Allison Lakin's Maine-Made Cheeses Are 'Gorges' (And Gorgeous)

Allison Lakin, founder and owner of Lakin’s Gorges Cheese, told us cheese sales peak three times a year: April (maybe cheese makes people optimistic for spring, she speculates); July through August (picnic season); and the holidays, from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. We called her up to talk cheese at the height of that last busy season, got advice we liked about cheese platters for New Year’s (start with your favorite cheese and build from there) and learned what cooking salmon had to do with her cheesemaking career.

HELLO GORGEOUS? We’ve always wondered, what’s in the name? It’s a nod to Cornell, her alma mater. “They have this bumper sticker, ‘Ithaca is Gorges,’ so that is my little sort of in-joke.” Do people get it? “Some do, some don’t, and that is fine, because it is fun to have a little pun in there.”

FIRST COURSE OF SALMON: Cornell is famous not just for the gorges that surround the campus, but for its food programs. But Lakin was an anthropology major and didn’t take a single food-related course. “That is not where my life was when I was at Cornell.” After graduating, she spent nearly 15 years working in museums, but food, she said, did keep popping up as a theme even in her museum work. Such as the time she spent gathering data about Native American dances at Tillicum Village in Puget Sound for her honors thesis. “I learned how to prepare salmon on a cedar stake cooked around an alder wood fire. That was my first anthropological introduction to food.” Then there were the Mug-Ups at Mystic Seaport.

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