The Magic of Making Cheese

The closest I’ve ever got to doing practical magic was ladling curd into moulds on my friend Mary’s small farm in Somerset. It was a slow setting cheese and so we often ended up working around midnight, ladling scoops of snow-white curd into the cylindrical plastic moulds laid out in neat ranks on the steel draining table. In the quiet of the countryside the only sounds were the liquid trickle of the whey draining into buckets sitting on the red tiled floor, and the occasional hoot of an owl. Ladling requires slow precise movements and in that mystical atmosphere I felt as if I was participating in some ancient ritual.