Comté Country: Part II

A drawbridge leads into a mountain.  But the mountain is hollowed out.  And in it live 65,000 wheels of Comté with their keeper, Claude.

The fort is a veritable library, filled with cheese rather than books.  Row after row, impossibly stacked, perpetually regular, teeming with mold, a cache, a vault, a catacomb.  It’s musty and cold and damp; spiderwebs hang off shelves; stalactites dangle from the blasted stone ceiling. 

Whistling, officious machines turn the cheeses electronically and dry-salt them; every cheese is turned, brushed and salted every week.  Every board (over 100,000) is changed every year by the fifteen workers that spend their time in the fort.  Only twelve cheesemakers in the region store cheese there; Bobillé makes up about ten percent of its stock.

The Fort is Marcel Petite’s.  The man after which it is named started out as a Comté cheesemaker who then turned to affinage, and before he died he penned some memoirs through which I flipped before lunch.  In them he recounts that one day when he was small, a vagrant came to the house pleading dinner.  His mother fed the man, who thanked her and said he’d come back a year later.  He did.  But this time he laid down the equivalent of 30 years of Marcel’s father’s salary down on the kitchen table and told the family he was a distant relative, lacking kin, who wanted to bequeath his money to the family members most deserving.

Petite’s first caves were in Pontarlier, but he acquired the Fort St-Antoine, an old stone garrison built a century and a half ago, in 1966. 

The Fort St.Antoine deserves depiction.

There are three kilometers of aisles of cheeses; in the garrison’s barracks, in its mess hall, in its long, infinite corridors.  The ammonia is so strong it hurts the eyes.  The light is dull and dim, the only sound the muted, diffuse motorized clanking of a far-off forklift or turning machine.  Our steps echo; our voices resound.  A mysterious mist settles around us; there is something templar about it.

Salters—people who salted—used to look after the cheese, dry-salting to remove moisture, preserve the raw milk, and accentuate the flavor of the cheese.  But in 1994 the fort got its first turning machine, a gigantic golf cart that whizzes through aisles turning cheeses with a nuclear arm, and now it has four.  Once it turns a cheese, the salt on top beads up like diamonds as moisture collects, after a few hours so much that water rolls off onto the ground. But many parts of the process are still executed by hand.  I watch a man carrying a big black ink tray stamp X down a whole row, zen-like, carefully, one by one.

When Claude tastes cheese, he uses every sense he’s blessed with.  He rubs the outside with his palm, feeling the roughness, the ruggedness of the skin.  I love the words the French can make use of to describe the textures of cheese crustage or croûtage: écorce (bark), dentelle (lace), peau de serpent (snakeskin).  “There’s a bit of magnetism to intuiting what’s inside, I think,” he says, grinning.  He taps with an iron mallet and listens to the sound.  “I don’t hit the cheese,” he says.  “I ring it.  J’osculte.”  He’s trying to guess, he says, what’s happening inside the cheese.  “Cheese talks,” he says.  “Just listen.”  He draws a quick circle where he thinks the weakness (‘lainure’) that signifies ripeness might be, and scores on the heel a height he’s guessed.  He cores.  Right on both counts. 

When he tastes cheese Claude peels it off his iron, twirls and twists it, and pops it neatly into his mouth with a thumb.  He chews and reflects, spits out a pithy perfect summation of the flavor, and scores the cheese with cryptic symbols on its talon (heel, or side).  Sometimes he doesn’t even taste it, just shoves the iron in (without turning), whips it out and smells it.  It’s like looking at a painting, tasting is.  All these different colors make a whole, but you have to look closely to see how they blend together.

We try eight Comtés.

The first tastes vanilla-y, like cream (young).

The second is burnt like a gratin, smoky, both acidic and lactic, lemony, fruity, sweet, like a prune.

The third tastes of pea skin, sweet but green, has a pithy bitterness.

The fourth tastes of cake batter and dough.  Claude scratches a diagram into the top of the cheese for us, graphing out the balance between salty, acidic, bitter and sweet.

The fifth reminds us of calves’ livers, is a peppery rollercoaster.  Too over-the-top.

The sixth is sweet and more forgiving.

The seventh, to me, tastes vegetal.  To Dom, it’s cooked leek juice and mange-tout beans.  Everyone nods their assent.  Well, at least I was in the right ballpark. 

The last one tastes of reduced gravy and makes me think of Thanksgiving.

For Claude the cheese is altogether palette, bible, manna, and work.  On the side he’s got a farm shop where he sells—what else—six different Comtés.  Claude has worked in the fort for eighteen years, and Comté has yet to bore him.  Apples fall off the tree when they’re ripe, says Claude.  Cheese doesn’t.  Which is why each wheel that leaves the fort is tasted individually rather than sent out in batches. 

We leave the caves for lunch upstairs; the sun shines over a green meadow and we can hear cowbells in the distance.  We eat—what else—cheese, we drink lovely sweet wine.  Claude and Philippe tell us about the regional ‘commis’’ shows, cow competitions, that set the mountains all a-fever.  There are ‘misses’’ beauty contests, for which the cows are washed, shaved and be-ribbonned.  Pontarlier is the county seat for all the regional finalists, and later they go to Paris for the national competition.  The Jura doesn’t rank terribly well nationally because not eating silage means the cows don’t get as fat.  The grand prize? Gigantic cowbells.  Claude tells us that come competition time in the autumn, proud farmers keep their cows from donating all their milk to the cheesemakers to assure that their udders stay nice and swollen.

Jason sells the Comté he buys at the Fort St.-Antoine on a stall at Borough Market.  He’s created a posterboard of pictures of the fort and the cheeses for customers to see that takes them through a Comté-buying trip from London to Geneva and back.  This blog entry doesn’t do much more justice to the Fort; preserving its inhabitants—both cheese and man—in plastic, keeping them two-dimensional, flat.  It hardly conveys the mammoth work they do, repetitive and focused, studied and pure. 

Funny world, cheese.  I had no idea before I got into British cheese what massive layers of sediment it would take me wading through.  And the funny thing is that anything you turn an eye to—hairdressing, pet shows, landscaping—is a world of its own.  In one of the Narnia books, I remember, the characters find themselves in the Wood Between the Worlds, a collection of pools in a forest into which they can jump to travel amidst universes.  Visiting Comté felt like hopping into a pool not so far from mine, if only just getting damp.  And to think that another thirty seconds and I’d have missed the flight…