Nubian goat Lizzie (or Nisa or Penny…). After you finish Goat Song you’ll feel like you have a whole herd of goat pals. (Photo by Dona Ann McAdams.)
I just finished devouring Brad Kessler‘s Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A short history of herding, and the Art of Making Cheese. No pun intended, folks. Reading Kessler’s memoir of what it’s like to leave the New York art and literary world to make goat cheese in Vermont — with his photographer wife Dona Ann McAdams — is about as mouth-watering a reading experience as I can remember. Written in lush but straightforward prose, with beautiful photos by McAdams (the one-time chronicler of the downtown performance art scene), Goat Song made me want to run out and buy a little Nubian doe and start milking. The book is a surprising mother lode of information about art and culture. (Did you know that both the devil’s horns and cloven hooves and the shape of letters in the alphabet all owe their origins to herding?) It’s also a page turner, with hair-raising chapters about staving off coyote attacks and hilarious passages about goat sex. (“It’s like a frat house,” writes Kessler, of a male goat’s post-coital preening around his fellow bucks.)
And because when you finish reading Goat Song, the first question is, naturally, “Where’s the cheese?” — as in where can I taste Kessler’s home-aged tomme? — C-Monster.net is proudly offering a cheese giveaway courtesy of New York City’s Les Enfants Terribles, the only restaurant in the city that serves it. Tell us why you “cut the cheese” in the comments below and the Canal Street bar-restaurant will send you a coupon for a free fromage sample.
In the meantime, be sure to pick up a copy of Kessler’s book. You can find it right here.
