In the world of cheese, pyramids normally don’t speak of exotic places but of comfy, cozy ones like the Parc naturel de la Brenne stretching in the middle of nowhere, not far from France’s geographic center that is. I haven’t been there in person, so I can’t tell whether the descriptions are true that this… [Read more…]
September 13, 2011
Here comes another high representative of the rustic Auvergne region, I very much like the description of its smell by my colleagues from the Eyewitness Companions who call it “old, the smell of a dark and humid cellar, of rye straw, and of mould”. The then Marshal of France, Henri de La Ferté-Sennecterre, a native from… [Read more…]
July 10, 2011
Today’s cheese is made south of Troyes, not too far from Paris after all, I very much like the Eyewitness Companions’ judgement that it “melts in the mouth like light snow”. That is true, actually, it is a cheese only poets could accurately describe given its many astounding features and flavors and textures. A native… [Read more…]
July 9, 2011
In the year of the Lord 1381, when the conclave was sitting in Avignon to elect a new pope, the clerics ordered 15 lumps of this cheese, made high up in the Savoy mountains. It was already famous back then, imagine, a dairy product from the alps with a history of more than 300 years… [Read more…]
May 28, 2011
France’s Ardèche and Drôme regions are so breathtakingly beautiful that they both deserved an entry in one of these guides listing “1000 places to see before you die”. They give home to culinary sensations as well (of course) and today’s cheese is only one of them. Its name used to be a generic term for… [Read more…]
May 13, 2011
This cheese has come a long, long way, it is fair to assume that it was already made and sold back in the Middle Ages, in the backward villages of lovely Normandy. It is in fact mentioned in documents published in 1560 and 1588, a square thing, strong and spicy, it used to have a… [Read more…]
May 3, 2011
Maybe I write this a little bit too often but the cheese presented today is again one of my favorites. It’s a subtle, soft, soothing yet powerful dairy product, a real character coming from beautiful Burgundy. The colour – flashy orange as you can see in the picture – is misleading in the end. It… [Read more…]
May 2, 2011
The Loire valley has offered quite a few fine products to the world and our today’s cheese is one of them. A native of the beautiful region called Sancerrois, it calls villages like Amigny, Asnières-sur-Sancerre, Bue, Champlin or Verdigny its home. In a man’s world you’d call it a short guy, displaying a diameter of… [Read more…]
April 27, 2011
Here’s to a fat guy in every respect: the entire cylindrical pieces weigh up to 6 kilograms and the ivory coloured pâte contains at least 50 percent of matière grasse, in other words: fat, and so I guess it’s what Americans would call a devilish sin (or even a threat to homeland security). To French people… [Read more…]
March 11, 2011
We owe today’s cheese to the shrewdness of French farmers who wanted to conceal the real amount of their milk production in order to reduce their tax burden. They did so at some point of time towards the end of the Middle Ages, transforming their milk into (easy-to-hide) small soft cheese discs that served as… [Read more…]
March 5, 2011
This is the rare case of a cheese which literally has been “invented” like the steam engine or the iPod. French farmer Antoine Roussel, living some 40 kilometres west of Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne region, had the (somewhat weird) idea, to inoculate his cheese with mould fungus that appeared on his rye bread. Roussel must… [Read more…]
March 3, 2011
Here’s a to a winter cheese, production starts on 15th August and is allowed until 15th March but it is sold only from September through May. As a costumer in Paris you only see it when the cold season really has begun – and it is, in fact, a product so rich and creamy that… [Read more…]
February 4, 2012
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