SideTracked by Cheese
Within days of first exposure,
the contagiously slow-moving Dordogne River begins to affect your nerves,
your heart rate, and your pace. Under that ether in the middle of a
hot July day, my wife and I slummed the seldom-mentioned villages along
the Dordogne.
With antique shopping at St. Sozy behind us, geese grazing under walnut trees grab our attention more than the gentle bends in the road toward Creysse, our anticipated next stop. We think, “Why not pull over and watch school children in the valley below conquer a cornfield maze?” Then, downstream, a huge roadside factory interrupts the lazy day and a billboard notifies passers-by that tours of the fromagerie are being conducted. I lift my accelerator foot a bit but then press down again, chased away by the smokestacks and the parking lot built for tour busses.
Several miles of geese and walnuts later, a foot-long homemade “Fromagerie Fermier” sign points right. It seems a more promising detour than the mass production cheese factory, and since we don’t have to be in Creysse at any particular time, down the narrow paved road we go. It winds and descends, then makes a sharp S through a tunnel to get around a couple of two-story boulders. After a few kilometers, we start to wonder how much farther we should chase this ghost. Can we find our way back to the road we turned off? Are we looking for a building or another small sign? Did we pass the sign without noticing it? But the scariest question remains: Will it be another bland monstrosity?
Another “Fromagerie Fermier” sign points up a dirt road we’d only attempt in a rental car. Looks promising – interesting outbuildings around a main house and a big barn but nobody in sight. Down the driveway, past the house, we turn toward the barn and a smaller stone building identified at last as the fromagerie. There’s a spot to park between the five-foot tall hay rolls scattered around the yard. Our little car disappears between the rolls and with the doors opened, The smell of freshly gathered hay reminds me of perfect childhood days making hay forts in the loft of the barn of a friend whose family ran a dairy. Bleating noises draw us to the barn. Peering in the half door, we get our first clue that the fromage at this ferme is not going to be from cows. About 50 very vocal tan and white goats let us know that if we like the cheese, it is they who are to be congratulated.
A doorbell dog alerts whoever is in the little stone building that curious customers are approaching. The door on the opposite side opens on a little reception/sales room and behind a table waiting to show us the cheese, beams a farm-fresh 25-year-old brunette beauty. Until all the ruckus outside, she’d been putting “Rocamadour” labels on little two-inch white hockey pucks called cabecou but stopped to greet us. Behind her is a four-foot wide window for viewing the cheese-making equipment in another room. Everything in there is pristine white or stainless steel. After chatting about the cabecou, we’re curious to know how much of life outside the farm she’d known. “I lived in Paris for a year,” she said, “and I hated it. Then, like the prodigal, I hurried back to my father’s goat cheese farm.” By now, it’s getting close to lunchtime, so we get two cabecou for about $1.00.
For lunch, this smooth, fresh cheese deserves to be eaten with the perfect bread. Realizing we are far from a village with a grocery store or bakery, we ask if there is somewhere nearby we could get some bread. She points to the road and says, “Our little community bakery is about a half-kilometer that way.” Within minutes, we encounter another make-my-day treasure for seekers of real local life on the road. Smoke is pouring from the chimney of an ancient, wood-burning, communal bread oven. Neighbors bring in flour from their farm and take home a variety of breads from the oven. No need for nearby farmers to heat up their kitchen every day for bread baking and the communal oven gets effective use. A good deal for everybody.
Inside, it’s not at all as clean as the barnyard fromagerie. Cooking this rustic bread is more of a guy thing and the place resembles a garage more than a laboratory. Inside the half-moon mouth of the glowing oven, we see about 30 loaves – petit, gran, some shaped round, some crescent, and one style is circular with a hole as big as a doughnut in the middle. A strapping apprentice asks, “Do you want this petit one?” After nods, he pulls it right out of the oven, and cradling it in a newspaper, he puts it ceremoniously in our hands. I’ve never had to flick chips of wood ash from the bottom of a loaf before, but to enjoy bread that tasty, I’d love to do it again. As we walk back to the car with the world’s freshest pain de campagne to go with the world’s freshest little goat cheeses, we spot a long plank atop two large stones under a shade tree. Just the perfect place to breathe in some real local air before enjoying what, even years later, we recall as our favorite meal ever.
