Birmingham's cathedral is overshadowed by more modern temples: the mirrored swirls of New Street train station; the dotted bulge of the Selfridges store; the lacy blocks of the library; the pillars and pediments of the museum and art gallery. Museum and town hall Next to all these, Birmingham Cathedral, in its square of dusty grass, isolated from the main flow of shopping and travel, seems less like a dominant building and more like a minor chapel. It turns out the unpretentiousness is deliberate. St Philip's Church was built in 1715 when the worshipping population of Birmingham had outgrown the medieval constraints of St Martin in the Bullring . Birmingham remained part of the Diocese of Worcester until 1905, when Charles Gore pushed for the creation of a new diocese and became its first bishop. Seeing the depth of need in the city, he decided to convert St Philip's to a cathedral rather than spend money on a grand new building. Birmingham Cathedral had to be restored afte...

Southwell Minster, Newark-on-Trent, and a pilgrim cellist

You may remember that I recently mentioned people doing weird and wonderful things. Well, I found another one. Last year, Kenneth Wilson visited all 42 English cathedrals. On a bike. With a cello. It was a cargo bike; the whole setup, cello and all, weighed about 50 kg; and he mostly managed a rate of one cathedral per day, with occasional rest days and train journeys where absolutely necessary. That's a lot of cycling. Of course, he wrote a book about it, and when I found out he was on the schedule at Newark Book Festival, I had to go. It also provided the perfect excuse to visit Southwell Minster. Newark-on-Trent feels like it is in the depths of the Nottinghamshire countryside, but it isn't actually hard to get to, I thought as I buzzed along the dual carriageways of the A50, A453, A52 and A46 on a sunny Sunday morning. All along the route, the grass stood bleached and crispy, scorched by the summer heat. Newark Castle with crispy grass The author event was at the National...

Martha's Marvellous Munchies

Search This Blog