Ballerino Creamery’s Louella Hill (Photo by Norm Shafer)
A line of shoppers winds around the Pizza Bones parking lot in Church Hill on a recent Saturday morning. But they’re not here for the pizza; instead, they’ve come for cheese made by Ballerino Creamery.
The Staunton-based creamery’s small-batch, natural-rind cheeses range from fresh pot cheese, a soft selection that lands somewhere between cottage cheese and the slightly firmer farmer cheese, to cave-aged wonders reminiscent of European varieties. The seasonally inspired, highly varied and variable offerings are only available at the Staunton Farmers Market, the Nelson County Farmers Market and, to the delight of many Richmonders, at the Saturday market at Pizza Bones.
“I’ve been traveling around different places in the city following Ballerino Creamery since the day I had my first bite,” Ballerino superfan Sarah Milston says. “I lament weekly that they are only here once a month. Each market we always buy one of everything they have.”
For Louella Hill, owner of the creamery, cheese making is a bit like parenting: “We think we control it,” she muses, “when really, we have to be like humble shepherds.” Hill, a mother of two boys, shepherds her cheeses into the world from the site of the 1940s-era Augusta Dairies near her home in Staunton.
Ballerino Creamery mongers Kevin and Malintha Custer at the Pizza Bones market (Photo by Jay Paul)
Hill sources organic milk from a nearby farm and produces each batch by hand, pressing in fresh flowers or fig leaves or dipping the finished products in beeswax before bundling them in compostable packaging. At the markets, each sample from Ballerino is paired with a backstory from Hill and cheesemonger Malintha Custer, who transports the cheeses to Richmond each month. Like good bartenders, Hill and Custer have a way of learning the tastes and preferences of their regulars.
Visiting Ballerino’s table at the Pizza Bones market is an exercise in trust. Leave your list at home and come with an open mind, ready to explore, and enjoy, whatever delights Custer describes and samples. On one visit, you may be re-warded with a dilly pot cheese, adorned with spring blooms and sprigs of the herb. The following, perhaps you’ll find a wedge of Alpine-style Starfall, a nutty pressed cheese that’s delicious in quiche. Another encounter might reveal a petite wheel of Patty Cake, a luxurious double-creme cheese that tastes as if it were plucked from a fromagerie in France.
Photo by Jay Paul
“My cheese stand is a bit more like a vegetable stand,” Hill says. “We don’t walk up to a vegetable stand in April and say, ‘Where [are] the cauliflower?’ We naturally understand that there’s a deep seasonality and that every week it’s going to be different.”
There’s also at least one intentionally funky, blue-veined cheese, called Bisby, but sometimes, Hill says, she’ll open a wheel in her cave and discover a surprise of blue. Blue mold spores are in the air everywhere, she explains, and they tend to show up in aged cheeses like Lightfoot, a semi-firm tomme with a mushroomy rind. “I’m always excited when I see a little blue coming through. It’s fate, it’s a surprise,” she says.
“One of my favorite things as a cheese peddler is getting to see people’s range of comfort with eating something that looks like the things they may have forgotten in the fridge and sort of updating that,” Hill says. “It’s just a cultural perspective, and I definitely think it varies a lot depending on where you are in the world.”
On a cheese-making day, Hill rises before the sun to get milk from a nearby Mennonite farm. Like the earliest stages of parenthood, time seems to move quickly and slowly all at once. The initial days after making the cheese, Hill must check and flip the wheels every hour, then every few hours. Later, she can relax her vigilance to every half day, every day, then weekly, and eventually on a scale of months or even years.
I’m just a truly local product that’s influenced by everything in the natural world around me — the moisture, the wind, the soil.
—Louella Hill
An aging wheel of Starfall cheese decorated with edible flower petals (Photo by Erin Kunkel)
Hill’s fondness for cheese-making was born on a sheep farm in Tuscany and nurtured in Italy’s Apennine Mountains. Back in the states, she learned from master cheesemakers in New England and founded Rhode Island’s first creamery, Narragansett, which continues to produce award-winning artisanal cheeses. She then trekked across the country to the Bay Area where she was dubbed “The Milk Maid of San Francisco” for her roving small-group cheese-making classes. She authored the book “Kitchen Creamery,” which is imbued with her wisdom and esoteric cheese philosophies. And occasionally, Hill reprises her role as teacher for Milk Street, where she enjoys opening students’ minds to the true depth of cheese.
For a moment, Hill frets that readers will be upset by what she calls dead ends — cheese that’s hard to find and classes that are extremely rare — but as the interview comes to an end, she shares a realization: “I’m just a truly local product that’s influenced by everything in the natural world around me — the moisture, the wind, the soil, on and on, and it’s an experience that is the antithesis of what modern commerce is. Actually, this is cool. It means that people have to embrace the unknown.”
