The milk that Paulette Marmottan uses in her cheese comes fresh from her cows and goats, so warm that on cold mornings, a cloud of steam goes up as she pours it into a cauldron.
It’s the first step in making Persille de Tignes, which according to local lore, was a favorite of the mighty 9th-century emperor Charlemagne.
However, the Marmottans are the last family making it, and while most French people may be content with the mass-produced cheeses of their globalizing world, the disappearance of traditional varieties is seen by some as threatening the very essence of Frenchness.
The Persille de Tignes is not alone on the list of endangered fromages. Dozens have been lost since World War II, and experts say another dozen or more are considered at risk of extinction. No one has a precise count of how many cheese types France produces, but the country has long prided itself on having a different one for every day of the year.
“The French have forgotten what real cheese is,” said Veronique Richez-Lerouge, who heads the Association Fromages de Terroirs, a group aimed at protecting France’s cheese culture.
Many blame the Americans, saying they habituated the French to pasteurization, to the detriment of raw-milk cheeses — an ironic claim, considering that the germ-killing process was invented by a French hero of science, Louis Pasteur.
Other big forces are also in play: the creeping homogenization of the global palate, food-safety regulations imposed by the EU and the increasing weight of the food industry, which churns out just a handful of blockbuster varieties.
Some small farms cannot cope with the new rules, and Big Food stands ready to buy them out.
“There are plenty of cheeses that only exist as names in old books,” said Stephane Blohorn, who owns Androuet, a famous 101-year-old chain of Paris cheese shops.
The French are still prodigious cheese consumers. They eat just under 0.5kg a week per person on average, according to the Eurostat statistics agency. That puts them just behind the EU’s champion cheese-eaters, the Greeks.
What has changed is the kind of cheeses the French eat.
Raw-milk cheeses, which until World War II and the arrival of the US military accounted for nearly all French production, now make up only 7 percent of annual consumption, the association said. Now most French people go for pasteurized, mass-produced, plastic-wrapped varieties like emmental, camembert and the orange-colored mimolette, and processed cheeses like the Laughing Cow brand.
“Buying cheese has become like buying a box of detergent,” said Richez-Lerouge, whose association publishes a calendar featuring bikini-clad pinups straddling hunks of Saint-Nectaire, Savarin and Rocamadour from family farms.
In La Savinaz, a village perched on a snow-covered peak in the eastern French Alps, Marmottan trudges downstairs to the stable — on the ground floor of her Swiss-style house — to milk her 30 cows and 80 goats.
In the outsized cauldron, she blends the milks and adds yoghurt to kick-start fermentation. Several days later, she mixes and salts the curd, packing it into tall cylindrical molds that leak out any remaining whey before being dispatched to the cellar to age for a few weeks.
Local histories tell of Charlemagne tasting Persille de Tignes during a visit and ordering a selection of the best wheels shipped back to the royal court.
Within recent memory there were dozens of families making Persille de Tignes in this region of Savoie. Now Marmottan, 52, her husband and older brother are the last ones, making some 15,000kg a year.
“Little by little, the others got old and retired or decided it wasn’t financially worth it to them,” Marmottan said. “A farm has to be viable financially and the product we make has to interest people or we can’t in good faith continue. It’s too hard a job.”
In the past two decades, the number of small family farms has plummeted, falling by 14 percent between 2000 and 2004 alone, to just more than 100,000, an agriculture ministry study showed.
In 1979, France had some 20,000 fromageries, according to the National Federation of Milk Product Retailers. Today, there are about 3,300.
“Supermarkets have effectively squeezed out the small retailers,” said Androuet’s Blohorn. “Those who survived are really offering a superior product aimed at very discriminating consumers.”
At Au Bon Fromage, a Paris store, Persille de Tignes can retail for up to 25 euros (US$35) a kilo.
Marmottan follows a recipe passed down orally by her parents, who learned it from theirs. Marmottan taught it to her three children, but like many in the younger generation of the village and surrounding Alpine valleys, their interests appear to lie elsewhere.
The Marmottans’ eldest daughter is a lawyer, and the youngest is a member of France’s national ski team. Their son, 28-year-old Francis, is a ski instructor and maintains the farm’s equipment for half the year during the off-season.
So his mother has pinned her hopes on the next generation — Francis’ two-year-old boy and six-month-old girl.
“I say my prayers every day that they’ll turn into little cheesemakers,” said Marmottan, her face crinkling in a smile.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique