Goat cheese revolution!

Google the phrase “American goat cheese,” and you could spend the rest of your life chasing down the nearly 1.5 million results. Start off by reading a recipe for, say, Aged American Goat Cheese with Salad of Honey-Piquant Greens and Apples. After that, you can buy a gourmet goat cheese gift basket, click through to a few of the countless American farms producing goat cheese, learn how to make your own goat cheese, determine the health benefits of eating goat cheese, join a goat cheese discussion group…It’s hard to believe now, but back in 1979 few Americans had even heard of goat cheese. In fact, if presented with an artfully-arranged platter of chèvre, as goat cheese is also known, most would have eyed it with suspicion—or worse. Sure, a few scattered farms across the nation produced the delicate cheeses for their own use, and you could sometimes find imported chèvre in specialty cheese shops. But that was about the extent of it.

The catalyst for change was a young Sonoma County woman named Laura Chenel. Far from setting out to be a pioneer, she was simply trying to figure out what to do with her life. But by following her interests—with bravado, it must be noted—she ended up kick-starting a brand new American industry: artisanal goat cheese.

Growing up in a rural part of the County, Chenel enjoyed helping her parents feed and care for their turkey flock and assorted other animals. Eventually she left to pursue her education, and for a decade she lived, studied, and worked in Europe, New York, and San Francisco.

In the late 1970s she returned to Sonoma County. Like many Baby Boomers at the time, she wanted to try living on the land and being self-sufficient. So she bought a few goats, and—discovering that they were charming, friendly, and intelligent—she bought a few more. Soon she seemed to be drowning in excessive amounts of goat milk. Does, it turned out, are generous milk-producers, averaging 3 quarts a day. Practicality dictated finding a use for all that milk, so Chenel tried her hand at making goat cheese. It wasn’t very good.

So she traveled to France, where she lived and studied traditional chèvre production with four farming families in different regions. Armed with new knowledge and a few ideas all her own, she returned home and set to work hand-crafting goat cheese. This time around the results were superb—the cheese was creamy, white, and with a bit of a bite. Pleased with her product, Chenel began selling small amounts to retail cheese stores. To pay the bills, she worked as a waitress.

Someone suggested bringing her cheeses to a woman named Alice Waters who had recently opened a restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley. Chenel had never heard of Waters or her restaurant, but made the trip. Waters—credited by most with founding the modern-day revolution in American cuisine—was enthusiastic: no one had ever brought her farm-made chèvre before. She placed a standing weekly order for five times more cheese than Chenel had been producing.

Chenel quit waiting on tables and focused on making cheese. And with that, Laura Chenel’s Chèvre—and the American goat cheese industry—was born. That first order from Alice Waters in 1979 was for 50 8-ounce logs (25 pounds) of cheese per week. In 2006, when Chenel sold her company to France’s The Rians Group for an undisclosed sum in the millions, she was producing in excess of 2 million pounds of goat cheese annually.

Over the years, Chenel’s name became synonymous with the industry she started. In fact, the day I googled “American Goat Cheese,” the No. 1 result returned was for a New York Times article published in October 2006, soon after Laura Chenel’s Chèvre was sold. The headline? For American Chèvre, An Era Ends. “Ms. Chenel, a gentle animal lover who almost single-handedly turned America on to goat cheese in the early 1980’s,” the Times noted, “has sold her company to a French corporation. Zut alors!”