The culture is changing, with feminist cheese

Cheese now often broadcasts its inherently feminine constitution

Last year Erin Bligh, the proprietor of Dancing Goats Dairy in Newbury, Mass., planned to introduce a new cheese — hard, with spicy peppers — called Madam President, in what she assumed would be a fromage homage to a historic election.

Then came the unexpected result: hard cheese indeed, in the Evelyn Waugh sense of the phrase.

“I’m like, ‘Oh damn, this is awful,’” said Ms. Bligh, 29, who has four full-time employees overseeing a herd of 45 goats. She renamed the cheese General Leia Organa, after the Rebel Alliance leader in “Star Wars,” and sent chunks to fortify friends attending the women’s march in Boston. “This is my small piece of the resistance,” a local customer told her, brandishing a wedge.

Soon thereafter Ms. Bligh decided to name cheeses after Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Cheddary, enrobed in black) and Josephine Baker (Sardo-style, with a natural rind and slightly sweet). “We’ve got a Misty Copeland, we’ve got a Marie Curie,” she said. “We’re just releasing our Jane Goodall, and we had an Amelia Earhart — two wheels of it and it sold out in a second, because everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s my girl.’”

Along with all the noisier revolutions of late, there is a quiet if pungent one happening in dairy cases across America. Cheese, traditionally named for a place of origin — Brie, Stilton, with the occasional Jack or Brillat-Savarin muscling in — now often broadcasts its inherently feminine constitution.

“As it should be,” said Seana Doughty, 46, of Bleating Heart Cheese in Tomales, Calif., who has created both Fat Bottom Girl, named for both a Queen song and its lovably variable shape, and Shepherdista, alluding to Ms. Doughty’s proud fondness for fashion. “Last time I checked, you couldn’t milk boys!”

Rrright?

At a moment when assault and harassment revelations are creeping across male-dominated industries like so much unwanted mold, independent American cheese making stands as an obvious if undersung exemplar of the ultimate matriarchal workplace.

“We’re all women here,” said Rhonda Gothberg, 63, of Gothberg Farms in Bow, Wash., a former nurse who offers a cheese called Woman of La Mancha — the sharpest in her catalog, naturally. “We do have one man who cleans our pens for us, but all my milkers, all my farmers’ market people — it’s not a requirement that they be women, it’s just worked out that way,” Ms. Gothberg said. “We’ve tried a couple of guys, and they were not patient and kind and clean.”

Cheese was historically woman’s “indoor” work while men were outside plowing the fields, as the New York City cheesemonger Anne Saxelby details in a useful “5 Minute History” last spring, in which she proclaimed that “The Future (And Past!) of Cheese Is Female.”

Then came the Kraft brothers and their convenient processed singles of midcentury; the slick bricks of Velveeta, Philadelphia and Cracker Barrel.

Second-wave pioneers taking back the land in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s included Judy Schad of Capriole Inc. in Greenville, Ind.; Laini Fondiller of Lazy Lady Farm in Westfield, Vt.; and Sue Conley and Peggy Smith of Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes Station, Calif.

Last year Ms. Schad, 75, introduced Flora, named for her grandmother, who made cheese under less than ideal conditions on her back porch. It joined Piper’s Pyramide, inspired by Ms. Schad’s own first, redheaded granddaughter (“bright and spicy — just like her namesake!”); Sofia, for a longtime friend (“a queen at any age!”); and Julianna, after a Hungarian intern. “Beneath her wrinkly exterior lies a complexity not often found in such a young cheese,” reads Capriole’s description of the Wabash Cannonball, a popular, prizewinning cheese named for the folk song about a fictional train sung by Johnny Cash.

“I think these cheeses are women — and sometimes they’re ladies, sometimes they’re not,” Ms. Schad said. “But the flavour is subtle. They don’t hit you over the head with a rolling pin.”

© The New York Times