France

The next morning, as we are checking out of the Hôtel Lutétia, a messenger arrives from Madame Cantin’s fromagerie. He has a very large bundle for me. Two vacuum-packed parcels wrapped in tissue paper. About 10 kilos of unpasteurized cheeses, including all four rounds of the Epoisses Madame Cantin had in her shop.

I also have Camembert de Normandie, Langres, Vacherin Mont d’Or, and a dozen different fresh chèvres, some covered in ash, others rippling with a pale blue mold, all completely and totally illegal to bring back to the States.

My wife looks at me with alarm. “What’s that smell?” she says as I hand her the packages and ask her to carry them for me.

“It’s nothing,” I tell her. “Just a little cheese.”

“Is it okay to bring back?”

I do my little French snort. “Of course,” I lie. “It’s nothing. Rien, rien, rien.” And then, as the taxi pulls away from the hotel, the precious bundles of cheese sitting prettily on her lap, I give her a kiss on the cheek. “Trust me, darling.”

Madame Cantin is a high priestess in the religion of raw-milk cheeses, and she works hard to convert me, putting out a large tray of different raw cow and goat-milk cheeses, any one of which would be illegal to sell in the United States.

Seeing my trepidation, she says, “How can you be afraid to eat my cheese but not be afraid to eat a McDonald’s hamburger?”

It is a question for which I have no answer.

I sample her cheeses. They are magnificent. She sees the look in my eyes and knows: I am a believer. Praise the lowly goat!

Now—and only now—will she sell me the outrageously expensive Epoisses.

I tell Marie-Anne Cantin that the cheese is a gift for a friend in California and ask if she can wrap it up for me. She asks when I am leaving. Tomorrow, I tell her. “Then I will deliver it to your hotel. What time do you leave?”

When I ask her why I can’t just take it with me, she sighs, looks at me sadly, and says it is simply not possible. That is when she delivers the bombshell: “You know, of course, this cheese is illegal in your country,” she says. No, I tell her. I did not know.

And then she sees the problem: I am a dupe. A rube. A cheese mule, as it were. I have been asked to carry nine ounces of an illegal substance, something I know nothing about. So her mission is clear. If I am to go through with this, first I must learn what I’m dealing with. Before she will sell me the Epoisses, she insists on giving me a crash course in French cheesemaking (most of which I have already revealed to you).

Madame Cantin puts on a smart laboratory smock and leads me down some dark stairs at the rear of her shop to the cellar. Here she has two dark rooms full of stinky raw-milk cheeses. One room for goat cheese, another room for cow cheese. We enter the goat cheese room. There are hundreds—no, thousands—of little white slabs of cheese on trays stacked from floor to ceiling being aged to perfection. The Fort Knox of chèvre. For the next hour or so, I learn everything there is to know about curds and whey. I learn about rennet and mold and brine. I learn about washed-rind cheeses, like Epoisses, which, as they ripen, are brushed with marc, a French alcohol. But mostly I learn about the joys of making cheese from unpasteurized milk.