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Of goats and cheese
I understand how it may sound. 3 months in southern France calls in your thoughts such gauzy and idealized images that they end up conveying nothing.
It might sound extraordinary, but life in Autignac is both more and less interesting than that. We're in a very specific place: an extremely small village in a wine region that's, more accurately,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], a farming region whose main crop happens to be grapes. We're here because I speak French, not Italian,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], because it is mostly warm, and because the village is big enough to possess a bakery and sufficiently small to become ignored by guidebooks.
That's pretty much how our French neighbors see things: "You flew over the Atlantic to invest three months in Milaca?" But for this Minnesota family, a regular village means we're not simply four badly dressed tourists. We are Mah-Ree Zho (Mary Jo) and Suh-Teeve (Steve), the mother and father of Eva, 14, and Joseph, 9, who sit next to Helo and Baptiste at school. And access to that kind of ordinariness, in a foreign place, leads to its own type of extraordinary experiences.
Today, for example, we elected to reward ourselves for an afternoon of modest achievements having a visit to La Ferme du Mas Rolland, a goat farm in the hills nearby,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], where Laurence, Eric and Jonathan welcomed us to visit their herd and buy their spectacular cheese.
The route by car from our front door to theirs, through scattered vineyards and dense brush, takes about half an hour. I have lately been conducting an odd, halting love affair with this particular Mediterranean scrub land, that the French call garrigue (pronounced gah-REEG) -- a landscape that seduces slowly but thoroughly, having a prickly allure not unlike the high desert from the American Southwest.
In the beginning sight, it looks just like a scrubby no-man's-land. The stony hills are tufted with a misfit jumble of flora, as though the region had ended up last in line, instructed to choose its species following the more appealing ecosystems had taken their pick. All of the stately oaks were sold out (and worse, sent to Britain), therefore the garrigue said, "Whatever," and grabbed the kerm oak, which looks more like a holly bush.
But the garrigue holds a place in the imagination here like the North Woods back home. It's the hardscrabble host to origin where ancestors eked out difficult lives, near to the land. It's shorthand for wildness. It is where (mostly) men go to hunt, and where they secretly believe they could return, if required, to live by their wits and ancestral skills, roasting partridge over tidy twilight fires.
This being France, of course, the cooking fire might require a handful of rosemary branches for that certain resinous something that just helps to make the difference. And the game bird, one feels, ought really to become rubbed, or possibly stuffed, or possibly both, with a few thyme, garlic and sage. And also the good news for that intrepid hunter/cook would be that a meandering walk through the garrigue would shortly procure him all of these ingredients.
The reverence for the garrigue, unlike our romance using the northland, includes this knowning that up within the stony hills, one of the faded green vegetation, can be found the origins and the heart of the region's cuisine, that is at the same time world-renowned and explicitly local: thyme, sage, rosemary, lavender, savory, fennel,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], almonds,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], garlic, olives, capers. The expression Saveurs de la Garrigue is used to begin clich here to describe a certain rough-edged, yet refined group of these earthy flavors. The phrase does not translate well as "flavors from the North Woods." We Minnesotans love us some stoic Finlanders,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], but let's face it, more often than not we don't want to eat like them.
The resident goats at Mas Rolland spend at least 250 days annually browsing the spiky offerings of the corner of the local garrigue -- one of the requirements that allows their cheese to become called P an Appelation Control unique to this area of the Languedoc,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych].
The goats must live inside the boundaries from the appellation, and must forage primarily within the wild, so the flavors of the region find their way in to the milk -- raw milk only, please.
At her counter, using the rhythmic chunk-chunking from the milking machines behind her, Laurence Testa will explain all this and more. Dark-haired, compact and wiry, she looks as if she could scamper off in to the hills herself and live on sparse vegetation and sunshine.
Today, in rapid French, she is about cheese competitions, while I strain simultaneously to follow what she is saying while focusing about the creamy pucks of cheese she brings up from behind the counter.
"Yes," she agrees with herself, "the only cheeses that win competitions come from goats that forage en pleine air."
She unwraps a little gray disc rubbed with ash and places it in front of us,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych].
"Oh,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], occasionally, you will see a success that eats hay, but . " Here she frowns to herself and tips her right hand backwards and forwards. This seems to finish her thought, because she moves on to the tasting.
Four cheeses are arranged in front of us on the narrow counter -- three plain white cylinders that reduction in size from youngest to oldest (aging removes moisture and volume) and a gray ash-rubbed cheese.
"This young boy here," she says, slicing a thin wedge from the first cheese, a wet, loose round that also weeps onto its white wrapping paper, "is one day old."
The cheese is tart, tender, a little grainy and unmistakably goaty, by having an astringency that lightly chalks our tongues. It is simple, which is not simple.
I think to myself that we have planned and saved quite a long time to get at this spot, this ordinary place,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], among undramatic hills, inside a perfunctory outbuilding, in a room across the street from small brown goats resignedly giving their evening milk.
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