by John Baxter
Like the tea thrown into Boston Harbour in 1773, cheese has the potential to transcend mere nourishment. With very little effort, Cheese, the Food, can become Cheese, the Symbol. To Charles de Gaulle, the diversity of French cheese was evidence that France was in robust political health and in no danger of becoming, as some people feared after World War II, a Communist nation. “How can one conceive of a one-party system,” he asked, “in a country that has over two hundred varieties of cheese?” It wasn’t simply that enthusiasts of Roquefort would never vote for a candidate who espoused Fourme d’Ambert. They were perfectly capable of creating Le Partie des Amis de Roquefort, proposing its most telegenic member for parliament, causing chaos by letting cows loose on the autoroutes, and, after spurning the revisionist rhetoric of the Camembert cartel, marching on the Chamber of Deputies, burning the building to the ground to emphasise their point, and probably toasting a Croque Monsieur—a grilled cheese sandwich—in the embers.
Early in my time in France, Victor, our friend who brought the apples, described a ritual re-enacted every August, when he returned to his family home in the mountainous Jura of southeastern France.
“One morning,” he explained, “my two boys and I set out to climb the mountain near our house.”
He described the steep and rocky track, the pause at midmorning for a snack and a drink from the clear stream, the continuing ascent.
“And so, at noon,” he went on, “we reach the home of my old friend, the goatherd. All year, he lives at the top of the mountain, in his small stone hut, tending his goats.”
The goatherd greeted him warmly, just as when Victor was himself a boy and climbed the mountain with his father.
They chatted for a while—“and then,” said Victor, “he goes into his hut, and returns with the cheese.”
I tried to look impressed.
“He only makes about twenty of these cheeses each year,” said Victor, “from the milk of his goats. To be given one is a great honour. We carefully wrap it, and then, after saying goodbye to our friend, we go back down the mountain, arriving at our home as evening falls.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “And tell me—how is the cheese?”
The look he gave me was filled with pity. What sort of person could ask such a question? In the light of such a ritual, who cared about the quality of the cheese? He and his sons had been the beneficiaries of a gesture rich in tradition, in the spirit of France. Edibility was enormously far from the point.
I grew up, like people of Anglo-Saxon extraction, in the belief that cheese existed in a single form, a soap-solid yellow/white rindless slab called Cheddar.
To suggest the existence of other forms of cheese was clearly heretical. Even when processed Velveeta slices appeared on supermarket shelves, followed by such gooey pastes as Cheez Whiz, our conviction remained unshaken. Mix it or mash it, wrap it in plastic or extrude it from a tube, cheese remained simply cheese, as immutable as water or air. Even when, during the 1960s, different grades of Cheddar began appearing in Australian stores, diffidently labelled as “sharp” or “tasty”, our faith in its changelessness remained firm.
And then came blue cheese.
I can remember the moment this newcomer crept timidly into the market: a few foil-wrapped wedges, lurking behind those slabs of Cheddar. Initially, it was stocked only by the most cosmopolitan of delicatessens—or as we, shunning the suspect foreign term, preferred to call them, ham and beef shops.
Who ate this sinister newcomer? Probably those Europeans, who were increasingly turning up in our cities, bringing with them their bizarre conceptions of food.
Salami.
Ravioli.
Smoked salmon.
One day, in my local ham and beef shop, I watched the owner, Mr. Schindler, employ a long, razor-sharp knife to shave some specks of mould from a slab of Cheddar. Himself an immigrant, but from the 1930s, he was now so well established that we accepted him as one of us.
“You can’t sell that now, can you?” I asked as he replaced the slab in his display case.
“And why not?”
“It’s gone off. It’s mouldy.”
He looked at me pityingly. “All cheese develops mould. We groom them every day. It’s natural. What do you think makes blue cheese blue?”
“Don’t know.” I shrugged. “Never tasted it.”
Silently, he unwrapped one of those mysterious wedges, sliced off a sliver, and held it out on the blade of the knife. Machismo demanded that I eat it, though I was fully prepared to spit it out if it tasted as disgusting as it looked.
It was a mild, somewhat too-salty variation on Roquefort. But if the phrase “to melt in one’s mouth” has any meaning for me, it was formed in that moment. The fragment disappeared without my being aware of it. Only one other thing evaporated on the tongue in quite that way—the communion wafer that I took dutifully at Sunday mass. But that papery piece of bread left behind nothing, not even the taste of sanctity, whereas the Roquefort bequeathed a flavour anyone who truly relishes cheese will recognise: a breath of the earth.
A few years ago, Charles, an old friend from Australia, passed through Paris.
“I’m going to visit my cousin in Dijon,” he said. “I thought I’d take him some cheese. Where’s the best place?”
The correct gift for such an occasion was chocolates or flowers, not cheese. No French person takes cheese as a gift, any more than they bring bread or wine. To do so is to suggest that a household didn’t have any of these three staples. In her novel Le Divorce, Diane Johnson rightly shows a French host offended when his American guests follow the Anglo-Saxon custom of bringing wine. “Did they think we wouldn’t offer them a drink?” he growls. You would no more bring food or drink to a French house than arrive at one in America bringing your own plate, knife, and fork.
However, Charles’s cousin was Australian, and probably wouldn’t mind. So, burying my own sense of comme il faut, I took him to the nearest of the three shops of ace fromager Roland Barthelemy, on rue de Grenelle, and explained our needs to the white-coated, attentive, almost priestlike serveur.
“An interesting challenge,” said the man, disguising any surprise he might feel at the solecism Charles was about to commit. “Dijon … hmmm. Well, obviously the cousin of Monsieur”—he bowed politely to Charles—“would be acquainted with the cheeses of his region, so we may exclude those. And if I may ask, Madame …?”
“His wife is Swiss,” Charles explained.
“Ah, bien; then we may also forget Swiss cheeses.”
He didn’t hide his satisfaction. Cheese turns even the most fervent internationalist into a patriot. When the Dutch mounted an advertising assault on the French market with the slogan THE OTHER COUNTRY FOR CHEESE, the hoots of derision must have been audible in Amsterdam, if not the North Pole.
Disappearing into the cave, where the cheeses lay on beds of straw in a precisely calibrated chill, he surfaced with his arms full of small boxes and packets.
The first he opened was a wizened disc the size of a hockey puck, with an exterior resembling elephant hide.
“I’m sure the cousin of Monsieur will never have tasted this. Are you by any chance acquainted with the goat cheeses of the lower Pyrenees? No? A pity. The flavor is distinctive. With a glass of Armagnac, after a dinner of pheasant or partridge. Sublime.”
Over the next ten minutes, we watched a master at work. Cheeses of every texture, consistency, and odour were produced. Cow’s, sheep’s, and goat’s milk cheeses; cheeses caked in ashes, in crushed black peppercorns, cayenne pepper, or dried thyme, others sporting coats of furry grey mould. Some were so pungent and hard that they recalled the toilet blocks placed in urinals, others so runny that, freed from their wooden boxes, they’d have spread out to cover the entire floor.
“Maybe,” Charles muttered nervously, “we should include something more, uh, ordinary? Say, a Camembert?”
I translated this request to the fromager.
“But of course.�
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Selecting a Camembert, he lifted the wooden lid and contemplated its rind, plump and white as the thigh of a nude by Boucher.
“Would this be eaten today or tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Lunch or dinner?”
“Er, well, dinner.”
A supremely educated thumb pressed the upper skin.
“Hmmmm. Not quite …”
It took four more cheeses before one of them coaxed a smile of satisfaction.
“By tomorrow evening,” said the fromager, replacing the lid, “I can assure Monsieur this will be à point.”
Charles reached for his wallet and looked around for the caisse, but we weren’t done yet. Since the cheeses were to travel, our helper wrapped each piece separately in aluminium foil, clearly labelled with its name and region, and placed the assortment in a small cane basket. After paying absurdly little, considering the time and expertise expended, we were conducted to the door with thanks for our custom, and hopes that the cousin of Monsieur would find the cheeses to his liking.
On the sidewalk, Charles looked back in something like awe.
“Strewth! I’ve had girlfriends who didn’t treat me as well as that!”
Remembering the experience with Charles, I had an idea about our own Christmas cheese needs.
“Let’s wait,” I said to Marie-Dominique, “and go to Barthelemy.” After all, it supplied cheese to the president of the republic. And since we had the same oysters as the Élysée, we should have the best cheese. As a clincher, I added, “They always have the best Vacherin.”
Marie-Dominique looked up from Le Monde and said thoughtfully, “Maybe we can find some Passe Crassanes.”
Vacherin is a particular oozing cheese, so liquid it has to be spooned, not cut. Its perfect accompaniment is a pear called Passe Crassane. They come into season for a few weeks in midwinter, their unique character signified by a glob of red wax at the end of each stem.
I sketched out the menu as one of the better restaurants would present it:
Huîtres claires de Marenne
Porc rôti à l’Anglaise
Pommes de terre rôties
Compote de pommes Clochard
Fromage Vacherin
Poires Passe Crassane
Which just left dessert—and, of course, the question of wine.
14
The Grip of the Grape
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (PARAPHRASED FROM THE JAPANESE)
If there was an Olympics for drinking, Australians would score gold in every heat.
Most of us are descended from Irish and Scots, both races noted for their ferocious thirst. Add to that, living in a hot, dry country provides an excuse to consume enormous amounts of cold beer. Beer and alcohol in general run like a river through the history of Australia. In 1808, during what came to be called the Rum Rebellion, the then-governor of the colony, William Bligh, notorious for the Bounty mutiny, tried to halt the local military’s use of alcohol as currency. They came to his house, dragged him from under the bed where he was hiding, threw him in jail, then had him sent back to England.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a daily portion of wine, rum, or beer was often counted as part of one’s wages, and payday traditionally concluded in a monumental piss-up, slept off in the nearest stables. George Johnston named his second autobiographical novel after a sign often displayed in gin mills of the time: DRUNK FOR A PENNY. DEAD DRUNK FOR TWOPENCE. CLEAN STRAW FOR NOTHING.
In the Australia of my childhood, drinking was the national sport. There were pubs every few blocks, and, particularly after work and on weekends, they roared. Crowds of men spilled out onto the pavement, arguing, shouting, but above all drinking, while in the alleys around, as lookouts, known as cockatoos, kept watch, rings of illegal gamblers gathered for the traditional game of “two-up”, betting on whether two copper pennies tossed in the air would fall heads or tails
Governments tried to limit drinking by closing all pubs at six p.m. This simply led to the “six o’clock swill”. As closing time approached, men guzzled a few pints, then carried half a dozen more outside to drink in the gutter until they toppled over, insensible.
On Sundays, in deference to the religious lobby, pubs never even opened, but it took more than God to keep a thirsty Australian from his beer. Two legal loopholes gaped. A private club could serve alcohol to its members twenty-four hours a day. And any pub could sell a drink to a “bona fide traveller”.
The traveler provision dated from days when sheep and cattle drovers who found themselves more than ten miles from home could demand the stabling of their animals, a meal, and, of course, a drink. Anyone arriving at a pub on Sunday signed a “guest register”, claiming they’d travelled ten miles, and the local copper was free to consult it—assuming he wasn’t leaning on the bar with a glass in his hand, like everyone else. Because of this law, the roads on Sunday nights were crowded with bona fide travellers who could barely walk, let alone drive. In the 1970s, a young doctor named George Miller, moonlighting as an ambulance driver, attended so many alcohol-drenched crashes that he quit medicine to become a filmmaker. The result was Mad Max and Mad Max II: The Road Warrior, apocalyptic vision of an Australia ruled by tribes of crazed auto freaks bent on homicide.
But it was the clubs that thrived. Every town soon had its Returned Soldiers League or Rugby League Club, where members could drink day and night. Barely one Rugby Club member in a thousand had kicked a ball since school, nor had generations of Returned Soldiers ever fired a shot, but nobody minded that.
At a regional RSL club, I did once meet a genuine veteran of World War II. He spoke with a heavy European accent—not surprising, since he was a German. In fact, the army he’d fought for had been the Wehrmacht.
“And the other members of the club don’t mind?” I asked.
“No, they are good blokes. It was all a long time ago. And you see …”
He nodded toward the niche that held pride of place in all RSL clubs, with a flickering eternal flame, and the words of the league’s motto—LEST WE FORGET.
“… they are just obeying the club motto.”
I blinked. “In what way?”
“Well … Like it say, ‘Let’s we forget.’”
Alcohol permeated my childhood. My parents were far from heavy drinkers, but, like most Australians, they routinely socialised with their friends at the pub, leaving my brother and me to wait outside in the car, sometimes for hours. After a few such spells with nothing but the Austin A4 manual to read, I took to carrying a few books in the back seat. This inculcated a lifelong reading habit, so I should be grateful for their neglect, though my brother was less so. Years later, by then a bank manager, he found himself running a branch near one of our parents’ preferred watering holes. When the staff invited him for a beer after work, he suggested this pub.
“As a kid,” he explained, “I spent so much time outside the place, I’m curious to see the inside.”
When we were adolescents, getting drunk, and persuading a woman to do so as well, was the foundation of social success. Believing no woman would agree to sex while sober, Australian men overwhelmingly reposed their confidence in alcohol—even though, like cannabis (and, for that matter, Viagra), it had no sexually arousing effect at all. Quite the contrary: too much drink induced the humiliating state known as “brewer’s droop”.
When it came to seduction, a sizable faction favoured gin, but it was expensive and demanded complicated mixers. Chat-ups mainly took place at parties or the beach. Arriving at either with a bottle of Beefeater and a choice of tonic, ginger ale, or bitters (not to mention ice and slices of lime) was not only cumbersome but might be construed as excessively calculating.
This never worried me. I would cheerfully have carried all this equipment in the trunk of my car, and did sometimes turn up at parties with a couple of bottles of champagne on ice in
the back seat, just in case. One reason I got on so well with the British novelist Kingsley Amis, when we met in London years later, was our shared respect for a well-mixed drink. Amis never went on a journey of any length without, according to his biographer, “what amounted to a cocktail cabinet; a large straw bag with handles, in which he packed bottles of tequila, gin, vodka and Campari, as well as fruit juices, lemons, tomato juice, cucumber juice, Tabasco, knives, a stirring spoon and glasses …”
Since women regarded beer as vulgar, the run-of-the-mill lubricant to Australian seduction was wine—for preference sweet, fizzy, and white, qualities women were believed to favour. In England, the market leader was Babycham, an “alcopop” made from pear juice, but Australians preferred Barossa Pearl.
As I had to thank Mr. Schindler in his delicatessen for introducing me to blue cheese, I owed a debt of gratitude to those vintners who produced Barossa Pearl. They closed the door definitively on the world of beer and opened another on the fascinating world of wine. Launched in 1954, this poor man’s champagne was the brainchild of German winemakers who fled Europe before World War II and settled in South Australia’s Barossa Valley. A blend of effervescent white wine and fruit juice, marketed in teardrop flagons of clear glass, it transformed wine from the drink of an elite to something accessible and, above all, sexy. Did its makers anticipate its potent effect? Without a doubt. The label featured playful drawings of hearts, birds, musical notes, and bubbles bursting with the word “pop”. Above these gaped a dark and inviting cavity, supposedly the entrance to a wine cellar, its pale doors flung wide in welcome.
That Saturday morning before Christmas, we headed south. At Royan, we took the ferry across the choppy gray river Gironde. Our destination was the Médoc, the rich triangle of land between the Gironde and the Atlantic, where the clay laid down over millennia favours the Cabernet Franc and Syrah grapes that make the greatest red wines.