For centuries, cheese in its many hundreds of forms, eaten with a crusty baguette and a glass of red wine, has been the midday meal for a sizable percentage of France. Not only did this combination of protein and carbohydrate provide energy for a day of hard labor; the choice of a cheese from your home district could affirm one’s cultural identity.
From the Middle Ages, cheese was a primary source of protein for the peasantry. Typically, it contains about 30 percent protein and 30 percent fat, almost the same as red meat, and substantially more than vegetables with their mere one percent to five percent protein. Cheese had the added advantage of simplicity. It could be manufactured in the poorest kitchen with the simplest ingredients. Rennet, found in the stomach of a cow, and in certain plants, such as the thistle or fig, was added to milk, which separated into solids—curds—and a watery residue—whey. Pressed into a mold and left to cure, the curds turned to cheese, soft or hard depending on how long they were left to mature.
Variants soon appeared. The use of cow, goat or sheep milk created the subgroups of vache, chèvre and brebis. To preserve cheeses and add flavor, they were wrapped in vine leaves, rolled in herbs, peppercorns, dried fruits or ashes, or flavored with such seeds as caraway, cumin or anise. Novelist Honoré de Balzac described approvingly “the famous cheese of the Touraine and du Berry, made with goats’ milk and reproducing on its surface the pattern of the vine leaves in which it had been molded, and which replicated the style of Touraine engravings.”
Blue cheese developed when naturally occurring bacteria, usually by chance, found their way into soft cheese. Roquefort, the most famous blue, was supposedly discovered by accident in the caves of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, in the rocky southern region of Aveyron. According to legend, a farm boy, distracted by a village maiden, left his lunch in the cave. Chancing on the leftovers some weeks later, he was surprised to find the cheese marbled with a blue mold that imparted a distinctive flavor. Although the mold has since been synthesized, the best Roquefort still matures in caverns where the culture occurs naturally.
The rise of cheese from one element in the French diet to a national symbol began early in the 19th century. In a nation with roughly the same population as the British Isles but many times the area, rural values predominated. With sugar expensive, hosts preferred to end a meal with cheese. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin had already decreed, memorably, that “a meal without wine is like a day without sunshine.” Now he added that “a dessert without cheese is like a beauty with only one eye.”
The gastronomes of Britain and Holland, where cheeses were generally hard and neutral in aroma, deprecated the pungency and deliquescence of the predominantly soft and odiferous French product. James Joyce, an enthusiast for most foods, excluded cheese. “A corpse is meat gone bad,” he sneered. “Well, and what’s cheese? Corpse of milk.” French authors were more appreciative. In his 1873 novel Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris), set around the teeming food market of Les Halles, Émile Zola rejoiced in cheese’s variety:
The heat of the afternoon had softened the cheeses. The patches of mold on their crusts were melting, and glistening with tints of ruddy bronze and verdigris. Beneath their cover of leaves, the skins of the Olivets seemed to be heaving as with the slow deep respiration of a sleeping man. A Livarot was swarming with life, and in a fragile box behind the scales a Gérome flavored with aniseed diffused such a pestilential smell that all around the very flies had fallen lifeless on the grey-veined slab of ruddy marble.
This proliferation of regional cheeses created a connoisseurship rivaling that of wine. In 1925, the dairy industry adopted the wine industry’s Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, with Roquefort the first recipient. (Today, it specifically protects the names of 56 cheeses.)
As Paris became increasingly cosmopolitan, cheese entered the urban diet. Inner city producers kept livestock in their courtyards and roamed the streets to sell their product. As late as 1927, Janet Flanner, correspondent for The New Yorker magazine, wrote of “goatherds, including our favorite Baptiste, whose flock parades the Quartier St. Germain at high noon.” She relished, in particular, his homemade chèvre, “at two [francs] fifty the cake, a remarkable luncheon dainty.”
The variety of French cheeses and the fact that many existed only where geography, climate and raw materials occurred in unique combination made them a useful symbol of unity in diversity. A fromager could even acquire political influence. As, traditionally, the Paris cheese shop of Nicole Barthélémy supplied the presidential palace, journalists learned to watch the shop for signs of changes in the seats of power. If the government looked like resigning, a flunkey was sent to settle Barthelémy’s bill, for fear the owner might cut off their credit.
Goat’s milk and cheese seller with customer in January 1929 in Paris
In 1962, as the Communists launched a bid for power, Charles de Gaulle derided their vision of a one-party France, demanding, “Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux cent quarante-six variétés de fromage?” (“How can you govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese?”) His political judgment was acute—the Communists never looked like winning—but not his count of cheeses, estimated by some as more than a thousand, and still rising.