The discreet Cowgirls

I didn't take this picture of some Cowgirl Creamery cheese. 

After reading this piece, I had the idea that Cowgirl Creamery Cooks by Sue Conley and Peggy Smith was a hybrid cookbook/memoir and decided to read it cover to cover. But it turns out the book isn’t a memoir at all. The narrative backstory is roughly eight pages long, which is a shame because there's enough spicy material crammed in here for ten Tom Robbins novels. 

See if you don't agree: After graduating from the University of Tennessee, Sue Conley and Peggy Smith spent six months driving cross country in a baby blue ‘67 Chevy with $700 cash in their pockets. They stopped at county fairs and music festivals and along the way picked up a jazz singer named Rhiannon who invited them to crash with her in San Francisco where she lived in an old Victorian with a circus juggler. They arrived in 1976 and the two young women threw themselves into the nascent Bay Area food scene. Sue worked at one of the last Basque boarding houses in San Francisco and then opened a diner in Berkeley. Peggy became a chef at Chez Panisse. Eventually the pair started making cheese in an old barn in Point Reyes Station, one of the prettiest places on earth. Their cheese is renowned and they have been hugely successful.

See? Interesting. 

But they clearly didn't want to write in any kind of detail about their lives. I respect that, but, as a reader, I'm sorry. Cowgirl Creamery Cooks isn’t a memoir/cookbook. It's more of a cheese primer/cookbook. 

And as a cookbook, so far so good. Yesterday, I made recipe #1, a deconstructed French onion soup that they call “panade with gruyere and onion-garlic confit.” Fancy name for a super-easy soup. You saute onion and garlic until soft and then simmer this with some parmesan broth. When it’s hot, pour the soup over bread and shredded gruyere. It’s very similar in principle to the boiled water soup I made a few weeks ago.

Here’s how it went over:

4:45 p.m. - text from Isabel: What is for dinner?

4:46 - text to Isabel: Onion soup

5:40 - text from Mark: I’ll be back at 6:40 and am hoping to watch college football finish. 

6:15 - decide to eat on my own since Mark will be watching football and Isabel hasn't surfaced.  Invite Owen to join me. He isn’t hungry. Eat soup. Like soup. 

6:50 - serve Mark and Owen soup. Hear that Isabel has to decided to dine at Cheesecake Factory. Retire to bedroom to read NOS4A2. 

9:15  - go upstairs for a cold drink. Ask: So what did you think of the soup?

Mark: It was ok. It was kind of hard to eat.

Me: Hard to eat? In what way was it hard to eat? 

Mark: The way onion soup is always hard to eat. All the bits. Kind of slippery.

Me: Onion soup is not hard to eat. 

Mark: Ok, don’t get annoyed. You asked what I thought and I told you.

Me: What is this? (full bowl of soup atop which other kitchen scraps have been tossed)

Mark: That was Owen’s attempt with the soup.

Me: He didn’t eat any of it!

Mark: He said it was too “sharp.”

There’s no disputing tastes, but in my opinion the onion soup from Cowgirl Creamery Cooks is neither “hard to eat” nor “sharp.” It’s very tasty and if you like French onion soup, you will like this. I’m not sure how crucial the parmesan stock is to the soup’s success, but to make parmesan stock you need one cup of parmesan rinds. This is easy to come by if you run a restaurant or cheese shop, as the Cowgirls do, but collecting those rinds could take an ordinary cook months or even years. I haven’t explored the book thoroughly enough to know whether this kind of disconnect is pervasive. To be continued.