The Goat Cheese Revolutionaries

The heart of Haute-Provence isn’t chic. Peter Mayle hasn’t lived here, the International Herald Tribune doesn’t list local villas for summer rentals and no cultural festivals are staged anywhere close by. But on the high, arid, wind-swept plateau between the Mediterranean and the Alps, about a 90-minute drive northeast of Marseille, the French revolt of 1968 has made its last stand and, perhaps, achieved its most enduring legacy: the creation of wonderful goat cheeses, many of them rescued from oblivion.

When the massive street demonstrations in Paris more than three decades ago failed to spark a permanent upheaval, a cadre of left-wing activists retreated to Haute-Provence to become goat-cheese makers. It took Gallic genius to discover profound links between revolution and gastronomy and to bridge the gap between ideology and pragmatism. Land in Haute-Provence was cheap, and goat herding seemed easy (just send the animals out to pasture and plot revolution, these Paris intellectuals figured). And the market for goat cheese seemed inexhaustible.

If a socialist utopia could not yet be achieved in the cosmopolitan cities, perhaps it could be carefully nurtured in the isolated countryside, where communal life appeared more plausible in closer proximity to nature.

For most of these back-to-the-land idealists, the romance ended after only a few years. Goat herding and cheese making are a lot harder than they imagined. But among those who succeeded are Charles and Simone Chabot, goat-cheese makers par excellence whose products are bought by the finest restaurateurs. They had an advantage over many of their ideological peers because they were born into peasant families--Charles in Haute-Provence, Simone in nearby Savoie--and grew up with a deep knowledge of farm life that wasn’t eroded despite almost 20 years spent in cities.

I first heard about the Chabots some years ago at La Bastide de Moustiers, a restaurant owned by Alain Ducasse, whose establishments in Paris and Monaco have each been awarded three stars by Michelin. The several courses of my lunch at La Bastide, an inn bordering a lake in Haute-Provence, were excellent. But it was the platter of local cheeses that I found most memorable. They included a banon--creamy as a ripe Camembert at its core, with a thick, moldy crust, wrapped in a chestnut leaf--and a tomme a l’ancienne, drier, but just as rich and properly aged.

The real shock for me was to discover they were goat cheeses. Normally I avoid goat cheese, having experienced too many cheaper varieties with an ammonia-like aftertaste. Yet these cheeses were ravishing. Lighter than any cow or sheep banon or tomme I had ever eaten, they actually left a trace of sweetness on my palate.

When I asked the maitre d’ for more details on these cheeses, he told me about the Chabots and mentioned that their farm was only 40 minutes west. I took down this useful information and determined to someday seek them out. Last spring I finally made the journey, and it wasn’t a moment too soon. Only a few months later, the Chabots, who are preparing to retire, sold their goat herd. For now they continue to produce cheese from milk purchased from neighbors.

Getting to the Chabots’ farm, La Petite Colle (“the little hill,” in local Provencal dialect), is a gratifying if difficult drive, along a road that winds past fragrant lavender fields and then up through thickly forested hills with glimpses far below of the tranquil Durance River and the medieval market town of Manosque on the water’s edge.

Finally, at 600 feet, the terrain levels to a plateau, which last spring was an abnormally lush green after a rare week of rains. The fields are mostly sainfoin, a hybrid of rye and wheat that is the mainstay of the goats’ diet. But there are also patches of wild plants and stands of oak, juniper and olive trees. The Chabots’ property occupied no more than 50 acres, but they had the permission of neighbors to graze their 100 goats on fallow land nearby.

It was early evening when I reached the end of the dirt road in front of the cheese workshop, where the Chabots and their four employees were hosing down the floors and closing up for the day. Charles and Simone invited me into their adjoining residence, a converted 16th century farmhouse built on a slope. Its bottom level, once a stable, is now an ample living room with a fireplace large enough to roast an entire goat. (May the Chabots forgive the blasphemy!) Above the mantel is a Picasso drawing of a satyr looking like--what else?--a goat.

The Chabots, both in their early 60s, offered me a glass of local wine. Charles, of medium height with piercing gray-green eyes, was born a short distance to the north, one of eight siblings. His mother had hoped he would become a priest. He had the suitable fervor, although it took a more radical, secular direction. For years he taught social sciences at schools in Paris and other cities. It was at his last teaching post, in Aix-en-Provence, that he met Simone, a petite, soft-spoken woman of steely resolve who worked for the town’s social welfare department.

As hopes for the big, urban-based revolution receded, the Chabots focused on a smaller one in the countryside. Helped by loans and their savings, they bought La Petite Colle in the 1970s.

“Land was cheap,” said Charles. “Farmers were telling their children to head for the cities because it was no use trying to make a go of farming on less than 100 hectares [250 acres].” Together with a score of other neo-ruraux (“new rurals”), former city dwellers with similar left-wing notions, the Chabots formed a cooperative. Its aim was to safeguard traditional agriculture in the region from larger agribusinesses and vacation house developers, and, equally important, to rescue long-lost local cheeses and those in danger of disappearing.

In France, cheese--like language--has a north-south divide. In the south, cheeses were traditionally made using a sweet curd (caille doux) technique, which still prevails in much of the eastern Mediterranean, including Greece and Syria. In the north, the lactic curd (caille lactique) technique reigns supreme. But in recent decades, typical southern French cheeses such as perrail, tomme d’Arles and Saint-Felicien have been in retreat before the more acidic northern cheeses, including chabichou, Chavignol, Sainte-Maure, Valencay, Selles-sur-Cher and other grandes appellations of the Loire Valley.

“Nowadays almost all southern cheese makers are only taught the northern caille lactique method,” said Charles, who has childhood memories of the north’s “colonial” attitudes toward both the cheese and the language of the south. He remembers, for instance, when his parents hung bags of banon high up in trees to dry and age--a practice, since abandoned, that his northern French schoolteachers mocked.

“And how well I recall being punished as a child for speaking the southern dialect at school,” he said.

The Chabots spent five years just learning and reinventing the caille doux techniques, some of them thousands of years old. They interviewed their own families and elderly neighbors, and they filled the gaps with their own experiments.

Caille doux cheeses, Simone said, are prepared at lower temperatures and with more enzymes than caille lactique cheeses, and the curd is compacted under higher pressure. The doux varieties are curdled for only three hours before being placed in molds, while lactique cheeses may be allowed to curdle for as long as 48 hours. “That’s why caille doux cheeses tend to be only a third as acidic as the lactiques,” she said.

When I asked Charles about the supposed dangers of caille doux cheeses--they are prepared at temperatures well below pasteurization--he bridled. “Sure, we could pasteurize our cheeses, but it would destroy their taste and turn them into the standard commercial varieties you buy in a supermarket,” he said. “Bacteria, in several varieties, are essential to good cheeses. And besides, the cleanliness of our cheese-making facilities more than compensates for the lack of pasteurization.”

Early the next morning I met up with the Chabots in Manosque for the Saturday market. The small, cobbled square in the walled town offered a cornucopia of lettuce, carrots, asparagus, eggplants, artichokes, oranges and strawberries. Peasants in caps and cord slippers sat on their sacks of potatoes. Old men in berets conversed with caporal cigarettes bobbing in their mouths.

The Chabots had the largest of the five cheese stands in the marketplace. The stands were placed almost equidistant from one another--and not only for territorial, economic purposes. Alas, a revolution breeds its splinter groups, its Jacobins and Girondins, its Stalinists and Trotskyites. Most of the cheese mongers once belonged to the same radical cooperative, which had broken apart for bitter ideological reasons. A few of the former members hadn’t spoken to each other for 15 years.

Although the disputes were explained to me in great detail as I wandered around the square, I must admit I cannot remember their substance any more than I can tell you today the differences between Robespierre and Marat. But I do know that the main conflict concerned the revisionist views of some cheese makers who used the northern “colonialist” caille lactique techniques in making traditionally southern cheeses.

Not only was this a betrayal of the cheese revolution, but, as pointed out by the Chabots, it contradicted ancient local archeological finds about original cheese-making methods in Haute-Provence. “The evidence is irrefutable that caille doux was the traditional method of banon and other cheeses here, and still, some people refuse to admit they are wrong,” said Charles, gesturing to a cheese monger at the other end of the square.

Later in the day, back in the tranquillity of their farm, I understood the depth of the Chabots’ convictions as I sampled a platter of more than a score of their cheeses--accompanied simply by boiled potatoes, green salad, sweet green onions and, of course, red wine.

We started off with three different banons, prepared by Charles. The first was very young and soft, with a subtle taste. The other two were more aged, with thicker crusts and creamier interiors. Charles picked up a slice of the oldest and showed me its golden marble interior. It was delicious, dry and slightly piquant, thanks to the action of the tannins in its chestnut-leaf wrapping.

Next followed an assortment of tomme a l’ancienne, also prepared by Charles. The younger ones were flaky and almost tart, the more aged varieties quite rich and dry. At the Chabots’ suggestion, I occasionally bit into a green onion to clear my taste buds, like munching ginger between sashimi slices. I particularly liked two cheeses recreated by Simone from her research: a Saint-Mayeul, creamy yet slightly chunky, and sweeter than banon; and a sublime du Verdon, with a musty washed rind crust and a powerful, ripe, creamy taste inside, which Simone attributed to a longer curding process than usual.

There was more to come--slightly acid galoubet molded into small, bluish cylinders; truffle-shaped truffes de Valensole, a mild, dry cheese named after the nearest village and made by the caille lactique technique (“You see, we aren’t ideologically rigid,” remarked Charles when I raised my eyebrows in surprise); and another lactique, a breast-shaped, cinder-colored tetoun de Sainte-Agathe (in honor of a favorite local saint who suffered unspeakable mutilation in her martyrdom) with a creamy, almost spicy flavor.

But the talent and passion of the Chabots could not be measured by their cheeses alone. Equally important was the way they handled their goats. They spent 16 hours a day herding the animals through pastures, hills and woods. The goats ate almost 200 different plant varieties, which lent complexity to their milk. And all the while, they viewed the lovely mountains on the horizon, including the famous Sainte-Victoire painted by Cezanne.

The Chabots insisted that the quality of their cheeses depended on how gently they treated their animals. They knew each by name. Goats, they avow, have fabulous memories: They remember every slap, every shout, every insult. And bile never makes for good cheese.