Goats, sheep and a puzzle

In the coach, just in front of a notice specifying (in English) NO EAT / NO DRINK, Jorge was handing out mini plastic beakers of his home-made cocktail. Sniffing it cautiously, I guessed ‘Gomerón?’ This is a popular and probably ancient Gomeran liquor, a simple blending of the delicious and unquestionably healthy miel de palma - palm syrup, a Gomeran speciality - with the slightly more suspect parra, the local version of vodka or grappa. Parra is entirely safe in small quantities, I’m sure, but is best treated with respect like any other strong spirit. What my mini beaker contained was, Jorge agreed, pretty much gomerón but with added secret ingredients.

It was nice, and it got us all off to a lively start on this, the final outing of the Asociación de Vecinos, our Neighbours’ Association. All good things come to an end (why? why do they always do that, dammit?) and for more than ten years our association had been sustained by just three active executives. They’d all had enough of the organising, the phone calls, the accounting and the paperwork (we were subsidised by the town council), and nobody else was prepared to take over. Ho-humm. So we had a farewell tour of the island, to see what had changed since the last time anyone toured around it, but mainly to be together in a bus for one more time.

This story is not really about the coach trip, however, it’s about goats. And sheep. Jorge not only makes an excellent hooch for private consumption, he also produces goat cheese for sale in shops and supermarkets. During one of several convivial breaks on the coach trip I asked him how his cabras, goats, were getting on - his farm is some distance from the village - because the last time we talked he’d been a bit stressed, with over 200 goats dependant upon on him for their survival and vice-versa. He’d reduced them, he told me, now had just 50, which was much more manageable. The more goats, the more staff you need. More profit perhaps, but also more problems. At our time of life we can do without problems.

He and his wife still had to be up at seven in the morning to do the milking. They don’t actually do it by hand these days, seated on little wooden stools as in fairy tales, but someone still has to plug all those wobbling udders into a milking machine.

Perhaps in time a new breed of self-plugging goat will evolve. They’re astonishing creatures. A farmer across the valley sometimes releases his small flock to run wild on the hillsides, and these little creatures prance around on near-vertical slopes as though held by natural magnetism like souvenirs on a fridge door. They all tinkle prettily because sometimes they decide to abscond from home and the tinkling bells give more hope of recapturing them. Some earlier escapees from around the island have gone wild, which is a little troubling for the council because if left alone they’d eat the landscape down to bare rock.

On a different occasion altogether I asked another villager, Feli, why he kept sheep instead of goats. He has five of them, which potter around in the fields and the river bed finding things to eat while he sits casually watching with his dog at his feet. He keeps ovejas, he told me, because cabras are a pain. For a start, they’ll eat anything at all, and just try and stop them once they’ve started on a neighbour’s courgettes or strawberries. Furthermore, at the drop of a hat or a goatly whim they’ll be off into the distance. Unreliable, goats. Difficult. Sheep are tranquil, they give you no bother. Yet ewes give you milk just like goats, and quite a lot of it - upwards of a couple of litres a day at full flow - from which you can make cheese. Ewe’s milk produces a softer and creamier cheese than goat’s, and some Canary farmers produce a blended cheese using both.

Gomeran goat cheese was on the menu for lunch, of course, on our final outing as an Asociación de Vecinos, when we took over most of a restaurant somewhere in the middle of the island. Then we travelled on, up, down and around, until the sun sank wearily in the sky and we all tumbled out to go home.

‘We shouldn’t just finish like this,’ I suggested to Jorge. ‘We could carry on organising things by ourselves, nothing to do with a formal association and the council and all the bureacracy.’

‘We could,’ he agreed. ‘Just us. El equipo, the team.’ That’s it, the team! Just us, all of us. Maybe we will, maybe something new and more casual will coalesce naturally like cheese in a milk vat. We’ll see.

NOTES

for the serious student

Maybe you know this already, but I didn’t. How to tell a sheep from a goat. They both come in many formats, with or without horns, with or without woolly coats, and they often look remarkably similar. Seeing Feli’s sheep for the first time I wasn’t sure which they were. He provided me with a simple way to tell. Two ways.

Number one: sheep are grazers and eat with their heads down, nibbling grass or small plants on the ground, while goats are browsers and will eat leaves, twigs and almost anything else, often with their heads up, often perched in unlikely places.

Number two: both sheep and goats have tails unless they’ve been docked, but a sheep’s tail hangs down while a goat’s points upwards.

And there you are. There are other clues involving intricacies of the mouth and so on, but two’s enough for me.

An ongoing puzzle, though, is why Gomeran goat cheese doesn’t taste in the least bit ‘goaty’. My first experience of goat cheese was the French variety which is tangy and calls to mind tomcats. The Gomeran product is absolutely not like that at all. In its fresh form it’s mild to the point of blandness, and when more mature its flavour is no stronger than that of, say, an English white cheese such as Wensleydale. In my view it’s at its very best when lightly smoked. It only develops a sharper, stronger flavour when smoked more heavily - and that’s the smoke, nothing to do with cats.