I cleaned out my fridge today. I had been out of town for a week, but that's really just an excuse. There's been stuff rotting in there since last year. The funny thing is, I'm approaching questionable food remainders with a new perspective. I blame it all on cheese.
Cheese, and I mean the stinky, real kind, requires a trained nose. The first time I smelled epoisses, I was rather horrified. Do people really eat that? After all, it smelled just as barn-yardy then as it does now. But the same odor that once made me recoil now makes me salivate. What happened? Somewhere along the line, my nose learned a valuable lesson from my taste buds: all that stinks is not necessarily bad.
Knowing this changes your perspective on food. This is why I had the courage to try the stanser, despite my nose's better judgement. In that situation, my nose responded with a resounding "Hah, I told you so." Despite this set back, while I once took my nose's opinion on faith, I now question it, take it's input with a grain of salt. Okay, sure, that smells uriney and fetid. But how does it taste? Same with sight- despite the obvious red and green stuff growing on there, maybe it will be tasty. Gradually your senses catch on. This change in sensory analysis is what inspires me to overcome my fear of fermentation, and my consequent attraction to a rather unlikely, moldy goat milk butter that Connie and I once purchased.
Fear not, gentle nose. When it comes to cheese, stinky + moldy = yummy.
Back to the refrigerator. First item up for discard- an old bottle of heavy cream from the Strauss Family Creamery, from a couple of weeks ago. I opened the top, was greeted with a warm, cheesey smell that cause me to question years of training about food safety. If it smelled like that, how could it be bad? Next item- an even older (circa mid January) container of Berkeley Farms heavy whipping cream. It smelled, I swear, of cheddar cheese. It was so thick I couldn't even pour it out down the sink.
I uncovered an even older item, a jar of creme fraiche that I made for Thanksgiving last year. Julia Child says it keeps for about 10 to 14 days. Well, clearly it had been much, much longer than that. But it only had a small spot of mold on the surface and smelled richly of sour cream. The final item, a container of yogurt from god knows when- last August, possibly?- was covered with green mold, but underneath was a sparkling ivory.
In each case, I hemmed and hawed. In the end, my fear of food borne illness won out. Logically, cheese is a carefully cultured ecology, while the cream in my fridge was subject to any number of random organisms present in the air. Listeria, though rare, is frequently fatal, as it is usually not detected until it is too late.
But the issue is deeper than that. My nose now has undergone a Pavlovian conditioning. How far can I trust this new response? How now do I determine what is safe to eat, and what is not? Or is it simply that we have been over paranoid in our food? It is likely that before refrigeration, people have frequently eaten food that we would now consider, had gone or was going bad. From the stance of a brave new, sanitized world, we eat only what we have control over. So ready we are to demonize the slightest bit of mold that grows unbidden and without our careful culture. But cheese surely must only happened because, long ago, someone left some milk out, and then, either out of desperation or curiousity, ate the strange concoction left behind. It is only through years of refining that we have managed to control the process. And the best cheesemakers wil be quick to admit the complexities of the microcosm of flavor that still elude us.
Maybe next time, I will be braver. Maybe next time, I will trust my nose, take a leap of faith in my body's evolutionary ability to defend itself from food borne illness, and take a little taste. After all, as they say, the nose knows, with a bit of training, that is. But then again, don't they also say that curosity killed the cat?
Posted by anne at February 26, 2004 01:21 PM | TrackBack