Cheese is a mandatory part of a French meal, inscribed on UNESCO's lists of intangible heritage
More precisely, cheeses: ten or even twenty. Made from cow's milk, goat's and sheep's, hard and soft, oozing creamy centers, enticing with a hard rind in fine perspiration and holes on a perfectly cut surface. Cheese is a mandatory part of a French meal, inscribed on UNESCO's lists of intangible heritage. About how chefs of French restaurants compose their cheese plate, an RFI correspondent spoke with chefs from different cities in France.
There is no typical cheese cart of a French restaurant: each chef and maître d'hôtel selects cheeses according to their own criteria. Still, if we imagine an "average" selection, it will consist of cheeses made from all types of milk: cow's, goat's, and sheep's. There will be soft and hard cheeses, both cooked and "raw", cheeses with a "blooming" rind, that is, covered with mold, fresh ones, and many others – all the diversity of the French cheese world.
General de Gaulle said that the number of French cheeses equals the number of days in a year, but in fact there are more than a thousand varieties of French cheeses. The quantity presented on the cart that is wheeled to the table will depend on the type of restaurant.
The cart itself may be marble or have a glass plateau covered with a napkin. On the lower tier are cheese plates and a bread basket, and on the upper tier are the cheeses themselves and various jams, nuts, dried fruits, and honey. After the maître d'hôtel or waiter has described each cheese, your plate will have three or four pieces, each 50-80 grams. The overall composition most often forms a triangle, with segments cut from round cheeses placed with sharp edges toward the outer edge of the plate, like a slice of pie. On the other side of the plate are dried fruits, honey, or jam.
From a square or pyramidal cheese, the waiter will also cut a segment, as from a round one. If the cart has a large piece of a giant cheese wheel (for example, Beaufort), then a portion-sized piece will be cut at an angle, so that the diner gets both the soft "heart" and the aromatic part closer to the rind. Cheeses like Époisses or Mont d'Or remain in their birch bark boxes, served with a spoon. With log-shaped cheeses, it's simple – they are sliced into rounds.
The maître d'hôtel will likely advise you to start with fresher cheeses and gradually move to cheeses with strong smells and sharp mold. Everything else you will have to learn on your own, armed with a fork and a cheese knife.
The main conclusion to be drawn from talking about cheese with French chefs: cheese has not gone out of fashion. It remains popular. Neither the persuasion "let's order dessert instead, cheese can be bought and eaten at home" nor thoughts about watching one's figure, nor even the feeling of fullness that comes after appetizers and main courses, have any effect.
"It is important both for the French, because cheese is inseparable from their culture, and for foreigners, because they get to know France by tasting its cheeses," says Virginie Guillone, head of PR at the Parisian restaurant La Tour d'Argent, which itself is part of French gastronomic heritage.
"The French eat cheese because they love it, and foreigners because they want to get to know it better," believes Philippe Mille, chef of a Michelin-starred restaurant in Reims, the capital of Champagne (restaurant Domaine Les Crayères). According to his observations, foreigners order cheese in smaller portions, and their choice is limited to fairly well-known varieties.
At the three-star restaurant of the great chef Guy Savoy, on the contrary, they believe that foreigners order cheese more readily, while Parisians and the French in general think they can eat it at home. "Moreover, when we see that a guest is hesitating and cannot decide between cheese and dessert, we usually do not push them toward cheese. Rather, we suggest dessert, because it shows our work, the work of our pastry chef," says assistant maître d'hôtel Lucas Cohen-Aubier.
And yet, even in the choice of cheese, the hand of the chef himself is visible and reflects his choice: chefs, usually attentive to preserving the gastronomic heritage of their regions, will rather choose local cheeses. Such is, for example, the choice of Philippe Mille: "Usually we present 12-15 cheeses, and for the Champagne-Ardenne region, that is already a lot."