Unchain the Gorgonzola....

Costa Rica is not famed for the variety or quality of its cheese and a first glance at the vast slabs of white cheese on the stalls is not encouraging.
Vast slabs of smoked white cheese do not offer encouragement either, while the yellow slabs of what is fancifully called mozzarella would have a native of Naples turn her face to the wall.

There are attempts at hard cheese, by the near monopoly dairy companies Dos Pinos and Monteverde...but the resemblance to the names claimed on the packaging  is distant and the prices such  as to induce apoplexy.

The upmarket supermarkets have imported cheese on their shelves.....and are proud of their range of Gouda....but on the whole the picture is grim for cheeselovers.

I have found one man making super European style cheese in the hills round the Turrialba volcano....though the sulphur fumes from its increased activity make him doubt for how much longer his pastures will be fit for grazing.....but apart from that I now rely on buying full cream cheese in rounds from a lady at the Plaza Viquez market, draining it, then washing it in fortified wine or rum every day and keeping it in the 'fridge betweentimes, wrapped in cheesecloth.
Three months later I have something worth eating.

So, given the situation, the trip to France and the U.K. will be a chance to eat proper cheese again, and to buy to bring back.

I thought it was all so easy...

Goat cheese logs - the cheapo cheapo ones from Super U - which keep for ages until becoming deliquescent enough to eat, the skin peeling off naturally; 
Fournol in its round russet coat;
Maroilles, that deep red brick with a smell that would flype your socks;
St. Agur, the creamy blue so disdained by cheese snobs;
Buy whole or halves of each for the suitcase and I was away.

That was it...until you chimed in and now, even before I hit a cheese counter, the claims of Pont l'Eveque, Comte, Bleu de Sassenage, Bleu de Bresse, Bleu d'Auvergne, Cantal and St. Nectaire are before me...not to speak of my since thinking of Salers, Fleur d'Aunis and the Mizotte du Vendee, let alone contemplating buying Tomme de Laguiole to make aligot.

My area of France was not blessed as regards cheese....goat cheese aplenty from local suppliers, the discs of 'crotte de chevre,' if allowed to dry out, being dropped into eau de vie for a month or two and eaten as an aperitif, but no specialist cheese shop within easy reach and the supermarkets distinctly variable as, like the fish and charcuterie sectors, these were run on sub franchises...obliged to take and present the 'promotions' of the central supermarket supply chain, be it Leclerc, Super U or Champion, but for the rest being left to their own initiative.

So I could be happily buying a soft textured tomme de chevre for months, then on my next visit find that the only goat offering was a chalky white ball from the Netherlands. The franchise would have changed hands.
Not that the Dutch can't make good cheese...it just never seems to make it to France...any more than do the  wonderfully aromatic Herve, the creamy Passendale and the sharp Brusselae Kaas from  Belgium.

The markets?
There was one good stall in the local town market whose Roquefort wasn't over salty and who sold a good ewe's milk tomme...d'Agour, if I remember rightly.....and whose Camembert was never ammoniac. But he was pricey.....and I only went to the market there for the stall selling small purple artichokes for deep frying.

Friends with a holiday house nearby used to go every week while they were in residence, going home laden with small rounds of Camembert to last them until the next trip.....returning once with proof positive that when the cheese man said his Camembert was made from unpasteurised milk...lait cru...it was.

Although having made his pile and retired, our friend used to like to give a hand in the family business and would cover for illnesses and holidays.
Working thus on the lorry reception area, he provided himself with a snack.
A bun with a whole small Camembert within.....not for him 'society sandwiches - six to a mouthful'.

He was enjoying his snack when a lorry arrived, so he put the bun on his desk to enjoy later and went to see to the reception procedures.
Returning some ten minutes' later, the bun and contents were where he had had left them, but his appetite had gone, for the bun lay open, two crescents marking his first bite, well into the cheese, where he now observed that maggots in quantity were disporting themselves.

So you will understand if I don't buy any Camembert.

In any case, I have to leave room for the Stilton....and the Wensleydale....and perhaps a proper Gorgonzola.




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Say cheese

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It is the way things disappear, without even as much warning as the Cheshire Cat.

You go into the supermarket intent on buying cheese, only to find that the franchise on the cheese counter has changed and the cheese you wanted and have bought there since the last time the franchise changed is unavailable. You cast a sour eye over the new offerings and resign yourself to looking for your favourite in another supermarket - yet another complication in grouping the trips to town.

As it is, with more and more cheeses now being made from pasteurised milk, I find that some of my old favourites have lost their special flavour anyway. Life is becoming more and more bland.

And before anyone tells me to buy cheese on the market stall - forget it. Their products are remarkable only for the cheek of the stallholder in proposing such prices.

I have never been unduly enchanted by the small town French market  here , though the main Saturday market in the big town is worth the occasional effort  - here - for fish, and for all sorts of bargains in the ethnic section, from chinese veg to brassieres in sizes that would contain three Carla Brunis at once, but getting good cheese seems to be more and more of a struggle.

I grew up on English cheese, in a period when the grocer sold mini truckles of Cheddar for Christmas, to be cut carefully in wedges and the cheesecloth laid back reverently over the remains.
Working in London, I could buy cheese in Berwick street market that had been turfed out by Harrods and Fortnum and Mason as being past their self imposed sell by dates - wonderful stuff, magnificent Stilton and whole raw milk rounds of Brie that I can still taste if I cast my mind back to it - at prices which encouraged the eyes bigger than the belly syndrome, leading to a rash of cheese and wine evenings with friends.

Holidaying in France, cheese had been disappointing, ready cut portions straight from the refrigerator, except a meal at Chartier in Paris, where, in that tourist dive, they served a ripe Munster with caraway seeds which showed me a whole new style of cheese, one which, on moving to France, I followed up.

I was lucky. Refrigeration of dairy products was not as developed as it later became, so there was a chance that your cheese would ripen naturally and not be stopped off by storage at low temperature.
You could take it to excess. Madeleine recalled a trip to the Jura with her father who decided on the return to buy three or four Munster cheeses. They were placed in the boot and the car rattled its' way back hundreds of kilometres in the blazing summer heat. Those were the days when cheese was cheese and the automobile was distinctly low tech, so the cheese began to ripen at alarming speed, infecting the interior of the car for weeks, and the family was force fed Munster which put her off it for years.

A friend who has recently sold his holiday home in France always used to take back raw milk Camembert, which while working, he would put into a bun as a sort of sandwich. He bought several, and stacked them in order, being a methodical guy, unaware however that his secretary had a habit of dusting and tidying shelves with no respect whatsoever for cheese dating.
He made his usual sandwich one day, ate a few mouthfuls, then was called away. On return, his sandwich had opened and he could clearly see maggots crawling through his cheese. Maggots whose colleagues he had no doubt eaten already. Gagging, he grabbed the cognac bottle and took a good swig..and another.
On his return to France he was recounting this tale to Madeleine, and she and her husband creased with laughter.
'What was so funny?'
'Well, in French 'tuer le ver', to kill the worm, is to have the first drink of the morning. Trust the English to take it literally!'

I have never managed to taste the Petit Gris from Lille, reputed to be banned from taxis by local bylaw, but was delighted to find Maroilles, pungent and tasty, and wonderful cooked as a tart.
The family from Belgium would bring down Brussels cheese and Herve when passing the summer with us...the Brussels cheese was held not to be as good a traveller as the Herve, but it can only have lost by a short head as even when wrapped in greaseproof, in plastic and sealed in a tin, the boys would find themselves accused of having taken their shoes off long before they crossed the Loire.

There is a specialist cheese shop in the big town which claims to ripen cheese perfectly, but the prices are appalling and on the one occasion I bought a Langres there I was not impressed. Mark you, at those prices I take a lot of impressing.

I notice too, that people seem to be eating less cheese generally. You go to lunch or supper with French friends and where there used to be a selection of cheeses that had clearly been got at by the family and a couple of fresh bits, there now seems to be a whole new selection, bought for the occasion.
Didier's wife explained
'Well, it's expensive now...goodness only knows why when the farmers are kicking up about low milk prices...and it just doesn't seem so good. Perhaps we're just getting old...'

Perhaps, morelike, we remember when cheese tasted of something.

The Association Fromages de Terroirs is attempting to put its' finger in the dyke, publishing a calendar of scantily clad 'les girls'  here to encourage people to eat traditional French cheese as opposed to the lumps of plastic packed plastic available on the supermarket shelves.

I think it's facing an uphill battle.

So am I, as I start the trek to find a new source of Fournols and Fleur d'Aunis.