The selection of cheeses presented for the cheese course at a fine French restaurant may be only a mere handful or more than a few dozen. On different occasions I’ve been presented with a simple tray of cheeses to a two-level cart crammed chockablock. In France there’re cheeses made from cow’s milk, cheeses made from goat’s milk, and cheeses made from sheep’s milk. Some cheeses are very fresh, light in taste, and barely a few days old. Others have dry, gnarly surfaces, and a very sharp taste. Some are so soft that they flow over the plate, while others are dry and crumbly. The selection of cheeses may be limited to those available locally or there may be cheeses from all over France. Some cheeses will only be available seasonally while others are available throughout the year.
The waiter brings the tray or the board or the cart with the cheeses, describes each one, and requests your selection. You, the diner, choose two or three, or even four, to try. Along with a small portion of each cheese selected, you are served a roll or a couple of slices of bread, even a selection of a variety of breads.
The cheese course comes just before the dessert course, but some diners forego dessert and finish their meal with cheese. Some have cheese plus a little fruit. Even at home, it is not uncommon for the French to have a little cheese at the end of their meal, although the selection is usually more limited than in a restaurant.
At home or in a casual restaurant, fromage frais (fresh cheese) may be mixed with a little cream, sugar, or jam and served as a dessert. Or the fresh cheese may be baked into a tart, such as tarte au fromage blanc, and served as a dessert.
Some cheeses are manufactured in large factories. Others are manufactured by a small fromagerie and sent to a cooperative for aging. One fromagère I met in the Dordogne used the entire output of her husband’s three cows to produce a very well-drained, and very tasty, fromage frais that was sold only to a few local restaurants. But this small fromagerie producing a few kilograms of cheese each day from three smelly cows has to follow the same government health and safety regulations as the large factory that daily produces thousands of kilograms of cheese.
Many cheeses fall into a general category, such as Roquefort or Camembert, and must meet government regulations as to how much dry material and fat they contain, how long they are aged, and how they are aged. Other cheeses are unique, such as the cheese from the three cows described above, and the only standards set are those of the individual fromager. There are over 40 cheeses that carry the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée indication; these have to meet the strictest regulations of standardization of all.
Cheeses packaged for sale in a supermarket in France will usually indicate the percent matière grasse, an indication of the amount of fat in the cheese. This number is a bit misleading because the percent is not relative to the whole quantity of cheese. The figure is an indication of how much of the dry matter is fat. For example, if a cheese is 60% water and 40% dry matter, and the fat content is indicated as 45%, 45% of the 40%, or 18%, of the total piece of cheese is fat. A 100-gram piece of this cheese would contain 18 grams of fat. Because the French government often regulates the amount of dry matter and fat that a cheese must contain, the absolute fat content is, by derivation, also regulated. Two cheeses with the same indication of matière grasse may have much different amounts of total fat if their water contents differ significantly. A fromage frais may be 80% water, whereas an aged comté may only be 40% water. By weight, the comté would contain twice as much fat as the fromage frais.
No one knows exactly how many different cheeses are produced in France on a given day. When de Gaulle made his famous statement—“How can anyone govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese?”—the number was already large. More recently I have heard from various sources that the number is jsut under 500, slightly more than 600, or somewhere in between. Whatever the number, it’s certainly a large variety of cheeses.
But that doesn’t mean that all cheeses are available everywhere. Many years ago, my wife and I were enjoying a fabulous dinner in the Jura. She tasted a cheese that was new to her and asked the waiter to write the name down so she could buy some later during our trip. A week or so later, in a cheese shop in Antibes, a couple of hundred kilometers to the south, she asked the proprietor for this same cheese. His response was that he, one, did not carry the cheese, two, had never heard of it, and three, could not understand why anyone would ask for it. It was our first encounter with the French attitude towards cheese where local varieties are favored over those from other regions. Later, when we looked for the cheese in Paris, we couldn’t find it there either. When we returned to our home in Northern California, we found the cheese at a grocery store three blocks down the street from our home and at other stores close to where we live. We found it easier to purchase this cheese from a small French village in California than in France!
For many years, whenever we had dinner guests, we would present a platter of five or six French cheeses between the main course and dessert. The cheeses would be accompanied by fresh bread or rolls and a small, light, green salad. One evening in Brittany, the waiter suggested a terrine de Roquefort instead of the cheese selection. It was a fabulous suggestion—one that I have now followed many times since I returned home. It was nice to substitute other cheese preparations for the cheese platter. So I started a search for other cheese-based recipes. The results of that search are the 15 recipes in this article. Some of these recipes include some form of salad, but for others, the salad is just a nice addition.
The selection of cheeses presented for the cheese course at a fine French restaurant may be only a mere handful or more than a few dozen. On different occasions I’ve been presented with a simple tray of cheeses to a two-level cart crammed chockablock. In France there’re cheeses made from cow’s milk, cheeses made from goat’s milk, and cheeses made from sheep’s milk. Some cheeses are very fresh, light in taste, and barely a few days old. Others have dry, gnarly surfaces, and a very sharp taste. Some are so soft that they flow over the plate, while others are dry and crumbly. The selection of cheeses may be limited to those available locally or there may be cheeses from all over France. Some cheeses will only be available seasonally while others are available throughout the year.
