SFA | Oral History | New Orleans Eats

“Traditionally it was eaten—people sprinkled sugar on it and eat it just straight out of the container like that. And there’s—there’s all kinds of ways: you can put fresh fruit on it or you can use it to cook with; it’s good in pastas. You can make cheesecakes with it. It’s good like that.”

– Kenny Mauthe

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The Mauthe Family Dairy’s roots are in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, where Kenny Mauthe’s grandfather first began milking cows. The farm moved to Folsom, Louisiana, when the city expanded and the Ninth Ward became more residential; eventually Kenny and his wife, Jamie, established their own farm on an impossibly green tract of land in McComb, Mississippi, where they raised four children—the fourth generation of Mauthe dairy farmers.

Over time, Kenny and Jamie transitioned from milking 150 cows and selling all their milk to a gigantic co-op, to milking just a couple dozen cows and then processing the milk themselves and selling it to customers directly at farmers’ markets. When they downsized, around 2000, the Mauthes also resurrected the old Louisiana dairy farming tradition of producing Creole cream cheese, a tart sour cream-like product that old-timer New Orleanians remember eating with sugar and/or fruit for breakfast. While there was one other small producer in the area at the time, many locals credit the Mauthes’ product with saving Creole cream cheese from extinction.

Kenny and Jamie haven’t been making Creole cream cheese since Hurricane Katrina blew in, damaging their barn and otherwise interrupting the momentum of their operations. But they have plans…

Listen to this 3-minute audio clip of Kenny Mauthe talking about feeding his cows an all-grass diet. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

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What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: Kenny Mauthe
Location: Mauthe Family Dairy, McComb, Mississippi
Date: August 6, 2006
Interviewer: Sara Roahen, writer and SFA member

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Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Sunday, August 6th 2006 and I’m in McComb, Mississippi. Could you state your name and your birth date and how you make your living?

Kenny Mauthe: This is Kenny Mauthe. My birth date is September 3, 1960, and I’m a dairy farmer.

And can you tell me, to start out, where you grew up?

I grew up in Folsom, Louisiana.

On a dairy farm?

On a dairy farm, yeah. My family—I’m the third generation dairy farmer. My grandfather and them actually dairyed in the New Orleans area.

And we have some pictures here of that first farm. Can you explain to me again where that was?

Okay. That was on Claiborne and Forstall Street and my grandfather, they dairyed there. That’s where they—when they settled into this country, that’s where they dairyed and they delivered milk door-to-door and also made cheese—Creole cream cheese—and delivered it door-to-door in the city.

Where did they come from?

From France and Germany.

And so from the very beginning, your grandfather made Creole cream cheese?

Yes. They—my grandfather and them made Creole cream cheese. That was back whenever they made it with raw milk. That was before the pasteurization act had come into place.

Okay, and so at some point in your father’s lifetime, they moved the farm to Folsom?

Uh-hm; by—well, my grandfather sold out of the dairy business and my father took it over, and he was the one that moved to Folsom. When the city started to grow, that was whenever he moved to Folsom, Louisiana.

And did you grow up working on the farm?

Yeah, yeah; I grew up working on the farm. We dairyed—my dad dairyed in Folsom and that’s where I grew up and we diary(ed) there.

So I should say for the record that you more recently have been known for reviving Creole cream cheese in New Orleans. It sort of fell out of the culture for a little while, and I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about why it almost went extinct.

Borden’s Milk Plant was the last one to make Creole cream cheese probably 25 years ago, and from my understanding the reason that they quit making it is because it was too labor-intense to make. And that’s what kind of give us the idea to make it, because the people in New Orleans had craved for Creole cream cheese for years since they quit making it and we felt like we could do well if we made Creole cream cheese.

And I guess at some point even your family’s dairy farm stopped making it.

Yeah. My grandfather and my father, they quit making it whenever they passed the pasteurization act, and they had to—they either had to pasteurize their own milk—go through the expense of pasteurizing their own milk—or they could just sell their milk to the local dairies that were doing the processing, and that’s when they quit making it.

What happened then was the smaller dairies that couldn’t afford to—to put in the processing equipment, they kind of had no other choice but to sell their milk to the processing plants, and that’s kind of what started the big processors coming into the picture over the years and that. The farmers kind of got away from—from direct marketing their own products because it was easier just to sell it to the large co-ops and that.

So then the farmers stopped being the producers of the—for the product beyond the milk?

Beyond the milk, right; when the milk left the farm, that was the last time that they had anything to do with it.

And can you describe for me what Creole cream cheese is like?

It’s—it’s almost—I don’t know; the way I would tell you it would be like, it’s almost—it has the tartness in one sense of a yogurt and it has the texture of like a cottage cheese.

And how do you eat it?

Traditionally it was eaten—people sprinkled sugar on it and eat it just straight out of the container like that. And there’s—there’s all kinds of ways: you can put fresh fruit on it or you can use it to cook with; it’s good in pastas. You can make cheesecakes with it. It’s good like that.

When you were growing up, how did your family eat it?

With sugar—they sprinkled sugar on it and ate it straight out of the container.

I imagine that you had some customers who you actually got to meet because you sold it at the farmers market—who were more like your grandparents and your parents [age], and what was the reaction like when you came out with it?

It was just unbelievable, you know. We had people that shopped with us that would buy a container or two of Creole cream cheese and would talk about—they would bring it to their grandmother, and how it would bring a tear to their grandmother’s eye whenever they brought that to them, you know, that they—it had been so long since they had Creole cream cheese and that was how much they enjoyed it, you know. It’s—it was just people talked about how it brought them back to their childhood and—and it was just unreal.

And so when you decided to do this, you had a—a full dairy farm operating?

Right.

And so what—how did it change how you were farming already?

It made us look to farm on a very small scale, that we could direct market our product. Instead of trying to milk 120 to 150 cows, we could milk 10 to 20 cows and—and turn a better profit on a smaller number of cows than we could milking a bunch of cows and having a lot of land to have to take care of and all of that, and—and could possibly give us a better way of life on the farm.

Okay—and then your day became not only milking but also processing?

We started wearing about three different hats. We used to just be dairy farmers. We went from being dairy farmers to—to being processors, and then we also went from being processors to marketing our product. So we—we—[Laughs] we had to branch out in different areas to be able to market our product instead of just being on the farm.

Can you take me through the process of making the Creole cream cheese?

What we done was we pasteurized our milk and after we pasteurized it, we cooled it down to a certain temperature and then we would—we would skim the cream. We would run the milk through a cream separator and skim the cream off of the milk and then we would—we would put our—put the skim milk in a vat and—in a cheese vat—and we would add our cultures and everything that we was going to put in it, and we would let it set for a day. And then we would dip the curd out of there and then let it sit another day in drain cups. And—and then after that, it would be ready to be packaged.

Before you started doing your own processing were your cows all grass-fed?

No, we actually were pushing our cows for production before we started processing. We was trying to get the most milk that we could get out of every individual cow because the price that we was getting paid was very small. So we was—you know we was—we was pushing them; we was pushing all of the feed, all of the grain that we could get in them. We used to feed a lot of silage, and when we started doing our processing, we didn’t have to put our cows under that kind of stress anymore. We could just let them have grass and—and just let them produce to whatever their potential was instead of trying to add all of this stuff to their feed and—and to get them to produce as much as they could. So the—even the cows, when we started doing this they were put on a program where they were a lot less stressful too, you know. It made a difference for them also. Before we started doing this…we had a lot of vet bills—veterinary bills. We had sick cows. It wasn’t anything uncommon to get a cow that would have an upset stomach and she might go off of her feed for a day or two and you had to have the veterinarian out here to treat her, or we did a lot of the treating ourselves. And you had an expense of trying to keep cows from getting sick and that all the time. So, it made a difference on our cows—on our animals—after we went to processing our own milk.
Going to the market and meeting your customers, probably sometimes—in some cases for the first time—did that change your relationship to how you spent your days?

Yeah. I guess whenever we was—when we were dairying before…the— the milk co-op always made you feel like the people in the city didn’t want to pay for your product you know, and—and after we started going to the market, and here you’re meeting all these people, it just made you feel so much better that—that people thought as much of your products and what you were doing; it just gave you a whole new outlook on what you were doing in life.

Did you also sell to restaurants?

We had quite a few restaurants in the city. The Bourbon House was our biggest user of milk and they used it in their bourbon milk punch, their signature drink.

I’m curious to know how you figured out how to make the—what recipe you used.

Doctor Gough from LSU had kind of built a recipe for us. And that was the original recipe that we had started—started off with, and then I kind of changed it from there. We ran into a few different problems with different things and we made some changes in it. But he—and basically, you know, the Centannis were well known—the Gold Seal Creamery in New Orleans—for their Creole cream cheese and basically the recipe that he had was pretty similar—almost the same as the one that they used over at Gold Seal Creamery.

You mentioned the next generation earlier. Can you tell me about your family—how many kids you have?

Okay; we have four children. We have two daughters and two sons, and they will be the fourth generation dairy farmers in our family. Actually, both our daughters are very interested in farming and—and the boys, they’re at an age now to where they—they—you know, they don’t know what they want to do. They’re just wanting to play football [Laughs] and stuff like that, but there’s a possibility that they will want to farm… Our oldest daughter, Sarah, she works at the hospital and she is just dying to be able to come back on the farm and be able to do something like this. And our youngest daughter, Katie, she loves it also. She actually helps us milk and all, still sometimes now. But their heart is in it; there’s no doubt about that and I just hope, you know, that we can continue to do this and they can carry on that fourth generation of doing it.

So for the record, the hurricane—you took a hit both physically and financially—

Yeah, we’re still actually—we’ve—we’ve never stopped milking cows since the hurricane. We’re just selling our milk to the co-op. We were under—we never dropped our contract with the co-op.

The storm damaged your barn, is that right?

The barn that we milk in—that afternoon it had ripped half the roof off and the half that it ripped off is the side that all the electrical boxes are on, and all of those were saturated with water so that—that night we actually milked them all by hand. And that next morning then we was able to dry everything out ‘cause I’ve got a generator that you run off the tractor, and we could have milked them that afternoon but everything was so wet you couldn’t do anything. And so we milked them by hand, and then the next day we used our generator. Now we milked for—we ran the generator for I think eight days and twice a day.

And all of that was poured down the drain. Yeah, we poured every bit of that down the drain. All we done was milked them to—to keep them healthy, you know. If we wouldn’t have milked them they—they would have got an infection in their—in their utter, and that would have made them dry up to where they wouldn’t have given any milk at all.

So since the storm, you haven’t been processing the Creole cream cheese. But the goal is to do that again at some point.

We will be doing it, you know. It could be six months from now, but we will be back doing it. I don’t know if we’re going to go back this time and do any milk—any bottled milk to—to drink. We’re probably—probably what we’re going to do, is just start out strictly making cheese and if we’ve got an excess of milk, we might go back to bottling some milk ‘cause there’s a lot more regulations when you go to bottling milk than what there is in making cheese, so we’ve kind of got our mind made up that we’re probably going to start off with just making the Creole cream cheese, and we’re going to look at doing some little short-aged cheeses and—and probably some mold-ripened cheeses. That’s kind of what we’re looking at.

One thing that we were talking about before I started recording that is interesting because it’s topical now, is that the farm that your father grew up on was in the Lower Ninth Ward, right in the area that totally flooded. It’s kind of hard to imagine that it was farmland.

Yeah, it is hard to imagine. You know I’ve—my daddy, I’ve heard him talk about how they would walk from there to Canal Street. That was the big thing when they were young. And Fats Domino—evidently wherever Fats Domino lived is where he’s always lived because he’s always told the story about, on Sunday evenings or Saturday evenings Fats Domino and them would be out there on the front porch playing music. And he said he’ll never forget they was all out there drinking one Saturday or Sunday evening and he said they caught the sofa on fire.

What does it mean to you to be known as someone who, you know, we call the Guardian of the Tradition?

I don’t really know how to answer that. [Laughs] I would rather Jamie be here to answer that question. [Laughs] It just, you know—it—it all has been very rewarding I guess you could say, you know. I mean it—we love what we do here; we wouldn’t still be here if we didn’t, you know, and Creole cream cheese has just like been a part of our life, a part of these cows, a part of our family, you know. By being able to do that, it’s been very—you know it’s—it’s kept our farming alive here and it’s given us hope that we can keep this tradition, you know, for another generation in our family.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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