legends · 4 min read ·
Cave Log
A cheesemaker's cave log follows a shelf of wheels that grow warm, red, and then begin to speak.
**Hallin Dairy — Maturing Cave Log (affineur: Marguerite Pell)**
*The cave is a natural limestone chamber under the dairy, 9 °C, 94% humidity. Wheels are turned, brushed and washed with brine weekly. Record condition and any faults.*
· · ·
**2 Oct.** Cave in good order. 212 wheels of Hallin Blue. Rind developing well. Fine bloom. Mites in the usual numbers.
**9 Oct.** Turned and washed. Wheels on shelf 14 are slow to ripen. Rind slightly damp.
**16 Oct.** Shelf 14, wheels 6 to 9: the rinds are blooming a colour I haven't seen. A deep red-brown, like old wine. The smell is rich and meaty. I tasted a plug from wheel 6. It was extraordinary: salt and smoke and sweetness, with a long finish that tasted, I thought, of a warm room.
· · ·
**23 Oct.** Shelf 14 has spread. Wheels 3 to 12 are red now. I have seen a fine web of white hyphae across the stone. It runs along the wall in a line.
I took a swab and sent it to the lab. The result came back in two days. *Mixed bacteria and moulds, all food-safe, in normal proportions.* Nothing unusual.
The lab report did not mention the temperature. I measured it with a hand probe. 9 °C on shelf 1, 11 °C on shelf 10, and 37 °C on shelf 14.
· · ·
**30 Oct.** The cave smells of bread. I mean a whole bakery, the smell of loaves in an oven. It comes up out of the floor of shelf 14. Wheel 9 had swelled until its cloth was tight. I laid a hand on it and felt a slow, steady pulse.
I did not cut it. I did not turn it. I closed the door of the cave and went upstairs.
**6 Nov.** I am not going to enter the cave again alone. But the dairy's cheese buyer, Mr. Hanif, came by to taste, and asked to see wheel 9. I took him down. He put on his gloves and drew a plug from the wheel.
He looked at the plug in the light. In the pale paste, bright against the red, was a fingerprint. A pad and whorls, perfectly formed, with the faint line of a scar across one ridge.
· · ·
**13 Nov.** Mr. Hanif says that every wheel on shelf 14 has a fingerprint inside. He says they are different. He says he would like to buy the lot. He says he has a customer.
I asked what the customer wanted with them. He said: "They say it tastes like home."
I am an affineur. I know what makes a cheese taste like home. It is a culture, a particular bacterium, on a particular rind, and it takes years to establish. The bacterium on shelf 14 is not in the lab's database. It has not been seen before.
· · ·
**20 Nov.** I went down in the night. I had to see. The cave was warm. The air was thick with the smell of bread and salt, and the light of my torch was swallowed by the walls.
On shelf 14 the cheeses had broken their cloths. They lay in a row, round, red, steaming, and each had split along one side. In the opening there was a soft pale paste, and in it a mouth. A small, wet, perfectly formed human mouth, lips parted, moving.
They were talking to each other. A murmur. A very low murmur, sweet and slow. In a language I knew, but could not place. The language of the place I was born.
· · ·
**27 Nov.** Mr. Hanif collected the cheeses this morning in a refrigerated van. He paid in cash. He loaded them himself, with great care, one at a time. I saw him pause at wheel 9, and lift it, and hold it to his ear.
He said: "That one's awake."
I helped him to close the van doors. As he drove off, I thought I heard from inside it, over the engine, a faint sound. A chorus of mouths. They were singing a song I had not heard since I was young, in the kitchen of my grandmother's house, when she told me that cheese is only milk that has learned to keep.
I went down to the cave. The shelves were empty. The floor was dry. The white web on the wall was gone. In its place, from end to end of the chamber, in a neat line, hung a row of small round loaves of bread, each one wrapped in cloth, each one marked in flour with my name.