Kate Arding photo credit Kinderhook Farm
“Of course, I love cheese,” says Kate Arding, cheese monger extraordinaire and one of the foremost authorities on farmhouse cheese. But her simple declaration belies a deeper, more nuanced meaning. “I love what it stands for,” she says. “I love the people who work with it,” says the owner and Director of Operations of specialty food shop Talbott & Arding in bucolic Hudson, New York, her words coming fast. “I love the producers. I love the fact that it’s a very collaborative world. I love that it represents the land generally, where it comes from, and that the people connected with it are very down to earth.”
A Love for Dairies & Cheese in the UK
In the 1980s, before she entered the food world, Arding did a stint at the National Trust in her native England, fundraising for its stately homes. While she enjoyed the art and architecture, interestingly she was drawn to the estate’s private dairies, though they were not in use. “That was always quite fun to look around those,” she recalls, noting the considerable time and effort that had been put into them.
Perhaps it was an unconscious harbinger of what was to come. While working for her uncle’s condiment company, Tracklements, a trailblazer in using local, natural ingredients, sourced sustainably, and produced in small batches, in the early 1990s, Arding was introduced to Neal’s Yard Dairy (located in London’s Borough Market). She wound up running its wholesale department for nearly four years.
“I’d always really loved cheese,” says Arding. More so, the food scene was changing in Britain and Neal’s Yard Dairy was at the forefront. The cheese quality, knowledge, and unpretentious, welcoming manner in which customers were offered tastes were “quite novel” at that time in the UK, and “really stand out for me,” she adds.
Arding’s experience there was formative, particularly in developing a philosophy around the importance of collaborating with producers, being their advocate, and understanding the make process as a way of supporting them. “If you’re going to sell cheese, in a great way, you really have to understand how it’s made,” she says. She spent a lot of time at the farms with the producers, developing and honing her palate, learning how to represent the cheeses as they are, understanding the nuance between different batches, and how to represent that in the best way to the customer.
Meeting Cheesemakers from the US
Sue Conley and Peggy Smith photo credit Cowgirl Creamery
While at Neal’s Yard Dairy, Arding met the visiting Americans Sue Conley and Peggy Smith, who were planning Cowgirl Creamery. Their vision for featuring the producers of West Marin County resonated with her. She fell in love with the area on a visit and recognizing another groundbreaking opportunity, moved there in 1997 to work with them.
“I could see the potential of what was possible in showcasing local food producers in West Marin and northern California, and because of my experience with Tracklements and Neal’s Yard, I could articulate that,” says Arding, who found the enterprise “hugely exciting” since there were no similar enterprises in the US at that time and “kind of an adventure at the beginning for me.” She didn’t imagine she’d still be in the States 25 years later.
Cowgirl Creamery’s pioneering of artisan cheese in the US proved an overwhelming success. Being part of the business and seeing it grow was “really wonderful,” says Arding, who dispensed her retail, wholesaling, and affinage knowledge from behind the cheese counter six days a week.
After 7 years, Arding wanted to broaden her experience and be out in the field again. “I certainly got that,” she laughs.
Consulting Worldwide
She began a consulting career that has taken her to Eastern Europe, Africa, and South America, as well as domestic locales. In the process, she’s become recognized for her expertise in affinage, infrastructure management for small concerns, and retailing. While working for Land ‘O Lakes in Uganda between 2004-2006, she developed a program that is still in use for veterinarians and producers there to improve milk quality.
She has also worked with Amish and Mennonite farmers in Wisconsin, which she found “very, very interesting” based on her work in developing countries where there was no electricity or little technology. “I never dreamed in a million years that I’d be able to bring what I’d learned from there back to the US,” she says.
In 2008, Arding embarked on yet another forward-thinking venture, co-founding Culture: The Word on Cheese, the first magazine devoted to cheese, which is published bimonthly. She also was an editor of and contributor to the James Beard Award-winning The Oxford Companion to Cheese, has served on the Board of Directors of the American Cheese Society, co-chaired the society’s Regulatory and Academic Committee, and in 2011, was inducted into the Guilde Internationale des Fromagers. She humbly says one of the great things about the food world is how supportive and generous colleagues are and have been to her throughout her career.
Talbott & Arding
Exterior photo credit Annie Schecte
Talbott & Arding, in which Arding is a partner with chef Mona Talbott, features an outstanding cheese department. She had moved to the East Coast in 2009 while consulting and working on Culture; the women opened the store in 2014 in the agriculturally focused Hudson Valley to be near producers.
Arding laughs when queried about what she looks for in a cheese and a cheese maker. “It’s a massive question,” she says, commenting that her goal is to find “well-made cheese” that has a balance of flavor and balance of texture. In addition to choosing cheese makers who use good quality milk and understand its source, she looks for ones with whom she can establish a great relationship since cheese makers, like chefs, are embodied in the food they produce. “It’s a very personal relationship because you’re feeding people, which is a very intimate thing. Also, it’s a position of responsibility,” she says.
She credits innovators like Cypress Grove, Capriole Goat Cheese, and Cowgirl for bringing high-quality US-made cheese to the fore. “I think one of the really exciting things for me personally, having been in the States for this amount of time, is to have been part of and to have witnessed that meteoric rise of artisanal and farmhouse cheesemaking and to have been part of that landscape,” Arding says, “because the quality of the cheeses that have been produced in the US now absolutely rivals anything made in Europe.”
From this vantage point, she’s pleased to see innovation and willingness to try continuing with new energies, ideas, and “wonderful cheeses,” citing Jasper Hill’s commitment as “astonishing really,” and interest from Europe in being part of the cheese world here.
After nearly 30 years in the cheese business, Arding remains in awe of the cheesemaking process. “It combines low art and science, and as many other people have said before, a sense of alchemy,” she says. “I think that’s lovely. And it changes and reflects some aspects of the world that we live in. It’s important. It’s beautiful.”