“Say vacca, please, not mucca!”, although both vacca and mucca mean cow in Italian. These are the first words of my telephone conversation with Fabio Grasselli, the owner of Cascina Lago Scuro, as I’m making plans to visit. Fabio is right, you have to understand things thoroughly in order to do them well, starting with the names.
I reach Stagno Lombardo early in the morning, a town among the endless plains around Cremona, the small city in the Lombardy region about fifty miles southeast of Milan. I stop for a moment to admire the farmstead, whose presence was already been documented before the year 1000. It stands out elegantly and poignantly against the still-dark sky. Fabio and his wife Paola greet me with an espresso and many smiles, the smiles of people who are serene and satisfied with what they do.
They chose to work here together in 1990 after Fabio inherited the business and decided to see to its management, unlike all his ancestors, who had always entrusted the management to others. Paola tells me, “This farm more or less fell on his head. He was studying to become a doctor, but I think he actually already knew we’d end up here. He simply forgotten to tell me about it – you know, the kind of information that gets shared on a need-to-know basis... I only gave him one rule: it had to be organic.” In 1993 they got the certification that guarantees everything they produce today: hay, milk, meat, vegetables...
It’s seven in the morning, we go out into the brisk air and can hear a few moos greeting us from the stable. The cows are waiting for us. They proceed in order, five at a time in a hierarchy that only they know, precise and unchanging, toward the milking room. I imagined it would be a long process, but in a just a few minutes the cows are back in the barn enjoying breakfast, a blend of fodder produced on the farm and flaked grains. All organic, of course.
We move to the small cheese factory created in 1998, put on aprons and white rubber boots and start making cheese with Marta, Fabio’s smiling assistant. They make many types of cheese here at Lago Scuro: caciotta, scamorza, robiola, mozzarella, latteria... Today we’re making a blue cheese called Blu del Lago (Blue of the Lake), which looks like gorgonzola, as well as mozzarella and ricotta with the whey that results from the processing of the Blu del Lago. We collect the fresh, raw and non-microfiltered milk in cauldrons. We add incubated milk to one, which is used to start the fermentation. It’s prepared every day by heating the milk to 115 °F for 12 hours, to avoid using the ready-made “starter powders” common in industrial cheese production. Along with the starter milk, we add rennet and Penicillium roqueforti. We heat it to 102 °F. After 30 minutes, with a sort of long ruler called a spada, or sword, we cut the clotted mass that has been created into two inch squares and let it sit for another 30 minutes. Then we break the squares into portions the size of a hazelnut with a tool called a lira, or lyre, because it looks like the musical instrument. We collect the curd which has by now separated from the whey and distribute it on a large perforated table covered with gauze. It will sit here to dry for several hours before being placed in the Blu del Lago wrapping. After two to three months of aging it will be ready.
We take a break with Paola to go eat some vegetables from their garden, accompanied by bread made with their flour. They tell me how raising cows and having a pasture, paradoxically, are not necessarily two things that are connected, even when everything is done organically. All you have to do is guarantee a certain number of square meters of space per animal and organic feed to earn the certification. They very decisively chose to have a pasture here, 37 acres where the cows are free to graze from March to November, even at night, deciding what to eat and where to run and rest. This is why Fabio’s cheeses are guaranteed by ANFOSC, the National Association of Cheeses Under the Sky.
Everything has its own time on the farm, and before returning to the cheese factory to turn the wheels of cheese and to the stable for the second milking, Fabio and Paola go to rest a bit. I take this opportunity to visit the garden and the chicken coop, which is almost empty because the hens are all rummaging about, some in the stable, some in the farmyard, some near the “farm-nursery,” a small daycare that welcomes 15 children every day. As I walk around I think the idea at the base of this multi-purpose company has solid foundations: every activity is connected, like the parts of a single body. Everything is alive.
Before saying goodbye, I ask Fabio which job he prefers most out of everything he does: “Making the hay,” he answers. “If I could, I’d be a collector of hay.”