A North Wind Is Preferred For Cheesemaking; South Wind From The Sea Is Best For Maturing

I.  Does this great cheese, so glorious at best, need butter?  It has been a deplorable but common custom in France to mix butter with Roquefort, making a spread of it.  In my Breton guise, as if hailing from the banks of the great River Rance), I am used to eating butter under cheese (like the Normans), but mixing it, never. It spoils both.  As a possible child of Rouergat ancestry (near Roquefort there is the “le tout petit ruisseau nommé Rance," as another Rouergat described it to me), I regard butter as quite unnecessary with any Roquefort I choose to eat; but some demand it to take the edge off such cheeses as the sharper also-rans of the Gault-Milau race.

Roquefort

          As for wine, let any who have felt uneasy when accompanying Roquefort with red wine other than port try sweet or very fruity drier white wines.  Chateau d'Yquem is the perfect but extravagant counsel of some great gourmets.  Closer to hand, and more reasonable, are Périgord’s Montbazillac, Banyuls and Rivesaltes rancis.  In England a sweet old dark ale or barley wine would do well, especially out of doors.

A fleurine in a Roquefort cave.   It is through the complex system of interconnected cracks or faults known as fleurines that the air runs through the Roquefort caves, maintaining constant conditions of wetness (95-99%) and temperature (7-11°C).

II. All the laiteries belong to the Roquefort cave proprietors.  Weather conditions are charted daily, together with detailed timings of each stage of cheesemaking, and the amount of rennet and pennicillium used.   Even the wind direction is tested, by the wet-finger method, and recorded. A north wind is preferred for cheesemaking because it is cooling for the dairy; traditionally making might “wait for the wind.”  South wind from the sea is best for maturing, being the only one to penetrate the fleurines and create the necessary movement of moisture and spores throughout the caves.  

A Roquefort cave

          Monsieur Albert Alric told me that Papillon laiteries keep similar charts and pointed out that if a customer complains and gives the date and vat of marking, it is possible to trace the conditions in which the particular cheese was made and all the details of its making to see whether the fault lay with the laiterie or the caves.   Dairy workers are paid for the whole year, although they do not have to work in the period when no milk is being collected.

A Roquefort laiterie 

          “There are eight stories below us,” Monsieur Laur said as we left his office and started descending the old staircase down into the caves.   The servants’ staircase, it might be called, for people are only here to serve; the cheeses are the masters for whom the lift is reserved.  It is salutary to think back to the days when they had to be carried up and down the stairs. Through the dimness, giving way to darkness away from the stair-shaft, only the cheeses seem to give off light against the deep, damp-saturated oaken uprights and shelves.  Chill moisture is the constant factor, together with the invisible spores, the two combining to create and nourish a greasy floor and stair covering (take sensible, non-slip shoes and wooly clothing, and do not dig your heels in).  On the south wall the naked rock is split by the irregular fleurines, great sinister cracks occasionally letting through the merest gleam from an upper, outer world.

1929 Château d’Yquem – 5 * -- Michael Broadbent

"A deep, rich amber, some [bottles] a rose tinted tawny; peaches and cream ride uppermost, also apricots, peeled sultanas, sometimes slightly chocolatey, always richly penetrating." 

"The perfect but extravagant counsel." 

Live a little, I say (hopefully).  The end is near.  If not, live a little (I say hopefully). Seana (below) clearly wants to.

From Patrick Rance:  The French Cheese Book.  Macmillan, London, 1989.   

Galettes Briardes

Aromatic, crusty Brie-flavoured biscuits.

For 4

200 g (7 oz) ripe Brie

70 g (2 ½ oz) unsalted butter, diced

2 egg yolks

pinch salt

pinch freshly ground white pepper

pinch freshly grated nutmeg

250 g ((9 oz) plain white flour

1 tbsp milk

Trim the cheese of any hard or brown bits of rind.  Mash it in a mixing bowl, add the butter, egg yolks, salt pepper and nutmeg, and blend.  Gradually add the flour and knead everything together until a rather stiff, smooth dough is obtained.  If necessary add a few drops of cold water.  Wrap in aluminum foil and chill for 1 hour.

         On a lightly floured surface, roll out about 6 mm (1/4 in thick   Cut serrated rounds of about 7 cm (3 in) in diameter.  Arrange on lightly oiled baking sheets, score lightly in a criss-cross pattern with a fork, brush with milk and bake in a fairly hot oven (190 C/375 F/gas mark 5) for about 15-20 minutes or until golden brown.  Cool on a rack.

From:  Peter Graham, Classic Cheese Cookery.  London, Penguin, 1988 

Home-made

Store-bought 



See also:  The Varieties of Brie (Link)

The Varieties of Brie (From The French Cheese Book)

 Major Patrick Rance

Brie à la Chiffe

Brie à la Loque

Brie au Poivre

Brie  Bleu

Brie d’Amateur

Brie de la Poste aux Chevaux de Meaux

Brie de Maquelines

Brie de Maquin

Brie de Meaux

Brie de Melun

Brie de Melun Bleu

Brie de Melun Frais

Brie de Montereau, Ville Saint Jacques

Brie de Montereau Bleu

Brie de Montfort

Brie de Nangis

Brie-en-pot

Brie de Provins

Brie de Valois

Brie Façon Coulommiers

Brie Petit Moule

Fromage à la Pie (Coulommier Frais)

Brie Fermier

Brie Laitier

Brie Industriel

Brie Truffé

From Patrick Rance:  The French Cheese Book.  Macmillan, London, 1989.    

NOTE:  Reading through Patrick Rance's vivid descriptions of the varieties of Brie, I can happily report that all of them seem interesting enough and worth trying with the exception of the penultimate entry, Brie Industriel, about which Rance writes: "There is a class of industriel cheese made from lait pasturisé standardisé which the cheesemaker virtually never sets eyes on.  [It] is only of interest to Brie lovers as a curiosity, or a candidate for the Chamber of Horrors."  Regarding Brie Truffé, Rance notes that M. Paul Corcellat of Paris will prepare this cheese to order.  It sounds fabulous and like a real September 2011 pick-me-up.

The so-called "black" Brie -- aged Brie de Meaux

Please note Major Rance's Monocle (Link).

This post is dedicated to Kevin Ayers in southwest France.

See also: Galettes Briardes (Link)

The Disappearance of the Transhumance (Patrick Rance)

        This brings us to the Vivarais, a beautiful mountain pays.  On its eastern flank crags and cliff-crested shale slopes tower over the rivage along the Rhone.  The south-east, between the Ardeche and the Rhone, more like Provence, is called Ardeche a l’Huile. This was Helvie in Roman times, later ruled, like Velay, sovereign-bishops, and came to the French crown in 1229. It was represented in the Etats du Languedoc  from the fourteenth century, but I hope its modern inhabitants will excuse me for regarding it as a natural companion in its mountains and its cheeses to Velay, Forez, and Auvergne.

        This century has seen decline and depopulation, and latterly even the disappearance of the transhumance*.  The irregular charm of the old stone buildings has too often been hidden behind the dirty battledress of cement, or the hideous stark suburbanism of harl and rough-cast.  What remains of Vivarais’ past to delight the eye is the occasional handsome group of farm buildings, and nature itself, sometimes growing over the abandoned terraces of the mountain sides, where the exceptional tiny, high vineyard yet persists.  Higher still, castles can be indistinguishable from crags, crags from castles.  Far below are the working vineyards of today, producing wines which I have found pleasant with pasta and cheese.   On the Rhone south of Valence, La Voulte-sur-Rhone on N86 offers a Friday market before you turn west on D-20 for Saint-Laurent-du-Pape, where there is an organic goat farm.  D120 provides one route up into Picodon country, with a farm at Gluiras by the way, before Pont de Chervil.  Further north and west are a farm at Saint-Basile, and Lamastre, where all kinds of chevres and some mi-chevres are available.

From:  Patrick Rance, The French Cheese Book.  London, Macmillan, 1989

* "Transhumance is the seasonal movement of people with their livestock over relatively short distances, typically to higher pastures in summer and to lower valleys in winter. Herders have a permanent home, typically in valleys. Only the herds travel, with the people necessary to tend them."