One Last Big Trip: A Sicilian Shepherd cheese party and Filippo’s hands.
^MT 25^OLBT^ opening ceremony
Before we kick things off I’d like to announce I’m planning a guided tour of cheesemakers in northern Spain this September with my friends at Aborigens. Check out this link and my instagram for details.
This post is an opening ceremony for the 4th Trip I’ll do under the banner of Milk Trekker, the only flag I find worthy of flying. It’s a black flag, with a yellow cheese wheel in the middle. And like all flags, it deserves to be burned, composted, or used to wrap something that has real value, such as a child, puppy, loaf of bread, or wheel of cheese. Maybe, It’s not a flag at all, but a picnic blanket. In my vision of the world, we will pull down all flags, and repurpose them as picnic blankets, from which the foods of a redeemed humanity will be served, free at last.
This 4th trip has a name. Milk Trekker 25: One Last Big Trip. “Big Trip” because I’ll be traveling for the next 8 months, until November at least. “One Last” because I think that after this, I’m gonna put this thing to rest. Bury it. And then, for the first time in 116 years, I’m going to try to get some sleep. You see, I’m plotting the death of Milk Trekker. He’s getting too big for his britches. He’s done what he said he would never do, and broke the Peter Pan vow. He’s grown up, and is forgetting how to fly. No longer sleeping in parks, barns, sheep camps, and abandoned buildings. No longer keeping it real. He’s become a bit of a posh old man, teaching in fancy kitchens, writings book and shit. I’m gonna kill him, set his soul free, so he can enter his next incarnation, whatever that may be.
I’ve struggled for a while now with the fact that it’s Trekk-ER, implying one person. It’s been more than that from awhile now. I’m interested in collaborations, in instigation, in starting fires, planting seeds, and encouraging others to pursue the unrealistic yearnings of their hearts. I want to move from being Milk Trekker to participating in milk or cheese trekk-ING. Which is an action, rather than a person. Because this isn’t supposed to be about me. It’s about the people I meet, the knowledge holders, the families whose earthquakes of hospitality have shook me out of my culture’s selfishness and spiritual amnesia. It’s about what we as a species are capable of becoming again. With that in mind, I invite you to come along for this final wild ride.
^MT25 ^ OLBT^.
If Allah and the other gods of my pantheon are willing, it will be delicious, over the top, boundary dissolving, trite, ill-planned, absurd, and tragically beautiful.
The first stop is a return one, to the enchanted island called Sicilia, where I landed in the previous episode. Sometimes to go forward, you have to start by going back, retracing your steps, remembering, picking up a little piece of your heart that you left behind as you scatter a trail out of the crumbling loaf of your bread soul around the planet, hoping the birds leave a few crumbs.
It starts here and now because I was invited to teach at a rural cooking school called Anna Tasca Lanza, as part of a 6 week intensive program called Cook the Farm. My role was to give an overview of cheesemaking, introduce what starter cultures and rennet are, and describe how I see Sicilian cheese fitting into the cuisine and agriculture of the island. We jumped straight in, visiting a farmstead sheep cheese producer as he cut the morning’s curd. My first glance as we pulled up to the caseificio told me Filippo is the real deal, dressed in all white, a holy padre from the church of cheese. His hands display the tell-tale traits of someone who has hand milked for decades. I am guilty of glorifying hand milking, but there is little glamour in the cruel reality of sausage fingers and the loss of grip that so many shepherd cheesemakers suffer from. The lifestyle tends to wear one’s body down, but there is also some captivating beauty and realness in this decay, in someone who is falling apart doing what they love. Why are we given a body, if not to use it to bring beautiful things into existence? To temper it, to work it, to embrace its inevitable decay? Filippo won my heart when he stated the matter bluntly. “Cheese is magic”.
We’re both followers of the same sect.
We pray to the same fickle gods.
His well-seasoned digits raked the curds briefly, as he lifted a handful and looked closely, reading some script invisible to the rest of us. As he placed them gently into molds, I couldn’t stop watching his hands. Those hands knew exactly what to do. There was no hesitation, no wasted movement. A recipe is inscribed on each bone of his fingers, and the most powerful X-ray couldn’t decipher it, would look right past it. I admired the fatherly way he looked at the wheels as they slowly took shape under the delicate touch of rough, working hands. I’ve seen this look, felt this aura of care so many times, it’s so natural and right. To others it may just look like a man making cheese, but I saw a priest clad in white performing transubstantiation. I nearly crossed myself. I could have cried. Maybe I should have, but like a fool I held it together. This first cheesemaker visit of the trip was a powerful reminder of what I’m fighting for.
Im fighting for Filippo’s hands.
I told the assembled group of students how fortunate we all were to be here, to be allowed to observe a maestro in his studio, performing the daily ritual of turning milk into cheese. I gave my now well practiced spiel, and we tasted Filipo’s cheeses. Superb fresh tuma, primo sale, and an experimental softie that had a light smear rind. The real treat was when Filipo solemnly cut into a massive aged wheel. He told us it is his best cheese, and he doesn’t sell it. It’s for his home, guests, and friends. This surprised me, and is an inversion of a common phenomenon I had observed where makers often sell their best cheese, and eat the subpar, the defective, the seconds, and the ricotta.
The pride reverberated off the twin handled knife as he used stout arms to break a year-old rustic round in two. It was mild and clean with flavors of lamb broth, nuts, and carmelized sugars. Sweet, unassuming. Easy to be around. Just like Filipo.
The next day, we visited a sheep farm on top of a hill, arriving during morning milking. We spoke with the genial shepherds as they performed the task of hand milking that was so routine that they hardly had to look, and could carry on a conversation as their bodies went through the rehearsed motions on autopilot. Everyone got a chance to sit at the stanchion and milk out a sheep, something most humans will never get to do. Drinking the warm thick goddess juice out of a plastic cup, I sighed as if I had submerged my cold body in a hot bathtub. It tasted like sheep. It tasted like a sheep farm on a bright, cool, damp morning on Sicily. I was immediately comforted and felt nearly sedated, slipping back into my body, realizing my feet were firmly on the ground, and that no matter how fast the world may spin, I can never fall off. I can only fall further into her embrace. Further in love with life, even if we fight every now and then.
Then, after coffee with chocolate cigarettes and a fair bit of casual bullshitting, after the flock had gone been let out to pasture, we were engulfed in the slow burning frenzy of a shepherd party. Although I don’t really party, it’s different when the suns still out, and you’re in a foreign country with crusty shepherds who have way too much meat on their war-torn hands. I live for these ceremonial rituals of dirtbag decadence. The courtyard filled with the aromas swirling off purple spring onions clothed in pancetta, and multiple languages singing and laughing the world into existence. Cheesy bread and garage-cured olives washed down with countless bottles of white wine led to an army of lamb chops dripping their divine fat onto the flame.
I over-served myself.
We listened as the elders told stories with their hands.
These days make me feel almost too alive, and my head drips a salty whey of tears, as my backpack fills with memories made with new friends, most of whom I’ll never see again.
Filippo, the shepherd crew, all the students and people who hosted me at Anna Tasca Lanza. The dogs, cats, and birds in the trees. Everyone I’m about to collide with on this journey. I love you all and sprinkle blessings on your eggshell minds, praying for the baby birds of our lives, which all rest in the same nest, protected from the foxes below by the wing beats of our great sky mother. She is the only defense we need, as we learn to take flight, to feed on the bread crumb trail of our past, fuel for growth, into the strange and beautiful birds we are destined to be.
From my dusty feathers to yours,
Trevor
that is mighty fine and powerful writing, thank you for sharing it.
Beautiful - every bit of it. Bon voyage.