The Whole Fromage by Kathe Lison

Author:Kathe Lison [Lison, Kathe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-45207-8
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

BUT REBLOCHON IS only one sort of fromage to be found in Annecy. The city so overflows with cheese generally that even the local Monoprix (France’s answer to Target) carries more than fifty artisanal cheeses, many of them with AOCs or labeled fermier, not to mention a smattering of foreign offerings such as cheddar and Manchego. And this was just in the deli counters at the front of the store; there were several more aisles of cheese back in the dairy section.

The very best place to see cheese, however, is at the marché. One Sunday morning, while Sarah was off visiting friends, I ventured out onto the cobblestone streets under a sky that periodically erupted into rain. The door to the Heidi Hut gave directly onto the main drag of medieval Annecy, where the marché takes place three times a week. On market day, merchants extract myriad impromptu storefronts from undersize vans packed tightly along the narrow corridor. Seeing the marché appear from the vans was like watching one of those gags in which clowns and more clowns keep popping out of a car: one moment the world is ordinary, and the next it’s filled with color and an almost silly sense of giddiness. Where before there was only gray stone and shops selling T-shirts, suddenly there were boxes stuffed with salad greens and cartons of cherries, strawberries, and currants. There were olives, a dozen different sorts swimming in brine; silvery anchovies dripping in oil; and dozens of varieties of saucisson, the dried sausages that made American summer sausages seem like wan pretenders. (Even at their most undignified—such as the bulging round sausages I saw that had been packaged in pink cardboard cut to resemble frilly ladies’ underpants—saucissons reign supreme.) There were baskets of artichokes and girolle mushrooms; piles of green and red sweet peppers; stacks of cucumbers, radishes, leeks, carrots; potatoes with dirt still caking their pale skins; and eggs complete with chicken fluff. There was a stubble-cheeked man selling a couple of rabbits he likely shot in a nearby field, and a worn nubbin of a French country grand-mère crouched in a corner on a stool gently peddling her own honey. And then there were the cheeses.

Many of them sat naked, stacked in wooden cartons and piled one on top of the other behind makeshift glass barriers. In most regions, the marché is the place to find smaller cheesemakers, those who still “make the markets,” as they say in French—setting up a stall in one village on Monday, in another on Wednesday, and in still another on Friday. In Annecy, one man had a folding table draped in a red oilcloth and set with three trays of little patty-like cheeses and a hand-lettered sign that read, “Fromage de chèvre fermier.” The sign was illustrated with a hand-drawn goat’s head, presumably for foreign tourists who might not recognize either a goat cheese or the word for it. Other stands had cases protecting faisselles of fromage frais and hunks of butter wrapped in paper.

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