To brie or not to brie: is cheesemaking an art?

Apart from mozzarella, which doesn’t really count, the only cheese my beloved domestic colleague will eat is comté, and because of this I was hopeful he would agree to come with me to see Holy Cow. If Louise Courvoisier’s film had been about brie, reblochon or (God forbid) roquefort, obviously, I wouldn’t have bothered asking. But comté! I hoped it might spark something. Under its influence, perhaps those paper-thin slices he likes to cut for himself would become huge, great chunks, at which point, the floodgates would at last surely open. Oh, my heart. What marital bliss. From chunks to the cheese trolley, in all its stinkiness.

In the end, though, Liverpool were playing West Ham, and so I went alone to the cinema. In the gloom before curtain up, I carefully surveyed my fellow moviegoers. What were they here for? Were they Francophiles, hoping for a Marcel Pagnol update? Or were they cheese-lovers, eager for sun-suffused shots of dairy workers arm deep in fresh, hot milk? In truth, it was hard to tell. All I knew was that none of them came carrying huge boxes of popcorn or crackly bags of cellophane-wrapped sweets. The mood was quiet, serious, reverential. When the film started and some knobbly white cows appeared on screen, chalky against so much green, their bells rang uninterrupted by the annoying sound of human munching.

It’s a good film, though don’t expect anything as picturesque as Jean de Florette (Claude Berri’s take on Pagnol). Courvoisier, who grew up in the Jura in the east of France, where the film is set, isn’t one to smear Vaseline on her lens when it comes to 21st-century rural poverty. Somewhat to my surprise, I found her tale of an 18-year-old boy called Totone, who turns to cheesemaking as a way to earn desperately needed cash after the death of his father – he hopes to win a gold medal for his comté – so affecting, I felt only the tiniest bit hungry when a huge wheel of the stuff finally came into view. (Though this didn’t last. By the time I got home, I was ravenous.)

But if you’re interested in cheese, it’s also rich and fascinating. As the film makes clear, while a lot of comté is produced – it has the highest production levels of any appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) cheese in France – a long list of rules is involved in its making (spoiler alert: in the film, Totone will fall foul of some of these). Only milk from certain breeds of cow may be used, for instance, and they may eat only fresh, natural feed. In the film, you see comté being made not only in a dairy, but also on the farm, by hand, the old-fashioned way – a large copper kettle is used, one that hangs over an open fire – and, as you watch, you become ever more aware of the fact that cheese is culture, and that the skills involved in making it are the result of centuries of experience. Not to sound like a complete pseud, but in this sense, it’s no less complex or beautiful than music or art.

Can it, though, be as transformative as music or art? All the vegetarians I know still eat certain posh cheeses, apparently choosing to ignore the fact that they’re made using rennet, an enzyme produced in the stomach of cows (Totone’s first mistake is that he knows nothing of rennet, and thus his curds and whey never separate). And I don’t blame them. When cheese is really exceptional – the kind you had seriously to shell out for – it takes you elsewhere, the kitchen fading momentarily to grey at the first bite, which is why I usually eat it alone, without bread or crackers.

The acclaim Holy Cow has received in France is, I’m sure, mostly thanks to Courvoisier’s marvellous direction of a group of young and inexperienced actors, as well as to what it has to say about working class life. But while I admire these things myself, the moment in the film I like best is as undramatic as one of those old-fashioned public information announcements. The AOC inspectors are visiting the dairy, drilling boreholes in the cheese to test it. They talk quietly of wildflower meadows in voices that would ordinarily belong to accountants.

Photograph by Laurent le Crabe