Making Mont d'Or

Every affineur and cheesemaker in France, it seemed, was in Paris on Monday for the Salon d’Agriculture. All except Monsieur Rousselet, president of the Longueville-Mont d’Or cheese cooperative. His wife was cadgy about why, and wheedled about before giving us an appointment in the afternoon. “It all depends how he’s feeling,” she said finally. “You see, he’s just had another round of chemo.”

We pulled up to the cooperative, blaring the Dead, stretched our legs and breathed in the sunshine glinting off the vast expanse of snow. Tiny skiers in one-piece quilted suits lobbed across the Mont d’Or like bright, slow-motion ping-pong balls on a massive white table.  It was a few minutes before M. Rousselet hobbled briskly up to us, a daft giant of a man with a fat, smooth head under a porkpie hat. He accepted Mateo’s cheese with amiable surprise—“Américain? Vraiment?”—and invited us in.

Mont d’Or production is exclusively cooperative-based; farmhouse production no longer exists and is in fact forbidden. “Except one renegade,” winked M. Rousselet. “My brother-in-law. Morbier man by trade. Makes Mont d’Or sometimes too. Sells it all on markets. How long are you staying? Hm, too bad…”  

What followed was the cleverest, most technically apt display of resourcefulness we’d witness all trip. The man and his brain trust had rigged up four tipping vats that spilled curd onto a table packed tight with forms. Men holding spade-like tools raked the curd over until the surface became level, which meant the forms were all equally full. Grouped in packs of sixteen so they could all be picked up at once, the forms were then racked and left to drain. Made-to-order trolleys and dollies askew littered the vast, deserted tile like android soldiers waiting idly for battle.

Every cheese culture has their own situation-specific method of keeping loose curd from sagging into lactic puddles on the maturing shelf: the English bind in cloth, the Americans choke in wax. The French, for their part, corset their fragile cheeses with spruce belts known as sangles, made by burly lumberjacks known as sangliers who carry up to 50 kg of the strips down the mountain on their backs. They strip felled spruce logs of their rough outer bark, and carefully plane strips one inch wide and one meter long off the thin, supple inner bark. To hear Rousselet tell the story, it peels right off. To hear Mateo’s experience in making them, it’s a colossal pain in the ass.  

During sangle season, there are four full-time sangliers (the word in French also means ‘wild boar’) combing the Mont d’Or for spruce bark (épicéa), but even so, the dearth of expertise, quantity, and the current economic crisis has French cheesemakers dialing up their Polish colleagues for the goods. Mateo, who trusses his Winnemeres up in spruce, had been buying belts from France for $1 apiece (about five times more than Rousselet’s rate) until supply ran out and he laboriously had to make his own from Vermont spruce, cursing himself for choosing to make washed-rinds, notoriously labor-intensive and finicky cheeses.

Rousselet boils the belts until they are pliable as worn-in leather motorbike pants, then wraps them about the waists of his baby Mont d’Ors and fastens them shut with an old-fashioned toothpick pin. Eventually, they coagulate shut and the pin is removed before the cheeses are boxed (also in spruce, which continues to impart to the cheeses the desirable, characteristic flavor valued by connoisseurs). 

So tethered shut, the cheeses are placed on boards dunked in penicillium mold. This allows for more controlled, slower mold growth than spraying the cheeses or inoculating the milk with penicillium does. Rousselet has four beautiful maturing rooms in which the cheeses, sleeping on these pregnant wooden boards (which in turn are arranged appropriately atop modular metal scaffolding), incubate for fourteen days. His fractious Algerian and Portuguese cellarmen wash the half-kilo, 800-gram and three-kilo wheels every day in plain water with a common toilet brush. An inflatable sock running the length of the ceiling drops humidity gently down onto the cheeses through micro-pores; when the room has been emptied, the misting fan double-duties by spraying caustic and detergents into the room to clean it.

Rousselet led us through the rest of the rooms like a preoccupied, stumbling, aged Willy Wonka, more mystified than mad. Each contained brilliant evidence of cheesemaking evolutionary thought: here a board-scrubbing machine worked like a car wash with rotating bristle brushes; there he’d put a Kärcher room for pressure-cleaning larger equipment.  There were hot caustic immersion baths with mini-cranes to lift dirty cages into. There was a boxing machine with little conveyor belts on either end; one for the naked cheese and the other for the empty box, with a clawed arm in the middle that would lever the cheese into the box and a chute to send the cheese on its way. In the next room was the packaging machine that shrink-wrapped the cheese in perforated plastic; stuck to it was a Post-It with “Rowcliffe” scribbled on it. (Aha!) 

Rousselet’s cooperative equally produces Comté and Morbier cheese (for Arnaud, the sugar daddy behind all of the expensive machinery). The make and maturing systems he had elaborated for those were as intelligent as his Mont d’Or setup, but at this point his brain had be-garbled itself too impenetrably for us to make much sense out of his explanations. He pointed to a scar that would itself intricately around his naked scalp like a tiara. “They’ve just taken out another tumor,” he mumbled. “Broken head…no fun.”

Let me be clear. Rousselet’s was not a factory, any more than other cooperatives are. He’d just come up with innovative help-machines to make his men’s work less back-breaking. It was a real pleasure, in fact, seeing his pride in the facility (which it was, in the most literal sense) and his response to our enthusiasm. Mateo hopped gleefully around snapping photos of cogs and hinges and close-ups of manufacturers’ labels as Rousselet looked on bemusedly. The one picture he took exception to was the one Mateo took of him in the airy tile-cathedral of a make room. “Awww…and I just lost another tooth last week…”

It was late and we were due in Paris, so, reluctantly, we shook hands and took our leave. On the way out, one last article in the farm shop caught our eye. The man had even developed a mechanized cheese guillotine that looked cobbled together from recycled bicycle parts and a gramophone; the cheese rotated on a turntable until it stopped with a click and the blade, like a record needle, dropped slowly, jerkily, down a chain, lopping off for customers fat, satisfying slabs of Comte. Rousselet tried to make it work, but his memory and fingers and words all battled against each other, and in the end, his saleslady had to find the right switch to flick, as our hero leaned heavily against the wall and bit his lip resignedly, aggravated and spent.

For another article on the Longueville-Mont d'Or cooperative, see here.

Comments

[govokinolij]

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