Paris

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Meeting Marie-Anne Cantin

Marie-Anne Cantin’s fromagerie is inconspicuously tucked into a narrow little side street midway between the Eiffel Tower and Napoleon’s tomb. She is sharp, perky, greatly opinionated, and reminds me just a bit of Debbie Reynolds.

Cantin is a second-generation fromager, having taken over the business from her father. I ask her if she has any Ay-pwoss, blowing out the second syllable as if getting rid of something nasty in my mouth, and she makes that same little raspberry noise that Diane made and leads me to one of her stunning little cheese displays where we stare, together, at four little creamy rounds that look like pumpkin-colored CDs.

Voilà!” says Madame Cantin, as if she had just produced photos of her grandchildren.

She carefully lifts one up to my face. I smile and sniff. It is…odoriferous. Seeing my reaction, Madame Cantin gives me my first lesson in French cheese appreciation: “The worse the cheese smells,” she tells me, “the better it tastes.” Then she shrugs and adds, “This is a hard thing for Americans to understand.” What the hell. Since I’m not eating it, I don’t care.

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La meilleure epoque

In France, many cheeses have a season. What the French call “la meilleure époque”—the best time to eat them. What determines the best time to eat a particular fresh cheese? It depends on two things: The pasturage of the animal that is providing the milk to make the cheese and the ideal amount of time necessary to age the cheese.

Take a nice artisanal goat cheese like Pourly. These goats graze on grass from the limestone plateaus of Bourgogne. The most abundant, flavorful grass is the new growth in the spring. And the cheese takes only two to four weeks to properly age. So the best time to eat Pourly is late sprig to early summer. And if you are a true French cheese-geek, that is when you would buy it from your local fromager.

But I do not know any of this yet because I have not met Marie-Anne Cantin who is going to tell me everything I don’t know about cheese before she allows me out of her shop with $60 worth of Epoisses. We shall meet her tomorrow.

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Cheesy lessons

In France, where they make over 500 different cheeses, and a good Brie is as easy to find as a baguette, Epoisses is rather rare and expensive. But in the United States it is more than rare. It is unavailable. It is unavailable because it is as illegal as Cuban cigars.

You see, this unassuming little round orange bundle, which weights about nine ounces and has something of a barnyard aroma to it, is made from unpasteurized milk. And in the good ol’ US of A, raw-milk cheeses are absolutely, positively forbidden unless they have been aged for at least 60 days, which would sort of be like saying you couldn’t sell fresh fish in a grocery store until it had been aged for at least two months.

There is a good reason for this decree from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Bacteria that can cause diseases can be transmitted in raw milk. Nearly a century and a half ago, French microbiologist Louis Pasteur figured out a process to eliminate bacteria in wine by heating it. Later the process was applied to milk and came to be called, as every schoolkid knows, “pasteurization.” Before Pasteur’s process was applied, all cheese was made from raw milk. In France today only about half still is. But modern pasteurization, in which the milk is heated to 161° for 15 seconds, can give milk a “cooked” flavor. And the whole point of having fresh, raw-milk cheese, like Epoisses de Bourgogne, is so you taste the distinctive flavors that come from ripened, soft cheeses that have not had their rather pronounced (substitute smelly here if you want) aromas “cooked” away by pasteurization.

But this is a no-no in the States.

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Off to the cheese shop

So now I am sitting in the Opera Suite, with its black-and-white photos of famous people I have never heard of—all French, no doubt—eating chocolate and waiting for Diane to call and tell me where I can pick up some cheese.

After half an hour, she rings me up. She is very excited. “I have found a place for you. Marie-Anne Cantin. It is not far.”

I tell Jan I’m off to get le cheese. She doesn’t care. She has half a bottle of the Veuve Clicquot left and the bathwater is still hot. So, with Diane’s meticulous but complicated directions in hand, I head off in the general direction f the golden cupola heralding Napoleon’s tomb, which, evidently, is near the cheese shop.

Let’s pause right here while I’m getting a bit lost wandering up and down streets that, for some reason, all seem to end at the Parc du Champ de Mars. I want to give you some information that, at this point in our story, I’m unaware of but I’m about to discover. It’s about this cheese. Epoisses. Epoisses de Bourgogne, as it is officially called.

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The Hotel Lutetia

Two weeks later, my wife is sitting in a bathtub drinking Veuve Clicquot. She is in total heaven. She loves the antique stores around Carré Rive Gauche, the wild strawberry sorbet at Berthillon, and the silk underwear at Sabbia Rosa, but mostly she loves lounging in the oversize tub in our hotel room sipping champagne and admiring the Eiffel Tower, which juts up into the cloudy sky just blocks away.

I am sitting shirtless and shoeless on a green couch in the Hôtel Lutétia’s Opera Suite, eating a nougat bar, wedge by wedge, speaking on the phone with Diane Mincel, an extraordinarily beautiful and charming (aren’t all French women?) jeune femme from the hotel’s marketing department who, during our three-day stay, has done everything but walk our dog—and I’m sure she would have done that if we’d had one. I have waited until the last minute to secure Elaine’s cheese, but we are leaving tomorrow, early, so I have asked Diane where, s’il vous plaît, I might find a little “Ay-pwoss.”

Diane makes that peculiarly French blowing noise, like giving the raspberry without sticking your tongue out, which, loosely translated, means either “Your guess is as good as mine” or “What a silly question.”

“Perhaps I can find out for you,” she says. The French always qualify everything by saying “perhaps.” This way they always look like heroes when they actually do something. “I will call you back immediately.”

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