Sunday, August 24, 2003

Twenty-five miles north of Pittsburgh, you are in rural Pennsylvania. The landscape is flatter, the air is sweeter, the people are friendlier -- the women more intuitive, the men more intense, committed as many are to the care of all those cows.

On the Marburger Farm, everyone is busy. The double glass doors to the dairy offices sit under the huge carton of milk, big as a silo that signals to everyone driving down the Mars-Evans City Road that this is the place.

The offices are upstairs, and to get to her sister, Margie Marburger Wearing, whom she wanted us to meet, Rita Marburger Reifenstein took us first this way and that through a maze that is an architectural wonder.

"This dairy has been in business 65 years, and there have been 65 additions to the building," she says. It may be an exaggeration, but with every twist and turn it seemed more like a fact. The office, however, isn't the place where visitors really want to be, and Rita knows it.

"We'll start with the dairy barn," she says.

But this was not the barn I remember. My first impression of Marburger's came from a video I recently watched at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center. In the film, milkmaids, Rita among them, herded cows into the field, introduced viewers to the black-and-white Holsteins, called them by name -- Sally and Lydia and Dana and Ruby -- and gave each cow a pat as it passed. An occasional cow would mug for the camera, leading one of the women to explain that cows are not big and dull but sweet and sensitive. Accustomed to humans, they didn't mind them being around.

I was so entertained by this film that I wrote about it in a column. This prompted an e-mail from Rita. From her I learned that WQED-TV had made the film for its program "On Q" in 1972. With the passing of time, the Marburgers had lost track of it. But the staff at the History Center recognized the film's charm and incorporated it into their Kidsburgh exhibition.

The old barn, however, is gone, consumed by an electrical fire in 1979. At the time the largest barn in Pennsylvania, it was slow to burn but impossible to stop. No animals were lost. It happened early one evening during the time of the Butler Farm Show. Word got out, and within hours, cattle haulers from nearby farms began appearing on the property, and the Holsteins were driven off to be boarded until the Marburgers could care for them again -- just one more example of rural solidarity.

The new barn is cool, clean and cozy, and the cows, free to move about, seem most content to poke their heads through the railing and eat the silage spread out for them. A cow consumes up to 75 pounds of hay and grain a day and drinks about 25 gallons of water.

The life of a milk cow is a pretty good one.

"We try to keep the girls happy," says Rita.

A mother births her calf, weighing about 80 pounds, with supervision, and the heifers are then raised in separate stalls and open fields. The animals are given every consideration. From birth to three months, each has a caretaker. At 2 years of age, they are bred. With the birth of their first calf, they begin giving milk. For another 10 to 12 years, each is milked twice a day, every day of the year. The milking relieves their udders of a heavy load, and they line up and wait patiently for milking to begin. The milking is done by machine, and the milk flows from udders that are first washed with soap and then rinsed.

The milk goes directly into a cooling tank before starting its journey to a processing plant, where it becomes one of many options, which include heavy cream, whole milk, 2 percent, skim milk, flavored milks, cottage cheese, sour cream and buttermilk. This fall, a new processing plant incorporating the latest technology will open on the property.

The dairy has operated with essentially the same system for 65 years. When Rita's grandfather, Adam Marburger, bought it in 1938, it produced 12 gallons of milk on the first day. Now, with a herd of 125 cows and with milk coming in from their other farms, they are up to 25,000 gallons a day. The farm dairy now employs 110 people, seven of them Marburgers. The family has never lost sight of its origins or of the one product for which they are most famous.

"Buttermilk," says Rita. "We have notebooks full of love letters for our buttermilk. It's the buttermilk folks remember from their childhood. Early on, my Dad knew that buttermilk would make a name for us."

Rita speaks about her father, Martin Marburger, with affection and respect. "He's 85 and in excellent health," she says. "He comes to work six days a week, where he enjoys the same lunch every day -- 1 quart of buttermilk, 1 banana and 1 vitamin pill. He loves to talk business."

Rita takes after her dad. She is cheerful, enthusiastic, energetic and endlessly interesting.

"Buttermilk is not a byproduct of making butter," she says.

For buttermilk, whole milk is heated to 190 degrees, held for half an hour and cooled to 74 degrees, when a culture is added. The mixture sits for 14 to 18 hours, and when it reaches the correct acidity, it is agitated to break up the curd until it becomes smooth. It is then cooled to 40 degrees, when butter flakes and salt are added just before bottling.

Orders for buttermilk come from far and wide. So do orders for the Marburger Farm Dairy Buttermilk Cookbook, 80 pages, 95 recipes, $4.

To order: Marburger Farm Dairy, 1506 Mars-Evans Road, Evans City, PA 16033

Buttermilk is their single best seller on a long list of products that include, somewhat surprisingly, tea. Because they have bottling and cooling facilities, many dairies have found bottled tea to be a profitable addition to their product line.

Also surprising, cows like tea. In the film at the History Center, a teenage girl who is raising a heifer for her 4-H project in the Marburger barn feeds the calf a half-gallon of iced tea from a paper carton. On a hot summer day, the calf gulps it down eagerly, and then it moos for more.

Rita Marburger Reifenstein enjoys showing Marburger customers around the farm. For information: 724-538-4800.

According to Rita, the sale of buttermilk took off when Ranch salad dressing became the rage. To make it, she uses Marburger buttermilk, Kraft mayonnaise and Hidden Valley seasoned mix following directions on the package. For mine, I use the following recipe:

Herbed Ranch Dressing

• 3/4 cup well-shaken Marburger buttermilk
  
• 2 tablespoons Hellmann's mayonnaise
  
• 2 tablespoon sour cream
  
• 1 tablespoon fresh basil, minced
  
• 1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh chives
  
• 2 teaspoons cider vinegar
  
• 1 teaspoon dry mustard
  
• 1 clove garlic, minced
  
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar

Combine all ingredients with salt and pepper to taste in a bowl or blender. (Low-calorie mayo and sour cream may be substituted.) Makes about 1 cup. This dressing is good with soft lettuce such as Boston and Bibb.

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