by Ann Mah
This process of summer Alpine grazing and cheese production is called alpage, and it’s a tradition that dates to the Middle Ages. Cistercian monks from nearby mountain abbeys—most notably the Abbaye de Tamié near Albertville—introduced the process. They cleared the land of coniferous trees and bushes of juniper, rhododendron, and blueberry, creating high pastures for grazing cattle; later they planted fields of wheat and rye. A few centuries later, in the 1930s, the area filled with another lucrative crop: skiers drawn to the generous sweep of treeless slopes.
“The region is poor gastronomically but rich because of tourism,” said Monbeillard.
The cheese produced from these Alpine pastures was a way to preserve milk from one summer to the next, a form of dietary insurance against starvation in a region where long winters prevented bountiful cereal crops. The monks made a type of cheese called vachelin, but by the early seventeenth century locals had imported cheese-making techniques from neighboring Gruyère, in Switzerland. The resulting large wheels—called grovire in the local dialect—traveled well and stayed fresh over long periods of time, making them prime candidates for export. Cheese became the backbone of the local economy, reserved for export, with montagnards enjoying the fruits of their labor only on special occasions. By 1865 grovire had been renamed Beaufort after the Beaufortain, one of the three Savoyard valleys that produces the cheese.
Fondue is considered a plat du pauvre, a way of using up bits of hard, cracked, or unattractive cheese. In fact, most of the Savoyard region’s dishes involve some sort of melted cheese, whether it’s tartiflette (sliced potatoes layered with morsels of bacon, cream, and melted Reblochon) or raclette (melted cheese with potato slices). Of course, the quality of your fondue depends on the quality of your cheese. If you’re a Savoyard like Daniel Monbeillard, you use only Savoyard cheese. Swiss fondue uses only Swiss cheese, fondue comtoise only Comté cheese, fondue Wisconsin would use only cheese from the Badger State, and so on.
In the 1950s, after centuries of production and export, Beaufort cheese production declined. The work of an alpagiste—spending half the year in primitive mountain huts, rising every day at 3:00 A.M. to perform the morning milking—began to attract fewer young people. Alpage herds dwindled, and the cheese almost disappeared. In 1961 a group of locals joined together to form a cheese cooperative. They gathered milk from several alpage herds, combining it to produce a quantity sufficient for commercial production of cheese. The prestigious AOC label (appellation d’origine contrôlée) followed in 1968. Today seven cooperatives in the region produce more than five thousand tons of Beaufort each year. The “prince of Gruyères,” as the eighteenth-century French gastronomic philosopher Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin called it, has reclaimed its place in the world.
* * *
* * *
France has long been protective of her food and drink. The origins of AOC date to 1411, when Charles VI decreed that Roquefort cheese could be ripened only in the caves of the Roquefort region. Today the Institut National de l’Origine et de la Qualité, a branch of the French Ministry of Agriculture, oversees the label and enforces the regulations, guaranteeing that a specific product was made in a specific terroir under specific traditional, time-honored guidelines.
The Syndicat de Défense du Beaufort regulates Beaufort cheese from its headquarters on the edge of Albertville, a three-story office building with a chalet roof and a life-size cow statue in the parking lot. Inside his (disappointingly cheese-free) office Maxime Mathelin, the Syndicat’s publicity director, described the cahier des charges, or guidelines, for producing Beaufort cheese, as “the most exigeant of any appellation,” he said.
To understand the regulations, he explained, I had to first know the different types of cheese protected by the Syndicat: Beaufort d’Été and Beaufort d’Alpage. (He didn’t mention a third variety, Beaufort d’Hiver, pale and bland, which is made from the milk of wintering cows fed on hay and is disdained by serious cheese connoisseurs.)
Seven cooperatives in the region produce Beaufort d’Été. It’s a large, heavy, semi-industrial cheese, one that may be fabricated only from the milk of Tarentaise or Abondance cows that have grazed in summer Alpine pastures. Like all Beaufort cheeses, it curves inward with a signature, concave dip, caused by the tight circular mold used to shape the wheel. Beaufort d’Été has a creamy, supple texture and flavor reminiscent of toasted hazelnuts. But it’s not the prince of Gruyères. That title is reserved for Beaufort d’Alpage, a cheese made under the strictest of regulations.
* * *
* * *
Here are four things I learned about Beaufort d’Alpage:
1. It’s made only at high altitudes.
During the summer, from June to October, the cows must graze in pastures above fifteen hundred feet. The resulting cheese must be made on location, immediately after milking, in special chalets at the same altitude. As the herd finishes the grass in one area, it climbs higher and higher, finding different chalets at each level.
2. Each cheese is made from the milk of a single herd.
The cows stick together, grazing on the same free-range buffet of wild pastures, which perfumes their milk. As a result, every alpagiste’s cheese has a distinct flavor.
3. The cheese-making techniques are laborious and old-fashioned.
Copper scalding vats, wooden hoop molds, and cheesecloth made of pure linen are among the tools of the trade. The alpagistes scald and coagulate, separate and press the cheese curds, all by hand, using the same method that’s been used for two hundred years.
4. The Syndicat demands respect.
It may be a self-policing agency, funded by dues from the alpagistes, but the Syndicat is like the Godfather. You don’t want to mess with it. A team of experts drives between cheese-making chalets all summer long, enforcing the cahier des charges regulations and collecting milk samples for testing in the Maison de Beaufort’s laboratory. If it sounds serious, that’s because it is—a single misstep and a small cheese producer could lose the right to label his cheese AOC.
It occurs more often than you might think. For example, remember the impenetrable cheese-making chalet? The one guarded by the possessive sheepdog? Well, it turns out the alpagiste had recently lost his AOC status, as I eventually discovered during the course of my visit to the region. I never found out why. Maybe it was something as simple as the Syndicat’s having caught him using a cotton-blend cheesecloth instead of pure linen. Or maybe he got so fed up with the appellation rules that he chose instead to rebuff the AOC and make cheese on his own terms. The Beaufort experts spoke of him in hushed tones, and I wondered if there had been a scandal. Perhaps that explained why he’d canceled our interview at the last minute and rushed down the mountain, leaving his dog behind to ward off any curious visitors.
* * *
* * *
D-Day—that is, Dumpling Day—was approaching, and I still hadn’t figured out if my guests were serial killers.
“I’m sure they’re normal,” Calvin said when we talked over Skype. I breathed a sigh of relief until he continued, “Just make sure to send me an e-mail when it’s over to let me know you’re still alive.”
I contemplated canceling, but then I felt silly. I didn’t want Colette and Nate to think I was crazy, even if I was convinced they were.
Finally I called Elena. “Do you guys have plans on Saturday night?” I tried to keep my voice calm as I told her how I’d invited two strangers over for dinner. “Would you like to come over to make pork dumplings? I mean, I know you’re a vegetarian, but . . .” I was pretty sure Elena ranked pork dumplings right behind offal.
“I love pork dumplings! That’s the only thing I make an exception for.”
“Really? You don’t eat any meat except for pork dumplings?” I wasn’t going to argue but still, her logic baffled me a little bit.
“What can I say?” She laughed. “I’m a Jewish gi
rl from the Upper West Side. I love dumplings. Count me in.”
I knew we were friends for a reason.
On Friday afternoon Elena and I trekked to the thirteenth arrondissement, where boxy, Soviet-style buildings mingled with Haussmann confections, where roast ducks hung in shop windows and the cafés dispensed bubble tea and bánh mi sandwiches. The guidebooks call this neighborhood Paris’s Chinatown, but it seemed more diverse to me, with a cacophony of languages that I didn’t quite recognize and rows of restaurants serving food from across Southeast Asia.
Down a narrow driveway, next to a parking garage, stood our destination: the Asian supermarket Tang Frères. We pushed through the strips of clear plastic in the doorway and entered into a warren of grocery aisles packed with Asian grannies every bit as aggressive as their French counterparts. They nudged my heels with their shopping carts, elbowed me away from the best mangoes, edged in front of me at the butcher counter. I loaded up my basket with dark soy sauce, dried shiitake mushrooms, frozen dumpling wrappers, fresh ginger, scallions, tofu—ingredients impossible to find in my staid Rive Gauche neighborhood. Elena and I wandered the produce section, inspecting bumpy-skinned bitter melons, jade green bunches of leafy Chinese vegetables, pale celadon eggplants as tiny as gumballs. The store reminded me of the Vietnamese supermarkets of my childhood, with the familiar ingredients stacked right next to the exotic. But the space was tighter here, the narrow aisles marked with signs in French and prices in euros.
After we paid, Elena and I surveyed our heavy bags of groceries with dismay. The plastic sacks cut into my hands as we walked several blocks to the métro, up and down flights of stairs, onto one train and then another. When I got home, I was tempted to drop the bags next to the front door and leave them there until the next day. Instead I forced myself to unpack them, stowing the tofu and vegetables in the fridge and setting the heavy bottles of Asian sauces on my kitchen counter. Then I collapsed onto the couch, almost too tired to worry about what tomorrow would bring.
The next evening Elena arrived a full forty-five minutes before Colette and Nate, just as we’d planned. “Stéphane said he’d stop by later,” she told me, and Lifetime-movie scenarios again began running through my head. We got to work shredding carrots and plumping dried mushrooms for the vegetarian dumpling filling, and then the doorbell rang. Elena and I looked at each other. It rang again.
“Do you want me to get it?” She wiped her hands on a dish towel.
“No, no. It’s okay.” I put my knife down and went to open the door. There stood Colette, looking just like the photo on her blog, and next to her a young guy with thinning hair and a plaid shirt. They smiled awkwardly and looked so American.
“Are you Ann?” said Colette, running a hand through her short brown hair.
“Hi! Come in! Can I get you a beer?”
“We brought the pig’s-foot broth!” She held up a plastic container filled with a solid mass that jiggled slightly.
In the kitchen I introduced Elena (who blanched slightly when she saw the tub of jellied stock), and we divided up the cooking tasks. Colette began kneading dough for the soup dumpling wrappers, while Nate minced ginger and garlic for the ground-pork filling. Meanwhile, Elena started folding vegetarian dumplings and I bounced among all of them, helping them find kitchen utensils and ingredients. Colette and Nate didn’t seem like psychopaths, I thought, but then again we hadn’t talked much yet.
But soon everyone had drunk a few beers, and we commenced a lively debate over how much jellied stock we should mix into the seasoned ground pork. We rigged up a makeshift steamer using a large sauté pan and the lid of a jam jar and then finally sat down at the table and ate our first basket of dumplings—and agreed they needed more soup. We adjusted the filling, steamed, and ate more dumplings, and then more, and more, and then we all sort of slid back in our seats and I almost forgot that Colette and Nate were strangers. We swapped tales of French administrative woe, stories we could share only with other expats, because when you live in Paris, everyone back home assumes your life is magical and turns an unsympathetic ear upon your problems. We talked about the places we wanted to visit before we left Europe—Colette and Nate were also here temporarily, thanks to Nate’s job as a research scientist—throwing out names like San Sebastian, Biarritz, and Siena.
When the doorbell rang again, we all jumped, and then Elena said, “Oh, right, Stéphane!” and went to let him in. Colette and Nate stood up to introduce themselves, and something about the set of their shoulders, their suddenly stiff smiles as they greeted Stéphane, made me realize that they had been a little nervous when they’d first arrived, a vulnerability that I found reassuring. Being an expat, I thought, was hard even when your partner was right beside you. Tonight, for the first time in a long time, I felt like I belonged to something, this small group of people bumbling along trying to create a new life in a new place, and I was grateful. All it had taken was a little openness, a little courage—a little foolhardiness, perhaps—for us to connect. And pork dumplings, of course.
After everyone left, I washed the dishes and went to bed, hopeful that the night had left me too tired and content for insomnia. Though that wasn’t the case, maybe the evening had brought a new flush of confidence. For the very next day, I finally contacted a friend of a friend, Olga, a Russian graphic designer, and met her for an impromptu Sunday movie matinee and hot chocolate. A few weeks after that, I e-mailed another friend of a friend, Elizabeth, a fresh-faced, freckled American from Illinois who spoke impeccable French and introduced me to Pierre Hermé macarons. Judith, the mother of our friend Adam, told me about famous French gardens as we ate delicious lamb curry and spiced pilau rice prepared by her Indian housekeeper. Colette, Elena, and I met at a tea salon, where we shared a bevy of beautiful pastries and planned a picnic in the Champ de Mars for when summer finally arrived. And at a Web site launch party, I met Katia, an Australian who warmed me with her sunny accent and enthusiasm for salsa verde enchiladas, Indonesian laksa, and wonton soup.
Sometimes I met these new friends for dinner, and when we did meet, we usually skipped French bistros for more exotic fare: Indian dosas, or Persian lamb kebabs accompanied by fragrant piles of basmati rice, or plastic plates of tacos al pastor splashed with fresh lime juice, or deep bowls of udon noodles adorned with shrimp tempura. And sometimes when we gathered together, I was reminded of the Savoyards and how they warded off the bleak loneliness by convening around a fondue pot—the heavy, satisfying dish was traditional Alpine insulation against the dark bite of winter. Of course, so, too, was friendship. We weren’t that different from them, I thought. The Savoyards might have bonded over fondue, but expats in Paris, we found comfort in ethnic food.
Fondue à la Maison
I adapted this recipe from one given to me by Pierre Gay, a fromager in Annecy. “People ask me where to eat the best fondue,” he said. “I always tell them it’s at home. Chez vous. Just make sure you use good cheese.” His recipe combines cheeses from Jura and Savoy in France and Gruyère from Switzerland. Drink dry white wine (Gay would pour Apremont, from Savoy), herbal tea, or a smoky black tea like Lapsang souchong, and sip cold water at your own risk.
Serves 4
2 baguettes, slightly stale
1 pound Comté
¾ pound Gruyère, such as L’Étivaz
¼ pound Beaufort d’Alpage or Beaufort d’Été
1 clove garlic, peeled and cut in half
½ tablespoon cornstarch
½ bottle dry white wine
Dash of kirsch (optional)
Special equipment: fondue set, including a caquelon, an enamel-coated cast-iron pot (Le Creuset is popular)
Cut the bread into bite-size cubes.
Grate the cheese or cut it into a very small dice. Rub a caquelon pot with the cut side of the garlic. Add the grated cheeses to the pot, along with the cornstarch, wine, and kirsch, if desired. Combine tho
roughly.
Place the pot over low heat and stir continuously, until the cheese is completely melted. Light the Sterno under the fondue set at the table, set the caquelon over the flame, and eat immediately.
Chapter 9
Burgundy / Boeuf Bourguignon
The first time I set out to find it, I missed it. I’d scrawled the address on a scrap of paper and walked along the rue de l’Université with it in my pocket. When I found the number, I crossed the street and knelt on the ground to capture the building’s entire height in my camera lens. But when I got home and looked for the photo, it had vanished. Perhaps I confused the memory with a dream. Eventually I realized I didn’t have the right address at all.
A few weeks later, I made a second attempt, and this time I was more deliberate, plotting my course in advance. That day I did find the apartment building at 81 rue de l’Université, a modest four-story, nineteenth-century limestone structure with tall, slender windows and a pair of solid, dark blue wooden doors. The building’s windows overlooked a little place, a small, cement-paved triangle lined with motor scooters. Next door stood a café with smoke-stained walls and a zinc bar that could have been preserved in amber. There was no plaque to indicate that she had lived there, but I could imagine her all the same, charging back from the market, a wicker basket of vegetables heavy on her arm, eager to dive into the kitchen and start cooking. The apartment was still indisputably chez Julia Child.
I had been thinking about Julia recently because I’d been considering boeuf bourguignon, the dish that helped make her famous. It was early March, and the weather was as blustery and fierce as the proverbial lion. But I had seen the determined buds of forsythia in the planters that ran along the center of my street, and finally I had tangible evidence that spring—and, with it, Calvin’s return from Iraq—was on its way, our year apart almost finished. I anticipated our reunion with uncomplicated happiness. But first we had a few more months to get through.