Recipes

    France

    The obvious place to start, and the country that gave the rest of the world its vocabulary for talking about cheese — affinage, terroir, lait cru, the appellation itself.

    What I want to do here is get past the greatest-hits list. Brie and Camembert are fine cheeses and they are not the interesting story. The interesting story is that France industrialised its dairy sector like everyone else and then wrote law to keep a parallel non-industrial version alive, and that this law is still being fought over right now.

    Why French cheese looks the way it does

    Four geographies, four completely different cheese logics — and this is the pattern to carry through the whole world tour.

    Normandy and the north-west: cows, grass, rain, no mountains. Rich cow’s milk, mild climate, markets close by. So: soft, high-moisture, short-ripened, bloomy and washed rinds — Camembert, Livarot, Pont-l’Évêque, Neufchâtel. You can make a delicate cheese when you don’t need it to survive a journey.

    The Alps and Jura: summer pasture at altitude, herds moved up and back down. You get one enormous flush of milk, far from anywhere, and you need it to last until spring. So: cooked, pressed, very large wheels — Beaufort, Comté, Abondance. Size is not showmanship; a big wheel has less surface per pound and keeps better.

    The Massif Central and the south: thin soil, sheep and goats where cattle struggle. So: blues (Roquefort, Bleu d’Auvergne, Fourme d’Ambert) and small goat cheeses, plus the sheep’s-milk tommes of the Pyrenees.

    The Loire: goats, and a river. A dense cluster of small ash-coated goat cheeses — Valençay, Sainte-Maure de Touraine, Selles-sur-Cher, Crottin de Chavignol — in shapes (pyramid, log, disc, button) that exist mostly to tell them apart.

    Climate, animal, altitude and distance-to-market. Four variables, and they predict the cheese far better than national character does.

    The appellation, and what it is actually for

    Roquefort was protected in 1925 — the first French cheese appellation and one of the first protected foods anywhere. The system now covers several dozen cheeses under AOP (the French appellation d’origine protégée, aligned with the EU PDO).

    An appellation is not a quality badge. It is a recipe with a map attached: which animals, which breeds, what they may eat, where the milk may be gathered, how the curd is handled, how long it ages, and often whether it may be pasteurised. That last clause is the one that matters, and it is where the fight is.

    🔴 Camembert de Normandie: the “peace deal” that everyone reported and that is not in force

    This is the correction on this page, and I nearly got it wrong in the other direction.

    The famous version of the story: after a decade of trench warfare between farmhouse producers and industrial dairies, an agreement in principle was announced on 21 February 2018. The deal was a swap — the misleading “fabriqué en Normandie” pasteurised camembert, which traded on the AOP’s identity without being in it, would be discontinued; and in exchange the AOP would no longer necessarily require raw milk, admitting pasteurised milk with a minimum share of Normande-breed milk. From 1 January 2021 you can no longer buy a camembert labelled “made in Normandy” outside the AOP.

    You will find that written up as settled fact. It is what the trade press reported and it is what I first had on this page.

    But the current official position says otherwise. The French agriculture ministry’s own page on Camembert de Normandie AOP — dated 16 March 2026 — states the cheese “est fabriqué exclusivement à partir de lait cru”: made exclusively from raw milk. The producers’ own AOP body likewise describes it as raw milk, and describes the curd being hand-ladled five times, forty minutes apart.

    So: an agreement in principle from 2018 that is not reflected in the specification as the state describes it in 2026. I am not going to tell you why — I did not find a primary source announcing the reversal, and guessing at French dairy politics from the outside is exactly how the wrong version got repeated in the first place. What I can say confidently is this:

    ⚠ Do not repeat “AOP camembert can now be pasteurised” as a fact. As of now the official description is raw milk, and if you are buying, the label still tells you: au lait cru means what it says.

    And the practical point for a cheesemaker: five ladlings, forty minutes apart is the actual technical content of the appellation. It is a specification that regulates gentleness — hand-ladling doesn’t shatter the curd the way pumping does, so the finished cheese holds more moisture in a more delicate structure. You cannot buy that; it is a labour rule.

    ⭐ Mimolette, and the cheese that the FDA classed as filth

    My favourite French cheese story, and it is properly documented.

    Mimolette — also Boule de Lille — is a big orange sphere from Lille, made as a French answer to Dutch Edam. As it ages, its rind is deliberately worked by cheese mites (Acarus siro), microscopic arthropods that graze the surface. The affineur brushes them off periodically, and the crater-pitted, lunar-looking rind is the record of their grazing. The mites are not a fault. They are the method.

    Then, in March 2013, US FDA inspectors in New Jersey detained roughly half a tonne of it.

    The regulation they applied is wonderful and completely reasonable on its own terms: since 1940 the FDA has enforced a limit of six mites per square inch of cheese. Excess mites are “filth” under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. On subsequent checks, three quarters of Mimolette samples exceeded the limit — some at 4,000 mites per square inch.

    Four thousand against a limit of six. That is not a borderline call; it’s two different theories of what a rind is.

    Two honest caveats, because this gets told as pure bureaucratic absurdity:

    The FDA denied it was a ban, and said so publicly — shipments were detained, the product was not prohibited.

    And the health question was genuinely open, not invented: the agency said it did not know whether high mite concentrations would make people ill, and mite ingestion can cause intestinal acariasis and allergic reaction. The uncertainty was real even if the outcome was silly.

    It’s on this page rather than in a trivia box because it’s the clearest example of something the whole world tour keeps demonstrating: the “rules” of cheese are mostly regional habit, and two competent regulators looking at the same rind can reach opposite conclusions about whether it is food.

    The ones worth knowing that nobody here has heard of

    The export list is Brie, Camembert, Roquefort, Comté. Here is what is actually eaten.

    Cancoillotte (Franche-Comté) — and it is the one I most want to make. You start from metton: skimmed milk curdled, drained, broken up and left to ripen until it goes translucent and pungent. Then you melt it with water and butter into a pourable, stringy, savoury cream, eaten warm on bread or potatoes. It is a skimmed-milk cheese from a butter region — the by-product turned into the local staple, which is the same instinct as ricotta and just as good an idea.

    Brocciu (Corsica) — a whey cheese and an AOP one, the island’s own answer to ricotta, made from sheep’s or goat’s whey. Eaten fresh in everything from omelettes to fiadone, or aged as brocciu passu.

    Boulette d’Avesnes (the north) — a cone of fresh curd worked with parsley, tarragon, pepper and cloves, then rubbed with paprika. Reputedly born of using up buttermilk curd and Maroilles trimmings. Aggressively, unapologetically strong.

    Vieux-Lille — Maroilles brined and held far longer than seems wise, to the point that its local name is puant de Lille, the stinker of Lille. A washed-rind cheese taken to its logical end.

    Banon (Provence) — a small raw goat’s-milk cheese wrapped in brown chestnut leaves and tied with raffia, which both protects it and flavours it. See the ripening page: leaves, bark and clay recur across the whole world tour as ripening vessels, and they are never only decorative.

    Langres (Champagne) — washed-rind, orange, and deliberately never turned during aging, so the top sinks into a concave well called the fontaine. Tradition says you pour Champagne or Marc into it. A cheese whose defining feature is a step somebody left out.

    Livarot (Normandy) — bound with five bands of reed or raffia, which is why it’s nicknamed le colonel. The bands hold its shape while the paste softens; the rank comes free.

    Tomme au marc / fromage fort — cheeses finished in, or made from, grape pomace and leftovers. The thrifty end of a cuisine usually described as luxurious.

    Neufchâtel — heart-shaped, and old enough that the shape has been claimed for the Hundred Years’ War. Treat that origin as folklore; the cheese is real and the bloomy rind is excellent.

    Ossau-Iraty (Basque Pyrenees) — sheep’s milk, pressed, nutty, and one of the great cheeses of Europe by any measure. Nearly invisible on American counters.

    Salers and Laguiole (Auvergne) — huge pressed cylinders in the cheddar-adjacent tradition, and Salers may only be made while the cows are on pasture, which is the season argument written into an appellation.

    Époisses (Burgundy) — washed with Marc de Bourgogne as it ripens, until the rind is brick-orange and the paste barely holds. Famous enough to be borderline for this list, but genuinely soft-and-stinking in a way the export trade struggles with.

    What to do with any of it

    The French families are covered by mechanism elsewhere: bloomy rinds, washed rinds, blues, the alpine cheeses, fresh and lactic goat cheeses, and whey cheeses for brocciu.

    Of everything on this page, cancoillotte is the one I’d actually attempt at home — it needs no press, no cave and no wax, just patience with the metton and nerve about the smell.

    Next: Italy — the other great cheese country, organised on a completely different principle.

    Sources

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