One of the world’s oldest foods is back on the menu
While in Office, the late French President Charles de Gaulle asked, “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of Cheese?” At last count, France has more than 500 cheeses.
The smartly uniformed server wheels in the cheese trolley to our table, and we are awestruck. Two tiers of sixty of the finest cheeses from France: aged, fresh, hard, medium, soft. Cheese with runny soft centres that you want to eat with a spoon, cheese with a fresh milk base which evolve, mature and ripen like fruit, wood-ash covered goat cheese set on fronds of fresh herbs and vine leaves, cheese from cow’s milk, goat’s milk, and ewe’s milk.
I recognize St. Nectaire, which looks like a big orange doughnut with a hole bored in the centre; goat cheese Crottin de Chavignol with its delicate blue spots; and Selles-sur-Cher, with its soft charcoal covered rind; a heart-shaped Neufchatel, its golden yellow bloomy rind flecked with red; Roquefort, the only cheese to serve with butter; Brie de Meaux, which matures for seven weeks in a cool cellar in Brie country, west of Paris; Epoisses de Bourgogne, carefully rinsed in Eau-de-Vie during the maturation process and carrier of the grapey scent; and Comte, a cooked cheese with a scattering of small eyes.
The server gracefully lifts the glass dome from the trolley and asks in dulcet tones, Madame what is your pleasure?” Overwhelmed, I can only murmur, “Surprise me.” The wine in my glass is 1982 Hermitage. The basket of bread is toasted, crusty, country loaf. Bunches of grapes from local vines and ripe pears are brought in simple crockery bowls, along with walnuts and a nutcracker. All the necessary ingredients for a luxurious repast. It is the truly perfect triumvirate of fine dining with all at 100%: Professional Server, Exceptional Food, Appreciative Diner.
I need a few moments to pause in my writing, close my eyes and appreciate again the memory of this simple, yet thrilling last course at an extraordinary dinner in Paris.
Two-fifths of humanity does not eat cheese, yet it is probably one of the oldest foods in the world, even illustrated with shepherds in 6th and 7th Century Byzantine mosaics. Georgian shepherds in the South Caucasus who allege they are descendants of Noah, claim they have been making sheep’s milk cheese forever. Even the Greek Mythological Cyclopes was a cheese maker. At last count France has more than 500 cheeses, and with form, flavour and texture constantly being reinvented, the range of French cheese is as infinite as the range of surprises.
It is inevitable, that while lunching on a terrace in Cap d’Antibes in the South of France overlooking the Seine, or at, say, Le Cinq at the Four Seasons Hotel George V, Paris, someone will say, “I’ll have a little cheese to finish the wine,” and then it’s a well-established tradition to have another bottle of wine to finish the cheese.
