You’re in an old house and you notice something odd – a wooden appliance. This wooden relic has left me with at least some food for thought. The wood polished and solid, its stepped mechanical function suggests a maker intended it to have practical utility used in an arduous, repetitive activity. This object is not just some random household utility object. It is a tool with tangible purpose. This wooden relic transformed raw materials on earth into something else, something delicious.
This wooden press was how homemakers compressed curds into a small fixed and fragrant block of cheese by placing just enough pressure to squeeze out and hold excess whey, but this mechanism could make any type and sized cheese. This wooden relic playing homage to family recipes, regional traditions. This was a slow build. If one wanted to envision, weighing down curds, hour by hour, until the perfect texture and proper density depth was achieved.
It was a craft that intimately engaged people with their food. It was a craft with skill, time, intention, and heavy direct physical effort. Here in the basement, hard up against me, is this old cheese press, memory from another time. At a time of equity: this wooden object reminds me of homesteading: I have lost little faith that my cupboards have some potential for self-sufficiency and culinary imagination, I still catch a whiff of the aroma of cheese making wandering around the house. This wooden relic is a testament to the past.
