It really is a bit like entering a richly endowed household via the pantry, because Franche-Comté, tucked beside the Swiss border beneath Alsace and north of the Alps, is a storehouse full of delectable foodstuffs. It is the source of France’s best-seller among appellation controlée cheeses, Comté, and of the unctuously superb winter and Christmas speciality, Mont d’Or, and it also provides much of France’s smoked hams and sausages – while at the same time keeping to itself a few curious regional specialities that you will not find anywhere else.
The region’s heritage in long-keeping and preserved foods of all sorts stems from the ancient necessity for the inhabitants of the Jura and Vosges mountains to keep themselves provided with robust nutritious food through the winter months. So they wanted to make large, long-keeping cheeses – and each great disc of Comté measures more than two feet across and weighs up to 100 pounds [42 to 45kg].
To make these flavoursome cartwheels always required the milk of more than one farm, so voluntary co-operatives, a feature of French agricultural elsewhere from the nineteenth century, had started already in Franche-Comté in the 13th century. Now there are still 190 cheese-making co-ops (known as “fruitières”) producing Comté throughout Franche-Comté.
The strict rules governing the cheese’s production require that the milk comes only from the local brown and white Montbéliarde cows, kept with a hectare of pasture each, and fed only on grass, hay and cereals. The milk for the cheese is unpasteurised; heated only in copper cauldrons; and the cheeses must then be aged only on spruce planks, whose corrugated grain ensures the proper aereation.
During ageing the cheeses must be regularly scrubbed, washed with brine and turned, to form the protective crust of rind which ensures that the body of the cheese remains sweet and healthy. Comté must be matured at least four months before it is sold, but some are aged two years or more, so there are an infinite variety of subtle differences between the tastes of the individual cheeses.
There are “taste wheels” devised for the flavours and characteristics of Comté just as there are for wines, beers and whiskies, with some 100 discernible flavours grouped in categories ranging from “lactic” (predominant in young cheese) to “toasted” and “nutty” (more pronounced in longer matured cheeses). Indeed the cheese-makers insist that Comté is even more complex than wine since it involves two senses not employed in wine appreciation: touch (the texture and feel of cheese when pressed or broken) and sound (used to tell by tapping the rind just when the cheese’s maturity is impending).
The second of Franche-Comté’s AOC cheeses, Morbier, is typified by a layer of vegetable ash forming a black seam through its centre. This is a remnant of the days when farms needed to mould together the curd from two milkings to form a cheese big enough to keep well – and used the layer of ash to protect the top of the first layer of curd while awaiting the addition of the second.
Almost half Franche-Comté’s area is given over to pasture, most of it undisturbed for centuries, so that an average of at least 30 plant species are to be found wherever the brown and white Montbéliardes browse. In spring the meadows are bright with flowers, and tuneful with the ringing of cow bells, while in autumn late-flowering crocuses still pattern the scenery.
This delightful countryside for walking or cycling. From spring through autumn the grass remains verdant and lush, even when the rest of France is suffering drought or heatwave, but in winter snow turns much of the region’s uplands white. That is when downhill and cross-country skiers and ice-skaters make Franche-Comté their playground, while hunters track wild boar and deer in the region’s huge forests.
Broadly that part of Franche-Comté not given over to grass, lakes, ponds or rivers is covered in trees, providing cover for game and raw materials for the region’s traditional cottage industries of clock-making and food smoking. In the Jura and Haut Doubs many farms still have a tuyé, a chimney specially designed for smoking hams, bacon and sausages with fires of resinous woods (typically spruce, pine and juniper) cut from the local forest.
Besides hams and sausages, one notable speciality is bresi - a tasty cured and smoked beef. The forests and meadows also ensure an almost year round supply of wild mushrooms which are much a feature of the region’s cuisine - especially morels, ceps, oyster mushrooms and girolles. Chef Pierre Basso-Moro at the Château de Germigney sometimes takes privileged (and well shod) guests along on his productive fungus forays in the depths of the nearby Fôret de Chaux, one of the largest forests in France.
Though Franche-Comté’s cheeses and smoked sausages are famous throughout France, the region retains a few specialities which are peculiarly its own. No-one should leave without at least trying cancoillotte, a staple food in the region but almost unknown outside. It is a concoction made by slow simmering “metton” (dried solids of skimmed milk) in water, wine or stock with whatever additives (spices, herbs, fruits, alcohols or other flavourings) the cook may choose. The result is a faintly cheesy, smooth sauce or paste which can be consumed hot or cold as a dip, a topping, a soup, or a breakfast porridge according to fancy.
