“American cheesemaking is where winemaking was in the late nineteen-seventies,” the food writer Clark Wolf says. Only in the past fifteen years has a generation of former lawyers and first-time farmers, dot-com dropouts and back-to-the-landers begun to develop true artisanal cheeses. But for nearly a century that tower of curd has been a purely industrial product-formulated, manufactured, extruded, and dispensed with the kind of machinery usually reserved for making plastic. The United States has long produced more cheese than any other country: eight and a half billion pounds in 2001 alone, enough to stuff the Sears Tower, like an enormous celery stick, four times over. in microbiology, even as she helps shepherd the country through a culture war of an unusual sort: a war of cheese. Yet her secular interests have only widened and deepened over the years. In 1985, she took her final vows to remain at Regina Laudis for the rest of her life, earning the title of Mother. Although she has occasionally been given permission to travel, she must spend all other nights and many hours of daily prayer behind the wooden scrims and walls of the cloister. Mother Noella has spent twenty-nine of her fifty-one years in the abbey.
She was a little miffed, a few years ago, when a French newspaper ran a story headlined “ she does research by day and sings blues in the churches of the jura by night.” One of her best friends was a blues musician, but that can give rise to its own misconceptions. Yet when Noella thinks of herself, which seems to happen only rarely, she does so in terms both more scientific and more spiritual: as an authority on cheese molds, or as a singer of gospel and Gregorian chant. Were you to point out that she just finished filming a documentary in France called “The Cheese Nun,” you would not be incorrect.
And, yes, she lives in a Benedictine cloister, the Abbey of Regina Laudis, in Bethlehem, Connecticut. It’s true that she makes cheese-a New England variation on the unctuous Saint-Nectaire of Auvergne. If it’s all the same to you, Mother Noella Marcellino would rather you didn’t call her the cheese nun.
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