The Wild Girls Food Camp in Sweden

Day One

Awake at 5am after 1.5 hours sleep. I hosted a supper club the night before and was cleaning up until 3.30am. I run for the coach from Finchley Rd to Stansted, coffee at 'Spoons', then take Ryanair to Copenhagen. At one point I think I'm not going to be able to squeeze my carry-on luggage into the metal suitcase measuring rack. A Ryanair woman looms over me. I remove my Wellingtons from my case, then the bag fits. I carry my rubber boots onto the plane in my hand.

I sleep through the flight, mouth open, snoring. Arrival at Copenhagen airport. My instructions say take a train to the meeting point in Sweden, in the Skåne area, where I will be picked up at 3pm by the organisers. I punch in 'Hoor' on the ticket machine. No such place exists. I ask for help and the young man with fluent English says you need to put the ö (those strike throughs and umlauts aren't just alphabetic garnishes), it's 'Höör'.

In the wood panelled waiting room at Höör station, two smudge-eyed teenage girls are conspiratorial. I find a plug and charge up my iPhone. We will be staying in a forest with no electricity. I need every percentage point on my battery as I won't be able to recharge for two days. 

At 3.15pm I phone Charlotta: 'I'm here'.

'We'll be there in five minutes, the others had problems catching the train.'

Lotta Ranert is a tall carrot-haired woman who has created this trip 'Pure Food Camp'. She's with Mia Klitte, a small blonde who runs a supper club venture called 'A Slice of Swedish Hospitality'. We drive to Nyrups Naturhotell. At the entrance there is a dairy, Nyrups Osteria, run by Cecilia. She has laid out samples of her cheeses on a small cloth-covered table outside. As we walk through the forest to the camp, I slip. I'm wearing clogs. I'm told to change into my wellies.

The accommodation is yurts, with two red wooden beds in the middle under a central skylight under a green canopy of leaves. I'm given a separate yurt because I snore. 

Camilla Jonsson is the owner of the Naturhotell. Her hair has become curly due to the menopause. We commiserate with each other. She shows us the compost toilets, separate ones for number 1s and number 2s.

'But for number 1s, we pee in the forest.'

I like peeing outside. I don't poo the entire time I'm there.

Camilla teaches us how to light the oil lamps and the paraffin heater. I think I'll remember how to do it but not sure. I use the other bed to lay out my suitcase then walk to the motherlode yurt, which has a wood-fired stove, a dining table, kitchen equipment and supplies.

 

We sit at a sun-dappled wooden table on top of a hill, eating 'fika', Swedish for teatime except you have coffee and cinnamon buns. We do a 'go around', talking about ourselves. I talk too long. I'm very tired and functioning on automatic. I make myself instantly popular by saying I can't stand cookery TV, the way it's become a game show. Then I realise that two people at the table are involved with competitive cookery TV. 

The other women

Gabriella Ranelli, 40s, of Tenedor Tours. She's American but has lived in the Basque Country in Spain for 30 years. She's a food writer, runs tours of the Basque region and is helping chef Elena Arzak to write a book. She often wears a black beret.

Regula Ysewijn, 34, from Flanders, is better known as Miss Foodwise, a food writer, photographer and currently judge on Belgian Bake Off. She is married to talented artist Bruno Vergauwen.

Helen Mol, 30, is from Berlin but 'born in a Chinese restaurant'. She's a wine expert and sommelier. 

Emily Brown, 27, from England, can't cook at all, she says. She organises tours with Martin Randall Travel that cater mostly for elderly people. She is learning Swedish and is planning to move to Sweden in a couple of years. Her biggest fear is one of her clients dying on a tour. 

Keri Moss, 46 (but looks about 30), was a joint winner of Professional Masterchef UK in 2012. 'I did it to prove that women chefs are just as good as men. People at my catering job laughed when I applied.' She's very close to her cats. She's British from a Trinidadian heritage.

Sarah Krobath, 30, is from Vienna in Austria. She's a food writer, author and journalist.

The head chef is Titti Qvarnström, 39, is the first female Swedish chef to gain a Michelin Star. Now between restaurants, she is heading up this project with Lotta. From Malmo, she tries to encourage a food community in the region.  Titti is tall, slim with burning blue/green eyes depending on the light. Apparently Titti is a normal name in Sweden. 

Titti's husband Andre Qvarnström is here. He's German and a chef, they met while working in Berlin. He's taken Titti's surname as his. Titti is filming an American TV show and so he helps with the camp cooking when she can't be here. Andre and Titti don't have metal wedding rings, they have triple tattooed bands on their marriage fingers, which is more practical in the kitchen.

We also meet Anna, 24, a young Swede, who is helping Lotta organise the camp. She's a pescatarian too so I'm glad I'm not the only dietary difficult person at the camp.

After fika, we are given baskets of food to cook, either in teams or alone. I'm given halloumi and beetroot and told to do something with it. I hate beetroot. But you are always on beetroot duty when you don't eat meat. It's just a fact of life.

The beetroot is roasted until black in the fire. I slice up the Swedish halloumi with nigella seeds, made by local Palestinians, called Nablusi. It's extremely salty (and I like salt); I later read that you are supposed to soak it in water. 

There are several cooking fires, everybody is preparing a course. I grill the halloumi with rapeseed oil, crushed garlic and cider vinegar. We are only using Swedish products, so no olive oil. As darkness falls we gather around the candlelit table in the motherlode yurt. Each of us presents our meal, I'm apologetic about the saltiness and the charred messiness of my dish. People assure me it tastes good. 

Regula has made perch en papillote and Keri has made a fire-grilled pudding, which was supposed to rise. Keri stands at the head of the table with an embarrassed smile, holding a dish containing a flat bubbly blackened mess. We divide it amongst us - it tastes fantastic, especially with custard.

As the night draws on and glasses empty, Regula mentions that she hasn't cut her hair since she was 12 years old. She carefully undoes her red tresses from their complicated twirls and ringlets. The auburn hair falls to the back of her knees. This feels so intimate, as if she has stripped off naked. 

Later she goes outside to pee, she returns almost immediately:

'I'm scared.'
'Do you want me to go with you?' I offer.

She nods gratefully.

Outside, under the velvety canopy of the forest, we squat either side of a large oak tree and pee while chatting companionably. I return to my yurt, which I find due to the yellow glow from the centre window. The paraffin fire is lit, so is the lamp. Once I extinguish them, the yurt stinks unpleasantly of paraffin so I open the door wide and leave it open all night. I get up twice in the night to pee. In the pitch dark I can't find my clogs so I go out to the forest in my bare feet. There was a rumour of Northern Lights tonight, so I look up, but there are too many trees to see the sky. In the morning I hear Regula and Keri, who are sharing a yurt, barely slept because they were afraid of zombies and bears.

Day Two

A Polish Swede called Pontus, who informs us he was named after a Greek god, is taking us on a foraging walk. He forms a circle and does physical exercises with us while we sing a silly song which lodges in your head, 'Vi Kan dansa labado, lapado, lapadoo', an ear worm.

We walk along the road to forage:

'You must use your mouse eyes' whispers Pontus 'to see the small things'.

We collect stinging nettles. After pinching off a few stalks, I have a tingly finger. We use the seeds and the leaves. We collect hazelnuts, acorns, Spanish chervil, plantain leaves, chickweed and wood sorrel for salad. We deposit our finds back at the camp and set off again immediately through the forest.

It is a damp, autumnal season perfect for mushroom picking. I've never seen so many mushrooms, brown and fairy-tale red with white spots. I find some cep mushrooms, one bright yellow. The leaves are mustard; we see a coiled black and white diamond pattern viper, cloven deer tracks, horse shoe imprints, khaki toads. The walk is mostly uphill and I'm starting to feel tired.

At the top, Pontus does some focussing exercises; now we are encouraged to have 'owl' vision or peripheral vision, where patterns emerge. We stretch out our arms and listen to the silence. Pontus thanks everyone: trees, nature, people.

Cecilia Timner,the cheese lady, has set up a picnic. I immediately drink a beer. Now I've stopped walking, my body is cooling fast, I feel wet and cold. They've provided fish for me as a pescatarian, some sea bass carpaccio, but to be honest I rarely eat fish. It's all a bit real. I eat cheese, fig chutney, crispbread and tomatoes.

The way back is much faster. I'm better at downhill, which might sound obvious but some people are terrible at going downhill and this is one of my specialities. We go to the motherlode yurt and sit on wooden low chairs with sheep skins and flop around the wooden stove. I can barely move. I've done 12k steps. That's a fuck of a lot for a long morning. Eventually I stagger back to my yurt and write a piece on tomatoes, due tomorrow.

Then I come back out to the camp fire. I'm asked to make flat bread with nettle seeds and buttermilk. 

'Roll them out as thin as possible,' says Titti.

Chef Titti is making butter in a tall wooden tube, using a wooden plunger, up and down. The butter is delicious and we keep the buttermilk for the breads. Emily cooks my flatbreads on the open fire; they bubble up and blacken in spots. I roll some more salt into them, scatter the seeds on top. They remain soft and pliable when cooked, like chapatti. 

We try a Swedish speciality, 'surstromming', fermented fish. The orange and red tin looks innocent enough, then Lotta opens it and the juice squirts out all over her sweatshirt. The smell is overpowering, I can smell it from 50m away. It's ammonia and corpse-like and the smell of rotting death. Regula cuts small fillets of it on a board. I take one and eat it. Ugh. It's a little like pickled herring but with an odour of rotten egg. The flavour continues. 

I walk away into the forest swearing, 'Fuck!' 'Oh my god!' and 'This is just wrong'. 

My brain is all messed up. We are supposed to eat this stuff in the flat bread. Fortunately there is some Kalix roe, one of Sweden's protected foods (DOP). I spoon this, with sour cream, red onion and lemony wood sorrel, into my flat bread. It's good. I don't mind eating babies.

Pontus has been leeching shelled acorns since Saturday, changing the water every few hours. The soaked acorns now look like brown plastic or small fake Easter eggs. Titti puts them through a food grinder. I taste a bit. They don't taste bitter but are very dry and tasteless. Acorns have carbohydrates and some protein. All of our food is local or foraged. Pontus intones:

 'Wild food is not put there by man. Acorns mean no fields of wheat.' 

Night falls. For the main course, back in the cosy mother hut, we eat acorn burgers, buttery mashed swedes with potatoes, wild leaves and for the meat eaters, coiled sausages. Andre tells us to inspect our bodies for ticks with the torchlight in our yurts. I have a few bites on the back of my legs. I have no one to look at my body for ticks. I worry about Lyme disease. 

Some people leave but some of us talk into the night: about the royals, about Lady Di, about illnesses, children, ambition and creativity. We drink Belgian sour beer and Austrian liqueur.  Eventually I go to bed and sleep 8 solid hours without waking. This is good. It rains outside.

Day Three

I awake at 7.30am and, as we are leaving this place, leave my orange suitcase outside my yurt, ready to be collected. Regula is making Belgian pancakes on a cast iron pan on the fire. We are eating breakfast outside, the table laid with a blue cloth. The table looks like something from a Swedish lifestyle cookery book: pretty tea cups, local yoghurt with fruit compote, slices of cheese, fish, meat. A bowl of fresh butter. Coffee made the old fashioned way, the grains left in the kettle which settle at the bottom of your cup.
We walk through the forest back to the dairy.

The coffee and the walk have made my bowels move. I dash to the modern toilet in the dairy. We take a minibus to Elisefarm, a golf hotel with a spa. On the ride Lotta explains that Skåne is Sweden's larder, where most of the food is grown. The owner of Elisefarm, smiling Ingrid, was a high-powered lawyer from Stockholm who fell in love with a local farmer from Skåne. They set up this business together. 

'What is this whole thing about golf?' I ask.

Ingrid laughs.

'I get the feeling that it's about nice walks and drinking.' 

She doesn't disagree. I go up the wooden stairs and see my beautiful room, with two boat-like beds. I have a hot shower. The first time I've washed since Saturday. 

We drive to a berry farm, café and farm shop, Brånneriets Gård, where we eat an excellent vegetarian lunch: leek and potato soup which the Swedes call Potatoleek soup - potatoes get top billing in Sweden. I pick raspberries, blackberries and seabuckthorn berries, the latter are like golden jelly beans. The owner Margitha Nillson teaches us to make seabuckthorn jam, pickled cucumbers and schnapps.

We are given a selection of ingredients from which to make our schnapps for our meal tonight: Spanish Coriander, Artemesia, Yarrow flowers, Chokeberries, Rowan berries, frozen Elderflowers (browned but still fragrant). I choose chokeberries, sweeter than the others and white yarrow flowers. Later we will fill our bottles with vodka. 

On our way back to Elisefarm, we stop at a castle and look around the rooms. One room, small and narrow is totally filled with books and, next to the window, one perfect armchair. I want this room in my life.

Back in my bedroom I think I'll write up my notes. I lay on my bed for a few minutes then wake up two hours later. Fuck. I wanted to swim. 

I stumble outside to the heated outdoor swimming pool, the steam curling off into the cold. Twenty lengths then over to the spa for the Jacuzzi. There is also an outside jacuzzi containing rather drunk Swedes; mini wine bottles and beer are scattered carelessly around.

Tonight is meatball night. But chef Titti makes a vegetarian option for me, Swedish falafel or 'Pealafel'. Målmo is famed for the falafel; it's an immigrant food that they've taken to their hearts. Peas are very Swedish, so Titti has made a dried pea version of falafel, which is bright green and very good.

Titti Qvarnström's face is all eyes, large pools, peeking out from a headscarf tied pirate-style, or a dark green hunting hat. She is as good looking, tall and lithe, as a model. But she's got no attitude, no swagger or arrogance. No awareness of her beauty either. A rare woman. 

Tonight we try Swedish wine, which is not bad at all. In fact I've often wondered, why the obsession with grapes when it comes to alcohol? Wine can be made from berries too. We walk in the dark, looking up at the stars, to the lake, where we will set the cages to catch crayfish. August and September is crayfish party season.

I hammer a stake into the grass and clutching a rope, chuck the cage into the lake. I manage not to let go of the rope and tie the other end to the stake. In the morning we will check the cages. The air smells of wood smoke. It's not cold. For pudding we have berries and French toast. I sleep next to an open window and watch the full moon filter through the swaying trees, casting a silvery light.

Day Four

I wake up just before 7 with a dry mouth. First we collect our crayfish cages: I have quite a few. I now know the difference between male and female crayfish: the females are darker, browner. The males have two penises.

This morning we are going duck hunting.  With tall hunters, clad in camouflage country clothes, one wearing corduroy knickerbockers, we stride along the blowy golf course, toward trees surrounding a lake.  Golf grass is different: you can tell it is high quality and costly: tightly seeded bright, almost fluorescent green grass, I peer at the men and imagine them as Vikings, their descendants. One man has the complexion and wild eyes of a person who lives outdoors, and is swearing an orange high viz jacket. He has a dog, some kind of Labrador.

 'He's very popular on hunts because he has a clever dog' says one of the hunters.

He bustles around in the bushes and rustles up the ducks. He wears a bright jacket so that he doesn't get shot. But ducks have good colour vision, so the hunters try to blend in. We are told to keep quiet.

Titti is wearing her hunting gear and carrying her father's gun. She spent her childhood outdoors with her father. 

'I got my hunting license when my father died. Before I hunted on his license.' she says.

The dogs are well trained, staying still during the shooting and running to collect the duck bodies in their mouths when directed. We remain silent, and every so often there is a call from the trees, some kind of human duck sound. The hunters tense, the ducks fly through the air and then shooting. At the end there are a dozen ducks laid on the grass, their peacock coloured necks stretched out. Those that aren't properly dead have their necks snapped. 

I don't feel anything. I don't eat meat but I don't feel bad. I feel interested. 

The only shooting I can try is with 'clay pigeons'. I'm handed a gun, a beautiful gun with polished wood and engraved curlicues on the pewter metal. This is a ladies' gun, with two barrels side by side, meaning you can shoot one bullet after another. Inside brightly coloured plastic cartridges, there are dozens of little pellets which used to be made of lead and are now made from steel. I've never seen a gun before which wasn't behind a glass case in a museum. I've certainly never touched one or held one. 

I am given bright pink headphones. Another man sitting at a machine a couple of metres away, catapults a clay object into the air. I watch the hunters hit the clay with ease. The noise is so loud, like dynamite. You can't stop yourself from flinching.
I go to the line and stand with my legs apart, one in front of the other. Keep the gun tight to your cheek and your shoulder/ just above the armpit, I'm instructed. Look along the barrel, that's how you direct your shot accurately. Take off the safety. When you are ready say 'pull'.

'Pull'

The weight, the length, the blast, the kickback. My whole body rings. It's shocking.

'Again?'
'Ok.'

I step up. 
Bang! I miss again.

'Not far off' says a hunter, smiling encouragingly.

I try a third shot.
Then I have to stop, to rest a while. It's so physical. It's both tiring and exhilarating. I feel exhausted and alive.
After a long pause, I shoot more. You can't do many though, it's too overwhelming, stupefying.

We have lunch with the hunters who are all local farmers. One, opposite me, looks very Viking, with pale blue eyes and white thick hair, strong teeth and a big grin. 
It starts to rain and I'm offered a golf cart to drive back to my room. This is fun, like a toy car.

That night it's the crayfish party which often takes place outside as it is a messy business. Elisefarm has a summer house with a fireplace in the corner, it's perfect. The long table is decorated in red and white: small pointed cardboard hats, large bibs draped over the back of each chair, crayfish candle holders, crayfish confetti, crayfish streamers and crepe paper cutouts. On each plate, a little pair of pliers and a knife. 

A large bowl of fire engine red crayfish is delivered. We are shown how to eat crayfish: you crack the claws, break off the body, extract the meat and suck the dill stock from the head. I don't eat any. I stick to the smörgåsbord of cheese, crispbread, herring, salad, Västerbotten pie. 
Every so often we sing songs, one to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Then a swig of schnapps and:

'Skål'! Cheers.

My chokeberry schnapps has turned dark purple. Our faces are bright and cheerful in the flickering candlelight. 

That night, in my sleigh bed beside the open window, I have a restless sleep. My body cannot relax, I feel so tired but invigorated. The wind and the rain batter the window, like lead shot.

Day Five:

When showering I notice a large purple bruise on my arm from the kickback on the gun. This makes me feel pretty tough. I want to go on more survival type adventures.
Pack, meet at the hunting lodge for breakfast. 
We see Pontus Dowchan, the singing forager, has joined Instagram and is commenting on all our photos. This makes us giggle. We joke that he will give up foraging to become a social media addict. 
We meet back at the spa to give feedback on the trip.

'It's the best food trip I've ever been on' I say.

Pure Food Camp will be operating commercially from 2019.  
This article, how to type umlauts on a Mac, has been very useful in writing this piece.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Meet Tia Keenan, the cheese queen of Queens

I first met Tia Keenan on my last trip to New York in 2011. We met in the lobby at the Ace Hotel and immediately hit it off. Her particular speciality is cheese - she was the fromager for high end restaurants in New York and created Casellula, a ground-breaking cheese and wine restaurant. Tia pairs cheese with unusual flavours, and creates things like cheese sushi.

In the five years since we met, her life has changed drastically: she now lives in a light and airy house in Queens with her husband Hristo Zisovski, the chef sommelier and wine buyer for a host of top Manhattan restaurants, and they have a beautiful son, Sterio.  

Tia wrote to me to describe her forthcoming first book 'The Art of the Cheese Plate' (Rizzoli, September 2016):

I wanted this book to reflect the spirit that I have always brought to cheese: playful, sexy, whimsical, a little irreverent, but backed up by solid knowledge. 

She added that she wanted the book:

To look really different from many other cheese books, which I think of as kind of visually lazy, you know, relying on the aesthetic cliché of county life: the distressed wood, the casually strewn antique knives, the rose-coloured romance of some Provencal farmhouse or something. 

I arranged the entries by season and by "weight", so we start out with lighter themes and visuals and end with darker, heavier, more aggressive themes and visuals as we progress through the flights in the book.  I don't state this anywhere in the book but that's what I did.  Again, I hope the reader gets the "feeling" of that.  I don't want or need to spell it out. 

I wanted to make something that only I could've made but that is ultimately totally user-friendly and relatable. I want this to be a joyful object for whoever owns it. 

We sat down on a Sunday afternoon at her beautiful house in Queens with a couple of good bottles of wine and a few cheeses and discussed motherhood, pregnancy, taste, politics, Western medicine, the restaurant industry, sexism, well just about everything. 

Talking the difficulties of describing flavour, Tia is inspired by a book The Elements of Taste, which makes a concerted effort to define taste, depicting 'push' and 'pull' elements, along with 'punctuating' flavours and a series of 'platform' tastes such as oceanic, garden, meaty, starchy. Eventually this is the route that Tia would like to go down:

But a book like that would take ten years and it'd kill me.

How do you develop a palate?

Exercise it! By tasting, by tasting, by tasting. By consciously tasting. People aren't mindful. What does this feel like, what does it smell like?

Like a taste gym?  

Now I'm not working in the restaurant, my palate isn't getting as much practice. Also getting older affects it.

Our palates aren't the same during or after pregnancy.   

I had gestational diabetes during my pregnancy. I couldn't eat sugar or carbs. I could only eat protein, cauliflower and brassicas. 

As a result her son loves brassicas, pleading for kale and brussel sprouts in the same way that other kids want spaghetti hoops or sweets. (Bee Wilson goes into this subject in her latest book 'First Bite, how we learn to eat'.)

Tia brings three cheeses to the table, a loaf of dark bread. Any particular cheese we should start with here?

I like washed rind, pungent cheeses. These are three of the same style. This is an American cheese, Grayson.  My friend in upstate New York makes this one, Juvindale. And lastly we have a Portuguese sheep cheese that I have leftover from a photo shoot. So we have cow, cow, sheep.

You started as a waitperson. You saw different aspects of the restaurant industry?

I worked at Tribeca Grill. Because I'd been working in publishing, I showed up to this interview in a suit, a nice suit, Dolce & Gabbana. So they hired me, because they were like, “who shows up to a waiter interview in a D&G suit?”. At that time in restaurants nobody wanted to do the cheese cart. The chef ordered the cheeses but didn't have time to do much else, the pastry chef didn't want to do it. The waiters would serve it but that's all. Nobody wanted to take ownership of it. It was a mess. So I said, 'I'll do it'.
So every restaurant I worked at, they'd say, “does anyone know anything about cheese?” and I'd say yeah I know something about cheese.
Then I heard Danny Meyer was opening a restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art. I was a manager at that point in my career, so I went to an interview for MOMA and the guy interviewing me said, 'We don't have any female captains in the formal dining room. We know you are over-qualified but we'd really like to have a woman on the team. We are trying to be inclusive...' (Tia rolls her eyes, we laugh.) 'This is our type of feminism... we are demoting you! I turned that cart into one of the most respected fine dining cheese programs in the city. That opportunity – to work for Danny, at MOMA, to build and shape an amazing cheese program, it was really great timing and such a gift. It coincided with this amazing time in American cheese. This is the conversation I used to have when I talked about the cheese cart:

'You have American cheese?
'Yes, there are some really fine American cheeses.'
'I would never eat American cheese, it's garbage, the best cheeses are from France.'

That was where we were at. Americans didn't even know we made cheese in this country. So I did that for a couple of years. Then I had the opportunity to open a small cheese and wine bar.  So I quit my fancy job and went for it.  Looking back I had some pretty grandiose plans.  I wanted to reinvent the cheese course – what it looked like, where it was served, who was serving it, who was eating it.  Everything, really.

What kind of things did you introduce into your cheese programme?

I was completely obsessive and particular. I was really hardcore about it. I was training the staff. None of this was happening at that time. I was caring for the cart, like I was taking it really seriously and there was no one doing that. It was intense. But I was rolling that cart around every day and talking to hundreds of people. I knew what I could do. I knew what people would be interested in. I knew how far I could push the eating public. I felt the culture around me changing. At the Modern, the cheese course was on the 150 dollar tasting menu, the chef just trusted me, let me do my thing. He never asked to approve anything. It was really clear to me what I wanted to do. I had a vision. I was so focused about what I wanted to execute. Everyone around me was like “No! That's not gonna work.” (Smiles) But once I put my work in a casual setting, it was immediately successful. It was packed from the very first day.

What sort of things did you innovate?

We did the cheese super casual. We created the cheese boards in front of people, like an open kitchen. Each cheese got its own condiment. The condiments were from Asia, the deep south, from Spain, from every cuisine, from the ethnic markets where I lived in Jackson Heights, Queens. The way I talked about it, the language I used. People challenged me: “But what are people going to eat for dinner?” And I was like, they’re going to have cheese plates!”  This was pretty unheard of.

There are still no restaurants like that in London, except La Fromagerie.

What do you think is happening with American cheese right now?

You can have no discussion about American cheese without understanding the absolute mess that the American food system is. Federal policy subsidises and favours industrial agriculture. There is little support for medium and small scale production farming. Almost none. The entire infrastructure of American food does not help small and even medium scale farming. So you've got a federal government that pays for corn, soy, all that. You've got an infrastructure to move that type of product through the chain and you've got small and medium scale farmers just trying to survive. The family farmer is gone, the Norman Rockwell farmer. The loss of the small & mid-scale farmer is where the American artisanal cheese movement started. It used to be that you could have 150 dairy cows, you could milk those cows, you could sell that milk on the commodity markets and make a living. Then the commodity market bottomed out. The costs of production units sky-rocketed. The amount it costs to feed, water, house your cows is more than you can earn for the milk. You have thousands of farms going under. You have farmers ageing out of that system. Their children don't take over, because they don't want to live in poverty. You have farmers that haven't aged out, but who are forced to sell and who have to enter the workplace. So you get the 50 year old guy, working at Walmart, who was brought up in a farm and farmed for most of his children's lives. He sold the land and ekes out a living at Walmart.  That’s the reality of rural America.  It’s been left to languish in poverty.  

And then you get the people who say lets make a value added product such as cheese. But that's not an easy road. A small segment of the farming population hooked up with people who were inspired on a culinary level. The story of American artisanal cheese was the culinary seduction of young American women. The story of young American women who went to France and ate amazing cheese and came back to America in the 70’s and 80’s and said why can't I get nice cheese here? I'm gonna get five goats and make cheese in my kitchen. It started with goats because they are easy to care for. They are small. Goats have always been women's animals.* One cow, you got enough milk for your family. The wife, the mother, took care of the family cow. Herds of cows- that wasn't women's work. Women kept goats. They were small and ate everything. So they were easier to feed. Goats don't need the massive amount of land that a cow needs. All over the world, in traditional agricultural societies, goats are still women's animals. You don't have to graze them the way you do sheep and cows. So you had these middle-class women, who didn't grow up on farms, who were exposed to the culinary wonder of cheese, and who came into cheese that way.  

And you had the small percentage of farmers who were so stubborn and didn't want to give up their farms, saying: What can I make? Milk isn't enough anymore - I have to make something else. And then that's also connected to the movement and growth of farmers' markets. Realising that the farmer now is really a speciality farmer. Much of the commodity stuff are made in giant agri-business 'farms'. They don't look like farms. They don't resemble the farms of our grandparents. 

This is the 80’s and 90’s. While Willie Nelson is doing FarmAid, they are singing sad songs, nobly so, about the loss of the American farmer. You have these small pockets of people making cheese. That's when we started to lay the foundations for American cheese renaissance. 

Where was this happening? 

Vermont, California, little random places here and there.

Have any of those small cheese companies become successful now?

Yes. Cypress Grove, Vermont Butter & Cheese, these were started by women cheese makers, and now they’re established American artisan cheese companies. But it’s hard. The regulatory bodies of the government have little understanding or respect for real food or traditional foodways. But they decide what happens with food in this country. They’re equipped to assess large factories and industrially produced goods. They don't know what to think when they walk onto a farmstead cheese production. It's been very hard for American cheese, especially raw milk cheese.

Is it still illegal here? Raw milk?

You can have raw milk cheese if it's aged over 60 days but it’s constantly under threat. The FDA is so much more strict about what is imported to this country. European cheeses that I used to have access to were much better than they are now. But that gives an opportunity to American cheeses. I wish that was something deliberate on the part of our government, in the form of tariffs or trade protection, so that American cheeses can compete with European cheeses.  But really the FDA is just bumbling their handling of importation. It's kind of a backdoor way for American cheeses to have a fighting chance, but that's how it happened. There is no food policy in this country that isn't about favouring big business.

We can't get American cheeses in Europe. We can't get Monterey Jack in the UK.

That's mostly Europe's fault. Europe is protecting their own dairy farmers, which I think is wise.  Why should they have to compete with Kraft?  They can’t.  Governments need to protect their traditional foodways.

I say this bread is wonderful. It's like caramelised. (The bread was made by a baker friend of Tia's, Zachary Golper of Bien Cuit Bakery in Brooklyn, who made all the bread for The Art of the Cheese Plate.)

Last time we met we talked about women in food. It was you that told me that women get a lot less backing than men to start new businesses.

That's the context of when I wrote (chef) Amanda Cohen a fan letter. I felt like she was the only female chef that ever spoke honestly about the climate for women in the food world. I sent her an email saying I really admire and respect you because the discourse on this is pathetic. I know there's been a backlash. I do think she has suffered for being... (the implication was an outspoken woman)

I don't know why she's not much much more famous.

That's why! Everyone wants to say: there aren't women chefs because you can't have kids and be in the kitchen. That's a fair assessment. It's very difficult if you have a kid to also run a kitchen. They say women don't like the culture, that it's sexist. That’s true, but I don't think that's the problem. I think we have a means of production problem. Men are 99% of the investors in restaurants and men do not invest money in women. Not just restaurants. Any business. All those other things, despite how hard it is, despite how shitty it is, how hot and hostile it is, there are women who want to do it. It's shitty, it's hard, it's hot, I don't see my kid, but they would still kill for a restaurant. Men don't invest in women. They don't. They invest in other men. And that's how they keep everything to themselves. It's about owning the means of production. The problem is capital. We would rather talk about how hard it is on women than talk about men doing the right thing.

Tom Kerridge, do you know who he is?

Yeah, he's the guy that said all that stupid shit. It's a British tradition for male chefs to be inflammatory, sort of school-boy. Men here don't talk like that. They hide their privilege. 

Most chefs aren't very well educated. I mean Tom Kerridge, I'm sure he's very clever but... He's now presenting loads of BBC cooking shows.

Why are they giving him work?

He's one of the most popular. He does pub food. He's a lad. He also was hugely fat. I'm not talking a bit round, he was obese. You just felt looking at him that he was literally going to die of a heart attack on screen. It was that bad, he was panting. Me and my girlfriends in food were saying no woman who looked like that would ever get a show.

You have to be FABULOUS looking to get a show, if you are a woman.

I never knew food was like this.

Every industry is like this.

It feels like it's gotten worse.

Because there's a lot of money to be made. It's a major form of entertainment now. Can we talk about the British Baking show?

We talk about Mary Berry and Bake Off. I repeat the joke by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler 'that there are still great parts in Hollywood for Meryl Streeps over 60'. There's only broadcasting jobs in food for Mary Berrys over 60. The only people who are allowed to be on TV if they are older and female are thin. Mary Berry is very, very thin.

She's very Julie Andrews.

Plans for the future?

I'd love to make a writing life. I'd like to write more books. Now I have my son, he's my number one. He's my first consideration. I've been pleasantly surprised by being able to do that. I do have a journalism degree but it took me 20 years in the restaurant business to become a writer.

I feel like food is the new rock n roll but actually I feel like the energy has moved past that.

I think food has jumped the shark.

Totally.  It’s very mainstream now, and less interesting in some ways.

We poured wine 'cheers', and Tia talked about getting ill while working in restaurants. Five years ago when we met you were trying to set up another restaurant. You'd been sick, you'd walked away from your restaurant, but you still thought you could do it again?

Yeah. I was doing consulting work for a big corporate client, and really enjoying it. I thought to myself, “Why am I trying to do the same fucked up thing again?”. I started looking at patterns in my life and realized I didn’t want to open another restaurant for myself. I was exhausted all the time, I was freezing cold all the time. I had searing headaches. My body stopped. My hands wouldn't work. I remember getting off the subway once and sitting on the curb, being two blocks from work and I couldn't move. I thought, 'there's something really wrong with me'. But when you're in the restaurant business you are always tired anyway. Hristo was the first one to say there's something wrong (beyond the usual tiredness). 

And you were how old?

30. I went to the doctor and said I need an HIV test. Test me for cancer or AIDS. I got super lucky because my doctor happened to give me the Epstein Barr test. He got the test results back: 'You’re right, you really are sick. Based on the anti-bodies in your blood stream, you've had Epstein Barr for a year and I can't believe it's taken you this long to get to me.' It's a virus - 90% of adults will get Epstein Barr at some point in their lives, but your body fights it and you never get sick. But if your immune system is suppressed, you get it and it can become chronic. It's like an extreme version of mononucleosis.

What's the cure?

The doctor said, 'It’s a virus and there’s no cure.  Try to get more sleep.' And I was like, 'what do you mean try to get more sleep? I can't function. I feel like I'm dying.' But typical of Western medicine, he said, 'There's nothing we can do for you' – he had no idea how to approach a whole body disease. So I went to see an herbalist/acupuncturist, who I still see to this day, who said, 'You give me a year, you do everything I say and you will get better.' At the same time my mum was sick with MS and there is a connection between Epstein Barr and MS. Everyone who has had MS has had Epstein Barr. I went on an extreme holistic cure. I did herbs, acupuncture. I ate no wheat, no dairy, no sugar, no alcohol for a year and a half. I drank half a cup of raw apple cider vinegar every day. At that time I was a compulsive exerciser, one to two hours a day. He said no more exercise. He put me on a sleep diet, you have to sleep the equivalent of 70 hours a week. I said, 'I don't have the time to do that'. That's OK, you do what you can during the week and then on Sunday you stay in bed all day. He put me on sleep exercise. He cured me.

We laugh at the absurdity of a sleep diet. Modern society rewards bipolar 'up' behaviour, I remark. It rewards obsessional drive and extreme hard work.

If you are a sociopath, or a psychopath you get to become president. All of the candidates are sociopaths or psychopaths. Even Hillary. Probably Bernie is the only and even him, I have to question the mental health of anybody who is a lifetime politician. And the restaurant industry rewards that behaviour.Then my mum died.

What of?

MS.

How long did she have MS for?

20 years.

Tia pauses and clarifies:

She didn't really have MS. It's a syndrome. There's no blood test.

Isn't there? I'm shocked.

No. She didn't really have MS, she had some sort of auto-immune disease. My mother had cancer three times. She had scarlet fever. She was not a healthy person her whole life. She also had mental illness. On her death certificate, she died of a heart attack. My mother died with no intestine, no breasts, no joints in any of her feet, several joints gone, no gall bladder. My mother was a medical... by the time she died... there was nothing left. She was pickled, stewed, screwed and stitched. Because Western medicine doesn't know how to deal with a whole body disease. They were treating one thing at a time. So what did she die from? I dunno. Drugs, disease, MS. We could name 10 things that killed her. So that was a huge time in my life.

When did you meet Hristo?

My father died in 2004, my first husband died in 2006, I met Hristo in 2007, my mother died in 2009. I opened the restaurant as a way to not fall apart from all of that. My husband died '06, my restaurant opened Spring '07. The restaurant was the way I kept myself alive. I just wanted to disappear. I was so heart broken. Then I met Hristo. I didn't find Hristo attractive at first. I thought he was just another guy, asking for my number. But he had patience, an inner fortitude like, 'Ok I'll wait for you'. He never pushed me. He was courting me and I didn’t even realize it until I’d fallen in love.

That's so sweet. 

After this we had a companionable snooze on respective sofas. It was the perfect Sunday afternoon, even though Tia felt a little guilty - 'normally I'm cleaning the house on Sunday'.

*Background reading: Kirstin Jackson talks about small cheese producers, how goats are women's animals, in 'It's not you, it's Brie: Unwrapping America's Unique Culture of Cheese' (Perigee Books 2012).

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