The evening at the Science Museum was very interesting. The speaker, Dr. Catherine Donnelly, is a Professor of Cheese (well, actually ‘Professor of Nutrition and Food Science’) at the U. of Vermont. Her talk was quite technical. There is a law that you can’t sell cheese made from raw milk unless it has been aged for at least 60 days. Her talk was mostly about this law, and the papers and experiments that have been done on it: where bacteria in cheese comes from, what kind of pathogens survive past 60 days, how to detect Listeria in food, and a lot of other stuff about microbiological safety of raw-milk cheese. There were some pictures, and a few charts and graphs. But really, it was very interesting.
She is also a founder of the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese.
And then we ate cheese: Mt Tam (Calif.), Montgomery’s Cheddar (England), Cabot Clothbound Cheddar (Vt.), Comte Reserve (France; we had a Comte at one of the Burlington tastings), Parmigiano-Reggiano (Italy), and Baley Hazen Blue (Vt). All of it cow.