Notes of the Alley

RM WEEKLY · ISSUE NO. 4

People keep asking me the same question, and I have decided to stop answering it. “Can you even make cheese from rat milk?” As though we are still standing at the start of this. As though four issues in, with the butterfat laid out on the table in front of you, the live question is still whether it can be done, and not what to pour beside it. Yes. You can make cheese from rat milk. We are finished with that sentence forever. Pour something and sit down, because today we talk about it like adults.

Here is the thing the cow people will never understand, because they spent a hundred years breeding the flavor out on purpose. A dairy cow eats one thing. Grass, hay, the same beige silage every day of its life, by design. It's the only thing a cow can do. And that's how you arrive at a cheese that tastes like a wall in a house you're trying to sell. Pleasant. Identical. Forgettable.

The rat eats the world. Pizza crusts, cold cuts, the gray end of a loaf, whatever’s in the alley behind the diner. I sold you on that as efficiency, cheap feed, less waste. I undersold it badly. That’s terroir.

Every cheesemaker in France will hold you hostage for an hour about terroir. The soil, the grass, the one particular hillside, all of it ending up in the rind. They are not wrong. They are simply thinking too small, because a cow is chained to a single pasture and a rat is chained to nothing on this earth. A rat raised behind a Sichuan place in October is not the same animal as a rat raised behind a bakery in spring, and if you have a palate, a real one, not the one that calls a beige sedan, “nice,” you will taste the difference. Single-alley micro-lots. I am not joking. I have rarely been more serious in my life.

And what comes out of that 21% solids is not a shy cheese. Do not come to a rat dairy looking for delicate. You get weight. A dense, slow, serious paste that coats the roof of your mouth and stays up there, making itself known long after you’ve swallowed. The fat does work too. Twelve percent fat does not whisper, it leans across the table and tells you things.

In my mind, where this industry mostly still lives, there are three styles worth a serious person’s time. A young washed-rind I call the Gouttière: pungent, orange, faintly criminal, the kind of cheese that empties a refrigerator by itself. A hard alpine-style wheel for the patient, aged long, all brown butter and a finish that won’t quit. And, for the brave, a blue, because a twelve-percent-fat milk shot through with mold is either the future of cheese or a matter for the federal government, and I will be honest with you, I cannot yet tell which.

Now. The wine. And here I will not be moved, so save your stamps.

Rat cheese demands tannin. This is not a preference, it is chemistry. All that fat needs something with claws to cut through it, to scrape the palate clean between bites so the next one lands as hard as the first one did. A soft, sweet, low-tannin wine against a twelve-percent-fat cheese is a tragedy in a glass. The wine lies down and dies underneath it and takes the evening with it. You need a wine that fights back.

So: no merlot. Nobody is impressed, and it isn’t up to the work. You want the high-tannin monsters. Tannat first and always, it’s practically named for the job. Sagrantino di Montefalco if you can lay hands on it, which grips the mouth like a tax collector. A young Barolo, all rose and tar and scaffolding. A Madiran, for the same reason as the Tannat, on account of it mostly is Tannat. The bigger the cheese, the meaner the wine. Write that on the inside of a cabinet door.

For the table, build around the cheese, never bury it. Charcuterie with a spine: a hard dry salami heavy on the pepper, a good coppa, something cured and grown-up, nothing dainty, the cheese will eat a delicate prosciutto alive. Bitter greens. A quince paste or a black-cherry preserve set against the funk. Walnuts, toasted. Dark bread, the denser the better, the kind that could prop a door.

And if you want to do the thing properly, the dish I will die in a ditch defending; take the aged alpine wheel and melt it. A rat-milk fondue, scraped hot over a board of boiled fingerlings and cornichons, the Tannat open and breathing beside it. Or shave the hard one cold and raw over a plate of bitter chicory dressed in nothing but good oil and salt, and let the cheese be the entire reason the plate exists. That is a Tuesday night that means something.

You have spent your whole life eating cheese designed by committee to offend nobody. Beige cheese for beige sedans. I am telling you there is a denser, more honest thing waiting on the far side of one small mental hurdle. The only thing standing between you and it, is whether you can grow up about where the milk comes from.

The French eat blue mold and call it a delicacy. They wash a cheese in brandy until it turns orange and weeps, and they charge you forty dollars for the privilege. Do not stand there and lecture me about the rat. The rat is the most honest animal in the building. It eats what we threw away and hands it back to us with a long finish. We are not lowering the bar here. We are finally being honest about where flavor actually comes from.

Pour the Tannat. The math, as ever, doesn’t lie.

Stay bold, my friends.

—BigCrazyBaldhead