Many's the night I've dreamed of cheese...

[shewhomust]

We had dinner guests last night, and talked of many things, including recent visits to France. Over the cheeseboard, Helen commented that increasingly, French people are following the health advice to eat less cheese. It's all anecdotal, but our experience in the last month had been quite the contrary, that cheese was being served more lavishly than in the past. Let's cheese-blog...

The classic way to serve cheese is at the end of the meal, before or instead of dessert. At the Hostellerie du Perigord in Aubeterre-sur-Dronne, for example, my selection from the trolley gave me three pieces of cheese - one local goat's milk cheese, quite strongly flavoured, another local cheese, Trappe (made by monks) mellow, and with a mushroom flavour which I suspect came from truffles, and some Tête de Moine, which I chose for the sheer pleasure of seeing it served. It's a tall drum-shaped cheese, yellow with a brown rind, and is presented on a device which lowers a blade onto the top of the cylinder and scrapes off a ruffle of cheese - hence the name, because the exposed pale surface above the brown rind is likened to a monk's tonsure. The taste is pleasant enough, rather like a dry semi-strong cheddar. You are given your pieces of cheese on a plate, and you eat them with a knife and fork. If the staff realise you are not French, they may take pity on you and leave the bread, but this is not a standard accompaniment.

But already in Burgundy I had noticed the use of a rich cheese sauce - and then we reached the Auvergne. The Auvergne is the mountainous centre of France, with a cuisine of filling peasant food. It appears to have two traditional dishes: there is truffade, a mixture of chunks of potato and young tomme cheese, and there is aligot, a mixture of mashed potato and young tomme cheese. These are not potato dishes with a little cheese for flavour, these are dishes of molten cheese, leavened with a little potato, and while on previous visits we have occasionally been offered one or the other, suddenly this year they were on every menu, the accompaniment to every dish. I'm not complaining, I'll happily eat cheese and potatoes at every meal, but I was a little surprised.

Even the Auvergne, however, did not prepare us for "le Welsh". At the very end of our holiday, in Berck Plage on the north coast, we discovered this popular local snack on offer in all the sea-front restaurants - and the shallow gratin dishes in which to prepare it in the local supermarket. durham_rambler ordered a "Welsh complet", which turned out to be a soup plate full of melted cheese, in which there lurked a slice of bread (most un-French bread from a white sliced loaf) and a slice of ham. The whole thing was topped with a fried egg, and served with chips. Death by cheese...

Comments

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Sure, but what we eat encompasses lots of foods, many of which are eaten by several nations. But melted cheese and leeks are very associated with the Welsh and no one else. Though of course some other foods incorporate those things, those dishes are called something else.