Marisa Mauro of Ploughgate Cheese recently got a blue ribbon from the American Cheese Society for her Hartwell variety. Photos by Bethany M. DunbarThe Northeast Kingdom will be represented by a cheese maker and a maple producer at a Slow Food festival and conference in Italy later this month.

Marisa Mauro of Ploughgate Cheese in Albany and Howie and Stephan Cantor of Deep Mountain Maple in West Glover will make the trip and serve as delegates.

The theme of the conference this year is indigenous foods and what we can learn from them — a subject that Ms. Cantor has spent a lot of time thinking about while boiling maple sap down to syrup in the sugarhouse.

The Cantors boil sap by burning wood from the trees in their sugarbush.  For them it’s a perfect environmental cycle and a simple way to do it, but they also believe their methods and the specific place where their product comes from make a difference in its flavor and quality.

It’s a concept winemakers have always promoted — that grapes grown in a particular spot in France or California are needed to create a particular flavor of wine.

Ms. Cantor recently read the book, American Terroir, by Rowan Jacobsen.  She said his book is the only one she has read that gets it right about Howie and Stephan Cantor are excited and proud to represent the Northeast Kingdom at the upcoming Slow Food conference in Italy.the science and process of maple sugaring — the ultimate slow food:

“Stately sugar maples... take the long view, that leisure makes their syrup especially fine.  A climax species of the northern hardwood forest, sugar maples grow in the understory of a young forest of colonizing trees and then slowly take over.  Extremely shade-tolerant, they have no need to be the first to leaf out.  They take their sweet time producing buds.  (They take their sweet time doing everything, sugar maples can live three hundred to four hundred years.)  This means that, for extended weeks of early spring, only sugar maples have flowing sap with that miraculous formula of high sugar content, a few flavor compounds, and nothing nasty.  You could say that the rich taste of maple syrup is the taste of waking up without urgency.  No wonder we’ve paired that flavor with lazy Sunday mornings.”

The Slow Food conference is called Terra Madre, and it will be held in Torino, Italy, from October 21 through 25.  This is the fourth such conference, held every other year.  The Cantors said the Slow Food movement originated in Italy as a backlash to someone wanting to put up a McDonald’s.

“Slow Food is an idea, a way of living and a way of eating.  It is a global, grassroots movement with thousands of members around the world that links the pleasure of food with a commitment to community and the environment,” says the Slow Food USA website.

Participants will be able to attend a wide range of events and try a huge range of wines, cheeses, breads, vegetables, and more.  They will be able to sample 16-year-old cheese paired with rhododendron honey, bread from Iceland cooked in the steam of geysers, Scotch whiskey distilled in Scotland in 1960.  Workshops include one on “capital, regulations, and distribution:  issues and prospects for a new agriculture,” and another one called quality at the right price.

“What it tries to do is bring together small food producers,” said Ms. Cantor.  People attending will be farmers, chefs, and food writers among others.

“I’m so proud to represent the Northeast Kingdom,” said Ms. Cantor.  “We’re completely honored.”

Mr. and Ms. Cantor were nominated by the Greenmarket in New York, where they sell their products.  They will attend as delegates and serve as mentors to a group of younger farmers.

The Greenmarket is a network of markets in the city where 150 or so farmers sell their wares.  The Cantors sell at the Union Square market in Manhattan.  Before 911 they sold at the World Trade Center.

The Cantors have been selling maple products at the Greenmarket for 25 years and talking to the customers about these issues all along.  In the meantime, the market’s rules have changed to allow only farmers who are producing foods in a 200-mile radius and from New York State.  But Deep Mountain Maple is still there due to a grandfather clause.

Consumers in New York gravitate to their products, the Cantors said, because they are made in Vermont.

“They just assume it’s better,” said Mr. Cantor.

He mentioned that he is making syrup from the same sugarbush that has been producing maple syrup for close to 100 years in very much the same way.  The Cantors switched from collecting sap in buckets to plastic tubing and a vacuum.  That seems to have done no harm to the flavor, but saves time.

They both said everyone who makes food has to weigh the advantages of certain methods in terms of cost, volume of product, and quality.

“You can choose some technologies and not choose others, and then you can change your mind,” he said.

Ploughgate

Marisa Mauro first heard about the Slow Food movement when she was milking goats for a farmer in California who was planning to attend.

“When I first found out about it, I was 19 and I had to watch the farm for him.”

Part way through the trip the farmer called to see how everything was going.  She reported that things were fine, but just after she hung up the phone the refrigeration system broke down.  She realized she did not have a telephone number where she could reach him and did not have enough money of her own to make the repairs.

But she worked it out and things were all right.

“I didn’t lose any milk or any cheese,” she said.

Ms. Mauro went to Italy for the first time with the Kehler family — relatives of the owners of Jasper Hill in Greensboro.  She was working as a nanny, babysitting their kids when she was 15.  That’s how she met the family, and these days she takes her cheese to the Jasper Hill cellars for aging.

The quality of her product was acknowledged recently when Ploughgate’s cow milk camembert, Hartwell, got a blue ribbon in the American Cheese Society competition — along with two ribbons for Jasper Hill cheeses, 13 for Cabot cheeses, and several for other Vermont cheeses.

Ms. Mauro is excited about the trip, but has hardly had time to check the schedule or workshops.  Instead she is trying to make enough cheese ahead of time to keep her market supplied while she is gone.