A Taste of Family Ties in North Carolina
By Lorrie Baumann
My father was born in Durham, North Carolina. He enlisted in the Air Force and married a California girl while he was stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and I grew up understanding that duty requires that you go where you’re sent. Today, I have a son and his family who live in Reno, Nevada. My daughter married a man from Kentucky and took her family with her as her employment took her from Kentucky to Iowa and then to Kansas and on to Raleigh, North Carolina, before she landed most recently in Auburn, Alabama. My seven-year-old grandson has already lived in four states, and he’s very likely to live in a few more over his lifetime.
Portia McKnight declines to be part of this kind of economically-driven diaspora. She sees its results all around her home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a part of the North Carolina Triangle region that encompasses the university cities of Durham, the home of Duke University; Raleigh, the home of North Carolina State University; and Chapel Hill, the home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the nation’s first public university. Those three universities, together with local governments and business interests, developed North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park in 1959, and since then, the area has been a prominent hub for high-tech research and development that has created an economic boom for the region and the resulting growth of a diverse, highly educated population that comes to North Carolina from around the world.
McKnight grew up an hour and a half away in North Carolina’s Sandhills, came to Chapel Hill to go to college and just never left. These days, she feels like she’s become a stranger in a strange land. “The people who live here are not the people who grew up here,” she said. “I regret that we’ve lost that.”
She and her partner Flo Hawley are countering that sense of loss by making cheeses that are a stake in the ground, anchoring their Chapel Hill Creamery to their cows, their neighbors, their community and their shared history. “We would like to be part of a movement where people eat closer to home,” she said. “I regret that there’s not more regionality…. Having our cheese as part of regional cuisine helps us hold onto that.”
Most people who’ve never lived in North Carolina and shopped for their food at the local farmers markets have never tasted a Chapel Hill Creamery cheese and never will. That’s all right with McKnight. “We provide a local product for a local community,” she said. “I don’t think either of us is particularly interested in selling our product in Austin or Chicago. We don’t have any connection to those places.”
Hawley and McKnight had both worked at Whole Foods for almost 20 years when they decided that they were ready to stop being just a link in their local food supply chain and start being an anchor. “We wanted to create the product that we wanted to represent and sell,” McKnight said. They took themselves to the University of Guelph for a short course on cheesemaking and then did some apprenticeships at Capriole and Goat Lady Dairy. McKnight worked for a year on a dairy farm, an experience that persuaded her that making the best cheese required the kind of control over their milk supply that’s only possible for the farmer who owns the animals. “Dairy farms have been going out of business very quickly,” McKnight said. “If we didn’t have the animals, I’d be very worried about that.”
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When I visited the farm in August, 2019, the temperature was 105 degrees, and there was only the slightest of breezes. Fryer, the handsome Chapel Hill Creamery ox who pulls local children around in a wagon during the annual Piedmont Farm Tour sponsored by the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, and the farm’s 30 milking cows were shaded up in the barn, some ruminating and some just panting gently in the heat. When I took my camera out of its case, Fryer took notice, stopped panting and turned his head to pose. He’s used to seeing people pointing cameras at him, McKnight commented.
Posted on the wall of the barn is the sign that announced that the dairy is Animal Welfare Approved. McKnight and Herd Manager Allison Sturgill, who’s been looking after the Jerseys for the past 14 years, regard the cows as executive members of the team – since they produce all the milk that goes into the Chapel Hill Creamery cheeses, it’s their work, and the care they receive, that controls whether the cheesemaking team’s work week will be five or six days, and to some extent, what cheeses they’ll be making. When there’s enough milk to require a sixth work day during the week, the cheese that’s made on that extra work day is likely to be Calvander, the aged Asiago-style cheese made in a 10-pound wheel and aged at least seven months to make Chapel Hill Creamery’s most robust cheese and its best-selling. McKnight and Hawley like to grate it over pasta or a risotto when they’re cooking at home. It’s a three-time best-of-show winner at the North Carolina State Fair, and it shares its name with one of the roads I traveled to reach the creamery from my daughter’s home in Cary, a Raleigh suburb.
As I nervously followed Google’s directions to reach the farm, I’d been reassured to pass the landmarks for which the Chapel Hill Creamery cheeses are named: the street sign for Calvander Road; the Calvander Crossroads, the site of the 19th-century Calvin Andrews schoolhouse; and Hickory Grove Missionary Baptist Church, which inspired the name for Chapel Hill Creamery’s Hickory Grove. Even though I didn’t know exactly where I was, as I followed the winding two-lane roads, the signs told me that I was at least in the right neighborhood for cheese.
When I reached the creamery, McKnight had set a table with samplings of her cheeses. Hickory Grove is a monastery-style cheese with raclette flavor and melting qualities. It’s made in a four-pound wheel. When McKnight wants a grilled cheese sandwich or even just a snack, Hickory Grove is the cheese she’ll probably reach for. It won third place in its class at the 2018 American Cheese Society Judging and Competition and has won multiple awards at the North Carolina State Fair and a 2012 bronze medal at the World Jersey Cheese Awards.
Carolina Moon is Chapel Hill Creamery’s interpretation of a Camembert – a soft-ripened cheese with glorious buttery mushroom flavors that, in the heat of the day, flowed like cream over the water crackers that we used to scoop it up as McKnight and I shared a tasting. Carolina Moon was named best-of-show at the 2013 North Carolina State Fair and won a silver award at the 2012 World Jersey Cheese Awards in addition to gold and silver awards at the 2014 and 2012 North Carolina State Fairs. “When the Carolina Moon is at its peak, I just feel like you can’t beat that,” McKnight said.
She’s also very partial to Chapel Hill Creamery’s Dairyland Farmers Cheese, a fresh, moist cheese with a hint of citrus flavor. Winner of the first place award for a fresh unripened cheese at the 2018 American Cheese Society Competition and Judging, McKnight likes to put it on scrambled eggs with hot pepper jelly. “If I make chili, I’m going to want to put Farmers Cheese on top of that,” she said. “I’ve been known to put it on a peanut butter sandwich.”