The fire souls in the dairy

It is still dark when the milk tank is hitched to the trailer. A cheesemaking day at Margaretelund often begins on the road, before the vat is warm and before the scent of milk has filled the dairy. The milk is collected, brought home and becomes the centre of a working day that rarely ends when the body thinks it should.

At first, there is nothing particularly romantic about the dairy. The floor gets wet. The air turns warm. Fans and cold rooms rumble in the background. The dishwasher thunders and releases even more humidity into the room. Some hours feel less like an artisanal dairy and more like a steam bath of stainless steel, milk and a considerable amount of responsibility.

And yet this is where the cheeses begin.

At Margaretelund, Emelie and Alexander make blue and green mould cheeses, white mould cheeses, classic Swedish hard cheeses, salad cheese and more idiosyncratic dessert cheeses with liquorice or black pepper. Tant Grön, Farbror Blå, Svarta Malin, Carmen & Bert, Holy Kitt and Greta are not just names on labels. They are small personalities requiring different temperatures, different touch and different kinds of patience.

Much can be measured: temperature, time, pH, quantities and humidity. But cheesemaking is never only numbers. Half a degree can change the feel of the curd. A few minutes can affect how the grains respond when stirred. A hand that feels its way sometimes knows more than a protocol.

That is where the craft lives. Making the cheeses even, finding the right creaminess, firmness and feel is a kind of quiet precision. The result is not always visible the same day. Sometimes the answer comes after six weeks. Sometimes after months. Sometimes after years. You do your best, clean up and wait while the cultures continue their work in darkness and cold.

Cheese days do not end when the make is done. On other days, tiny holes are pierced in the green mould cheeses so the mould can breathe. Holy Kitt is washed by hand so it can slowly develop its red-pink rind. Cheeses are turned, brushed, checked and left to rest. What looks still is often full of life.

They say cheesemaking is twenty percent making cheese and eighty percent cleaning. At Margaretelund it does not sound like a joke. The final hours of a day are often the heaviest: packing, washing, rinsing, cleaning, checking. Then you are tired, wet and worn down. But the next cheese begins there, in the cleanliness after the last one.

Then comes the moment that makes everything understandable. A mould cheese is brought out after weeks of quiet work. The surface is even, beautiful and alive. Mould culture and acid culture have done what they were meant to do in symbiosis, and what began as milk has become something else entirely: aroma, resistance, softness, salt and memory.

That is when you understand why a cheese from Margaretelund is not simply something you happen to put in a basket. It is something you have managed to get hold of.

“Half a degree can be the difference between a good cheese and a great one.”