Oh sure, I’ve tasted other cheeses," Scott Fletcher is saying. "A few are pretty good. You know, there are some Cheddars that are made by fellows sitting in front of computers pressing buttons. They make more in a week than we make in a year. But their hands never touch cheese. I could never make cheese that way."

Fletcher is in his cheesemaking kitchen in a clapboard building on a country road in Grafton, a small village in the hills of southern Vermont. In a large steel vat, fresh milk from brown Jersey cows is being heated
- the beginning of a process that will bring it to the point where he will consider it cheese.

Wearing starched white coveralls belted with a plastic apron, calf-high rubber boots, and a white hard hat that identifies him as "Fletch", this man who has been crafting Cheddar cheese by hand for the Grafton Village Cheese Company for thirty years gently lowers his forefinger into the milk, to which cultures and rennet have been added. It is gradually becoming quite like a custard. He extends his finger under the surface and lifts it out. "When it splits in a line, it’s ready," he says. "That’s how you tell. Few more minutes."

Fletcher is a big man with big shoulders, his face wreathed by reddish hair and beard, his eyes squints of satisfaction because he is happy with this morning’s flow of milk. "It’s all Jersey," he says. "Vermont Jersey, the best there is for Cheddar - high butterfat, high protein. And it’ll give us more cheese today. A good day."

Most of Fletcher’s working days are good, he suggests, because he is a contented man. He is unassuming, yet his pride in his job as head cheesemaker is evident. "It’s been a fine job for me. They say it builds muscles", he says, grinning. "It does. Never been laid off. We get busier every year, and every day there is the satisfaction of the finished cheese. I look around at the cheeses and I say I did that, with my hands. Then, when the cheeses get that two years of age... Man!"

Fletcher has never worked at anything else, never lived anywhere else but in this little niche of Vermont, except for his time in the Air Force. He was born in nearby Townshend, then lived in the crossroads town of Cambridgeport and later in Saxtons River, both tiny junctions along Route 121, the winding lane that leads to Grafton. Now forty-seven, he came to the cheese company in 1967. - His arrival coincided with a little wedge of Vermont history. Grafton, settled in 1780, had prospered as a farming and sheep-raising center and was once important enough to have had Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ulysses Grant, and Rudyard Kipling stop over on their stagecoach journeys from Boston to Montreal. The village also became home to what was then called the Grafton Cooperative Cheese Factory, created in 1892; local dairy farmers delivered their milk to the factory and received cheeses in return. In 1912 the cooperative was destroyed by fire, and cheesemaking ceased in that corner of Vermont. Grafton itself underwent an economic decline. Then, in 1963, a nonprofit organization called the Windham Foundation set about restoring nearly half of the town’s buildings. Four years later, with the help of the University of Vermont, the foundation rebuilt the cheesemaking facility, with steel instead of wood vats, and asked a local farmer and cheesemaker, Edward McWilliams, to reestablish the factory.

"That was Ed Senior", Fletcher says. "He hired me right out of high school. I graduated on a Wednesday, began full time the next Monday. You know, I didn’t really like cheese as a kid", he adds, laughing. "But a job was a job. Ed Senior showed me what to do and I worked with him and Ed Junior for years." Senior has passed away, Junior is retired, and Fletcher has moved into the top spot.

Just a minute", Fletcher says. Again he inserts his finger into the vat and lifts it out. "Almost there, almost there." Fletcher has been in his kitchen this morning since just after dawn to taste and touch, to begin the process that turns Jersey cows’ milk into blocks of Cheddar. The milk has been pumped, 1,500 gallons of it, into a steel vat and heated. "We don’t pasteurize the milk. Close to it, but it’s still considered raw. That’s the best for the cheese." He has brought the milk to 155 degrees Fahrenheit, cooled it to 80 degrees, then added culture-bacteria that starts fermentation. The mix is stirred by large rotating paddles for an hour and then rennet is incorporated. "We used to use animal rennet," he says, "from calves’ stomachs. We stopped that ten years ago because we couldn’t find it easily and it’s very expensive. Now we use one that is not animal-based."

The rennet has transformed the milk into a soft mass, and Fletcher draws curd knives through it. These are steel screenlike frames that break up the mass, allowing the curds to begin forming and the whey to separate from the solids. He allows this altered milk - "it’s still milk" - to rest for fifteen minutes then heats it back up to 100 degrees to finish "cooking" while paddles stir the mixture to prevent it from sticking.

"I go by time and temperature", he says, "and feel. I can feel when the curd is cooked." The acidity has to be just right, too, and he tests it periodically by drawing off a sample and measuring it chemically. When the whey has separated from the curds, Fletcher fishes out a bit of curd. "When they’re cooked right, these curds will bounce when you drop them," he says, and to prove it he drops the piece to the red tile floor. It bounces.

The whey is then extracted from the vat and pumped into tanker trucks to be used as animal feed and fertilizer. -The curds are raked against the sides of the vat, becoming cohesive clumps that Fletcher cuts with a twin-bladed knife into long slabs. "It’s beginning to look like cheese," he says. For the next ninety minutes, the slabs are turned so that they release as much whey as possible. "If tear a piece it will have a texture like cooked chicken breast," he says. He does so and pronounces himself satisfied. "We can call it cheese now", he says.

He then "mills" the slabs by feeding them through a multibladed cutter that slices them into small white lengths, rubbery to the touch and with the look of potatoes cut to be French fried. As the paddles turn these cut curds over, Fletcher strews salt over them with a motion he describes as "feeding the chickens." Has he ever studied cheesemaking as theory, I ask. "No, never read about it. Never studied it. Learned about it from Ed McWilliams, Senior. Just did it." Has he ever visited Cheddar in England, the font of all Cheddar? "Nope." Had he an interest in going? "Nope, I’d rather hunt and fish. Had a great trip to Alaska recently." He smiles slightly.

"Taste this," he urges me, changing the subject and handing me one of the stubby chunks of curd, slick and shining with dissolved salt. "We call this squeaky Cheddar." And so it is, chewy and with a sweet, defined taste that I would associate with the best of mozzarella, a bufala, that one might find fresh on a morning in southern Italy.

The final step is to shovel these salted curds into steel "hoops", rectangular boxes that are actually molds. The curds will be pressed in them overnight and any residual moisture will be drained off. The cheese curds and the hoop together weigh sixty-one pounds significant bits of lifting, particularly when each vat of milk will yield thirty of them. "I told you about muscles, didn’t I?" Fletcher says. "When the moisture is drained and the cheese removed from its hoop, it will be a block of Cheddar weighing about forty-two pounds."

These blocks are moved into cool curing rooms and allowed to age either for a year, to become Premium Cheddar, or for two years, to become Classic Reserve Extra Sharp Cheddar. The Cheddars are white, yet yellowish because of their high butterfat. Grafton’s Classic Reserve has in recent years won a host of gold and silver statuettes, medals, and blue ribbons. "We also have a block of eight year-old," he adds. It’s reserved for staff snacks and occasionally for guests.

"How is it?" I ask.

"Good, real good," Fletcher replies. "Gets smaller by the week."

The blocks of aged Cheddar are cut for waxing and packaging into blocks ranging in size from four ounces to twenty pounds. They also mold two pound cylinders called "baby longhorns" and twenty-three-pound "daisy wheels," which usually are earmarked for country stores. - How much of his own cheese does Fletcher eat? "Oh, I nibble when I’m cutting it. Not too much, I guess. I love cheese and crackers, and macaroni and cheese. And you take some of that squeaky Cheddar and you throw it on top of a pizza and you really have something."

What he fancies most, however, is what he calls a "cheese dream sandwich," his own creation. "I take two pieces of white bread, dip them one side only" into a batter of eggs, milk, and sugar, then brown them on a griddle. Then I put a couple of slices of Cheddar on one piece, cover it with the other, and grill the sandwich until the cheese melts. Then I eat it with maple syrup. It’s great!"

Neither of Fletcher’s sons, "Scott the Third" and Gregory, has any interest in becoming a cheesemaker, although Scott worked here one summer when he was going to college. "The boys just like to eat it," says Fletcher. He is not a demonstrative man and has not tried, except in an occasional, perfunctory way, to communicate to them the immense satisfaction he experiences as each vat of milk becomes, under his hands, blocks of extraordinary Cheddar cheese. "If they decide they want to, they’ll do it."

The vice president of the Grafton Village Cheese Company, Peter Mohn, who confesses that he is awed by Fletcher and by the effortless manner in which he works, tells a tale of how one morning he raced into the cheesemaking kitchen to share with Fletcher the news that the Classic Reserve Cheddar had won its first international gold trophy. "Scott looked up at me through his glasses and said, ‘I always knew it was good cheese.’"

by Fred Ferretti

This article originally appeared in Gourmet. ^© Fred Ferretti