I learned about French cheese the hard way. Really, I mean the suffering, the hardship, the anxieties I went through in those first years! I sincerely hesitate to write them down. I mean, there is no age check on this site, and what with all the readers of tender ages reading this… But I’ll give it a shot anyway. Here’s about goat’s cheese.
Picture yourself a beautiful lake in the mountains of the northern Provence, a region known for the Canyon of the Verdon, France’s own miniature Grand Canyon, ‘only’ something like 3000 foot deep, but stunning nevertheless. The high plateaus surrounding are covered not in woods of pine trees, but in lavender fields, their deep purple rows extending right up to the horizon. In other places, especially on the slopes, hardy shrubs and sweet herb bushes survive. This is goat’s country.
My friends and I were camping on the shores of the lake. We had finished our first year at university and had driven there all the way from Holland, some 800 miles, in rickety third-hand cars. Tourism was only just extending its fingers to the area, and we had to rely on local produce to sustain ourselves. One evening this included goat’s cheese.
Now you may know goat’s cheese as it is produced elsewhere in France and the rest of the world. Fresh goat’s cheese is snowy white, creamy and soft, with a distinctive slightly sour taste, something that no cow’s of sheep’s cheese has. When a bit aged, it will have a more marked taste, ‘goaty’, which will turn into downright pungent when older. Goat’s cheeses usually being small, the whole process of ripening is something to be counted in weeks rather than months.
But France in the seventies was a country where certain areas still had a very rustic quality to them. Perhaps you want to trade ‘rustic’ for ‘medieval’. Now milk, from any animal, absorbs aroma’s very easily. Have you ever smelled a goat stable? If not, let me just say that it stinks. Of urine, to be precise. Goat’s urine, especially that of billy goats, is powerful indeed. And the rustic little goat’s cheeses of High Provence smelled of precisely that. When fresh, this could still be described as ‘full of character’. When more ripe, it was, let’s say, ‘something for the true connoisseur’. But the cheese we had that night was beyond those stadia. It had dried out into a glass-like consistency, which explained the bombshell-like fragments that flew off when we tried to cut it. It seemed that all the billies of the region had combined their efforts into expressing the true essence of old-time France through this cheese. Ammonia played a loud, if not so harmonious tune in our mouths. No, I did not spit it out. No-one did. We were nineteen years old and had dedicated this trip to the true understanding of all things French. Already I was a devote Francophile. This was A True French Taste and if I didn’t like it, that was something to be overcome. Acquiring might be more difficult than I had thought or hoped for, perhaps, but I was not going to chicken out on the first occasion.
You know that an important aspect of the quality of wine is its aftertaste. How long will it linger in the back of your throat? Well, then this goat’s cheese was really world class. Its ghost haunted me all through the night and didn’t back off in the morning sun, either. In fact, it gave a whole ‘new dimension’ to the continental breakfast of crusty baguette, butter and plumb jam. I know Americans combine the oddest things on their bread, cheese, jam, peanut butter and who knows what more. But take my advice and never, ever try over-aged goat’s cheese with anything.

The cheese plate at San Francisco’s Bar Tartine is a beautiful thing.  Partly because cheese plates in and of themselves are a beautiful thing, and partly because Bar Tartine was the first to introduce me to Renata.

Renata is a semi-firm, raw cow’s milk cheese made exclusively from the milk of a single brown Swiss cow of the same name.  This is both unusual and incredibly rare: milk is typically supplied by a farm’s entire herd or more often collected from several dairies and pooled.  It generally takes up to ten gallons of cow’s milk to produce one pound of whole milk cheese, yet all of the milk for Renata comes from Renata, who resides in Oroville, WA with veteran farmers and cheesemakers, Sally and Roger Jackson.

The remote and isolated Jackson farm has 140 aces of tillable land and permanent pasture near the Canadian border.  Seasons are extreme, and the Jacksons employ sustainable farming techniques and avoid the use of pesticides/herbicides, keeping their soil fertile and productive.

Their cows graze daily in a 20 acre grove of mixed aspen and alpine fir, which lends unique seasonal variations to the milk they produce.  As the character of a cheese is largely informed by milk from which it is made, Renata’s flavor is indicative of the quality of life Renata leads.

What I’m trying to say is–clearly, Renata has got it good.

The moist, mold-ripened cheese is wrapped in unmacerated chestnut leaves from a local orchard and aged 60-90 days.  Buttery yellow in color with a slight sheen, Renata just barely begins to ooze at room temperature but still holds its shape.  With a slight spring to the touch and a smooth elasticity in the mouth, Renata has a rich aroma and a lingering finish that continues long after the cheese itself is gone.

Certain bites are more assertive, earthy and pungent at first, then grassy, with the slightest vegetal flavor imparted by the leaves.  Other bites are sweeter, even nutty, each taste vacillating between the various nuances.

Though the Jacksons began selling their cheeses by driving to the Seattle/Tacoma area and talking to hotels, restaurants and stores, now their cheeses are made by request and shipped all over the country.  Sitting at the long marble bar on a Wednesday night with Renata and a fruity Beaujolais, I couldn’t be happier about that.

by pm.raymon

To love France is to love cheese. Or the other way around, I can never tell. So I love both. I even like the French, I may add, but that’s rather besides the point. Now I happen to have a second house in the Burgundy region. And in the nearby market town Tonnerre there is this cheese seller in the market on Wednesdays and Saturdays, that sells the most glorious cheeses ever conceived by man. Undoubtedly man was inspired by trains of dairy muses, that day. And just like truffles, these cheeses make themselves known in a big way, all around the market place, by means of their, eeh, aroma. Yes, dear readers, they smell. They smell up to high heaven and they do it in the most heavenly way. Now I’m not referring to Camembert. There’s this old saying that Camembert smells like Gods own feet – meant to be positive! – but that’s simply not true. I think a good Camembert doesn’t reek very much at all (bad old ones do), so either God takes good hygienic care of his feet, or the Camembert of our time smells differently than the one from the time the expression was put into words. It so happens that this latter solution is true. Harold McGee wrote about it on his blog, Curious Cook, recently. 19th century Camembert used to have a rind that not only was home to a happy family of molds, but also to a prospering population of gray yeasts and red bacteria. And there you have Gods feet. The co-habitation, or rather the competition between what can better be compared to extremely war-like tribes, however made the production of the cheese unpredictable. So when in 1905 the Institut Pasteur provided the cheese makers with the means of limiting the flora and fauna to a single strand of mold, the creamy white Penicillium Candidum, they jumped to it. And left us with a cheese that left something to be desired for the true foot fetishists. But lo! there’s no reason for despair (as proven at the market in Tonnerre). It’s just a matter of bye bye Camembert, and hello Epoisses, Munster, Fromage du Curé, Maroilles and their relatives, cheeses that still have red bacteria proliferating on their rinds. Let these microbes play around for a few weeks and the cheese curd, at first firm and chalky, turns soft and melting in a downright erotic way. And then the cheese smells, o yes, it smells! It smells of Gods own feet and of all sorts of forbidden things, it smells of life itself. It’s easy to understand that the Chinese abhor cheese like this, just like any newcomer to the world of French cheese. Easy does it, you have to build it up over the years, find your way by means of young Gouda, then aged, try matured goats cheeses. It’s an acquired smell. And I’m soooo glad I acquired it.

Ever tasted ‘Friese nagelkaas’? It translates as ‘Frisian clove cheese’ and, true to its name, it is cheese with whole cloves in it. Besides cumin seeds, but they somehow don’t seem to count. Especially when it is a bit aged, it has a rather strong flavor, not pungent like French cheeses, but mouth filling and strong. You may observe that it’s less creamy than Gouda cheese and that’s perfectly true, since it is not a full fat cheese. In fact, that’s the very reason the cloves are there. Besides the not counting cumin seeds, that is. You see, the Dutch in the old days loved cheese to be creamy and rich. Very creamy and rich. But they also loved butter. It was quite common for the more well-to-do Dutch to eat both butter and cheese on their bread. (At the same time this was condemned by the Calvinist church ministers. There is still a proverb saying ‘zuivel op zuivel is van de duivel’- dairy on dairy is from the devil). Foreign visitors in the 16th century wrote back home telling how surprised they were seeing people eating lots of cheese and butter, as if it wasn’t a luxury at all. Up to this very day the Dutch butter their bread before topping it with slices of cheese.

So, we do like our butter. But when you skim the cream from the milk to make it (butter is made of cream, that can’t be helped), you end up with… skimmed milk. Which makes for cheese that’s far from creamy and rich. It kind of lacks flavor. And here the cloves come in. By adding strong spices the cheese became something different. Not creamy, but nice in a different way. Good enough for the Frisians, who preferred to sell off their butter and eat the cheese themselves. The best of two worlds, wouldn’t you say?

I must admit I don’t really know whether cheese fondue is a popular dish in the United States. But if it isn’t, it should become so. Not only is cheese fondue a glorious get-together of cheese and wine in a way that we can safely cry out that one and one is three, but the eating of it, dipping long forks with chunks of bread at the end of them into the molten goodness, invariably turns out to be a celebration, creating happiness all around, peace on earth and heavenly bliss, all be it very temporarily and geographically extremely limited.
It all started somewhere in the Alps. Or so I assume, since I know nothing of the deeper origins. Why, we will never know, but perhaps some enlightened spirit thought that in stead of drinking cold wine and eating cold cheese separately, the freezing winter nights could be made to be felt less if you put them together and warm them through. In the process the cheese will melt, of course. But if you do it slowly and use bad wine, with a bit of luck it will all turn into a sauce-like consistency.
Bad wine I said. Now this is important. In the old days wine-making was not very sophisticated. There were more bad years than good ones. In those bad years the wine was often very acid. And that made it perfect for making cheese fondue. Take a well rounded, ripe California chardonnay and hey-ho, your fondue curdles. That’s why everybody adds a bit of starch, potato of corn starch, to safe-guard a creamy consistency. But if you use really zippy, zappy wines from Switzerland or French Savoy, the ones that make your ears curl, it should not be necessary. They will join the cheese – usually equal parts of sweeter Emmental and more savory Gruyere (or Leerdam and Gouda, like we Dutch do) – as in a perfect marriage.
But that said, I must admit I don’t go for the acid wine-no starch version. To risky. And there’s another thing you must know in order to succeed in making fondue. It’s just a little something, but a less-known little something that is responsible for many spoiled fondues, wrecked evenings, relationships utterly broken, and so to loss of happiness, peace on earth being threatened and losing every hope of heavenly bliss. I am referring to the slow warming of the wine and the timely adding of the cheese. Cheese melts, but it will toughen at temperatures near the boiling point of water. The secret of using wine in stead of water (and the adding of a dash of kirsch) is that the alcohol present lowers the boiling point. However, if you let the wine for too long before adding the cheese, the alcohol will be evaporated, the boiling point will go up and your cheese will grump and grind and form lumps. Worse, this is irreversible.
Now, to end it all, here’s a little secret from the darkest areas on the border of France and Switzerland. Do you know the cheese that is known as Vacherin? Mont d’Or is another name for the same thing. It comes in a round, wooden box and it is soft, with a white rind. When ripe, that is. This cheese is delicious as it is, but also known for its ability to turn into a fondue for two without any fuss. Take of the plastic wrapping and make a few cuts in the upper surface. Pour in a bit of white wine, perhaps stick in a sprig of thyme and pop the whole box into a moderate oven, pre-heated. Ten minutes or so will do the trick. Enjoy!

I’m a cheese head. It only follows, the Dutch being called cheese heads. Not that we reflect on that name very often. To us it doesn’t even sound offensive. I mean, the Dutch do make a lot of cheese, and we eat a lot as well. But the French consume lots more and nobody ever thought of calling them ‘têtes de fromage’. You see, our nickname has more to it than just us eating cheese.

I suppose you are familiar with the name Edam, as in Edam cheese. That particular cheese is (almost) as round as a cannon ball, bright yellow and very heavy, something that is perfectly clear once you see the sweating of the guys with the straw hats on, running around with trays loaded with them, at the world famous cheese market in Alkmaar. Edam cheese is made from lightly skimmed milk and it contains less fatt then a Gouda. That makes it less creamy, less velvety, yes, but it certainly does not lack taste. It makes up for it all by being more intense. There seems to be less moisture, more delicious dry ‘cheesiness’, obtained by using a litle bit more salt and shaping it in its unique cannon ball shape, which permits it to ripen faster than a Gouda does.

But how did Edam cheese got its peculiar shape? Well, by wrapping the fresh curdle in cheese cloth and putting it in a mould, consisting of a little wooden bucket. In the old days, that is. Nowadays everything has to be of plastic, due to hygienic requirements. But that wooden bucket used to be called ‘cheese head’. And besides giving shape to the cheese it had another function. Put it on your head and it already looked like a kind of helmet. Just a bit of straw inside to absorb the occasional shock and presto, your head armor for times of unrest was ready. And that’s precisely what my forefathers did in times of quarrel and upheaval. Which made them cheese heads!

You may think differently, but for me food should stand still. Or, to be more precise, it should be dead. I completely agree with Woody Allen who in one of his films says that he does not eat oysters: “I want my food to be dead. Not sick, not wounded, but dead.”
Cheese is harmless, seen in this light. It may be reckoned to be ‘animal’, but that’s of course only in a derived way. It brings us all the good proteins of animal origin, but the source is not harmed in any way. Cheese is gloriously dead, since it has never been alive. Or is it? If you consider all the unseen microbes, yeasts and fungi as life then yes, cheese can be very much alive. And that is not the end of it. In some parts of our world the gods breath even more life into cheeses, an act which is welcomed by the humble inhabitants of Mediterranean France and Italy.
One beautiful summer day my family and I were sitting in a slightly run-down trattoria in the Italian Alps, somewhere west of Turin. The place was filled with local workers – in fact, we had chosen the place because of all the vans that were parked outside, since that is the sign to look for – happily digging their forks into bowls of pasta. And so did we, choosing pan fried trout for ‘secondo’. And all the time there was a cheese board standing on a side table, giving me the eye. Yes, it, or rather the cheeses, were showing off their voluptuous forms, the deep yellow of the rinds, the slightly moist interiors. It was sheer dairy poetry staring at me across the dining room. Mountain cheeses they were, rustic half-hard cheeses of cow’s milk, not having any name apart from ‘nostrano’, which means ‘from here’.
So I ordered cheese. The board with its four big wedges was carried to my table and I dug into it. Yes, my fellow cheese lovers, this was it! This was the very essence of milk, ‘milk’s leap toward immortality’, as Clifton Fadiman once put it. The rind was wrinkled like old leather and powdery, the cheese itself had a deep, immensely gratifying taste. It was only after a few minutes that my then ten year old daughter calmly remarked: “Daddy, the cheese is moving.”
And so it was. Well, not that the pieces were dancing around the board, but something in the rind was wriggling. One or two, perhaps some more tiny yellow threadlike creatures were performing belly dances in the hills and crevices of the cheese. A quarter of an inch long, they were. And no, they were not the ill-famed maggots of the cheese fly, Piophila casei in Latin, that feed on cheese. On the island of Corsica and Sardinia cheese lovers deliberately infect cheeses with them, wait until the maggots have turned the cheese soft and creamy and then eat them. Maggots and all!
This practice was abolished years ago by both France (to which Corsica belongs) and Italy, but this being France and Italy it does not mean that it went into extinction. In fact, all that governments can abolish is the selling of the ‘casu marzu’, as it is called. What people do in their own homes is of course not something the governments can interfere with, nor do they want to.
What I was eating here on the slopes of the Piemonte Alps was not casu marzu, since my creepy crawlies were not white, nor plump, but extremely skinny and yellow. And I must admit that I have not been able to determine what they were, Google notwithstanding (help is welcome here!). They didn’t scare me either, and so they didn’t stop me eating. I just sort of worked my way around the animals. The cheese was just to good. The waitress, when asked, shrugged and thought nothing of it. Quite normal, she said.
I will never know whether the cheese tasted so good because of the inhabitants of its crust. But good it was. Worth a detour, as the Michelin restaurant guide uses as the meaning of two stars. Requests for the name and geographical location of the trattoria are welcome!