Thinking aloud on the war in Ukraine

This is just me trying to order my thoughts on the war. It’s not a hot take, and frankly no one would read it anyway. It’s for me. I may update it as I go.

Russia is the aggressor here. Putin didn’t have to invade.

Although Russia’s stated mission is to “denazify” Ukraine, Putin in a revanchist imperialist fascist. I doubt that he is mad though.

Your enemy’s enemy is not your friend. Rightly opposing Western neo-liberal imperialism does not mean that you have to support Putin. You should oppose both.

Ukraine is not some cuddly idyll lead by the Strictly Come Dancing winning voice of Paddington Bear. It accommodated the Nazi Azov Battalion and, like many European states, is hyper nationalist with some profoundly vile right wing politics. It is as guilty as Russia for undermining the Minsk accords. It has undoubtedly been responsible for atrocities in the Donbas region. None of Ukraine’s failings justify Russia’s invasion. Fair play to the Ukrainians for their brave and vigorous defence.

Don’t pretend that there one army will be committing nothing but atrocities and one will be completely ethical and lovely.

Don’t fall for Russophobia or Ukrainophile approaches [or vice versa]. Condemn politicians and war criminals, but don’t make sweeping statements about whole populations. The victims here are the civilian populations and the young people sent off to fight.

Don’t accept or interpret single instances e.g. a photograph or a video or a tweet as being capable of encapsulating the situation anywhere.

War is an abhorrent thing and all efforts should be made to avoid it or stop it. Wars happen because at least one side wants a war. War degrades everyone who is touched by it. There are no clear and honest efforts to seek a true peace. Governments are too busy banging their war drums and are too happy to see civilians die.

Truth is the first casualty of war. Treat all reports with a pinch of salt, especially now that we have technologies capable of presenting images as though they are real. Avoid embracing armchair commentaries as powerful insights. Avoid gloating over corpses [although I can see why people in Ukraine might be tempted to]

Avoid consuming news like a distanced reality TV entertainment, irrespective of how it might be presented.

States and governments will always sacrifice thousands of their own people as well as the people of other countries, either as soldiers or as civilians, for the continuation of the state.

Western government hypocrisy over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is quite disgusting. The Israeli government is committing genocide on the Palestinian people, the Saudis [armed by the West] are bombing Yemen causing thousands of deaths through violence, famine, and disease, the Western governments have recently invaded Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, and blockaded and sanctioned many countries for failing to fall into line with Western hegemony. Western governments and Russia have both chosen to confront each other through proxy wars e.g. in Syria, central Africa, and now Ukraine. Proxy wars kill people who aren’t your own citizens and therefore those people don’t seem to matter. Oppose all oppressors. Oppose all who want war, or who lean on the threat of war.

The hypocrisy over good and bad refugees is simple racism. The refugees from Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere have suffered as much as other refugees and are as deserving of support and a welcome as those from Ukraine. It would also be grand if the UK government could actually support some Ukrainian refugees instead of just being the bullying, lying hypocrites that they clearly are.

Governments rarely, if ever, go to war for an abstract idea of “freedom”. They go to war for land, power, influence, money, resources.

The media in all countries are complicit with on-going war and the supporting narratives.

Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Baudin – local revolutionary history

Where I live we [I say “we”, but who am I kidding, I’m not French] have a fine reputation to uphold regarding revolutions.  The Bastille was just around the corner, the last stand of the Communards was up the road in the 20e arrondissement and the biggest massacre by the government troops was just up the road at Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Some of these topics are too big to cover briefly and have been well covered elsewhere.  I am also not sure I could do justice the history of the Paris Commune and it is a topic that needs suitably respectful coverage.  Respectful to the Communards that is, not to the government.

This is a shorter story of revolutionary, republican behaviour.  Across the road from the bar called Le Chat Bossu [The Hunchbacked Cat and a very nice traditional bar for lunch], there is an off license and above the doorway is a sign that has seemingly been put up unofficially.

Sign describing the death of Alphonse Baudin

Translated it reads “Killed 2nd December 1851 on the barricade raised here by the insurrection against Napoleon III’s coup d’état.  The bronze statue erected here was given by Pétain to make cannons.”  What’s a bit strange is that all of the accounts that I’ve seen of Baudin’s death reckon he was killed on the 3rd December although the barricade was raised on the 2nd.

Seeing this sign piqued my interest. I hadn’t realised the number of revolts and uprisings that occurred in Paris.  I knew that we had revolts, riots and rebellions galore in the UK but my historical awareness is not so great here.  Since I wasn’t brought up here, I haven’t absorbed as much history through simply living amongst the stories.  If I’d bothered thinking then I would have guessed there would be have been the same kinds of riots and revolts, I just wouldn’t have been able to guess the facts.

Louis Napoleon was the nephew of the Emperor Napoleon.  He had been elected as President in 1848 by a huge majority.  At that time every male had the vote but the Assemblée Nationale introduced a rule that only male homeowners could vote in an effort to ensure that electoral support for Louis Napoleon was undermined. Napoleon was prevented from standing for re-election as president by the constitution since he was the incumbent.  His period as president was due to come to an end in December 1852.  He tried to force through constitutional change to allow him to stand again for election but this was blocked in the parliament and so he started plotting his coup.

On the night of the 1st and the morning of the 2nd December, troops loyal to Napoleon took up positions throughout the city and key opposition figures were arrested and Napoleon declared the Assemblée Nationale to be dissolved and that he was now in charge.

An insurrection against Napoleon was launched, led by, among others, Victor Hugo the famous author.  A bounty was put on Hugo’s head and he considered this an enormous compliment.  According to Eric Hazan, Hugo saw it as his duty to get killed in this insurrection which, had he succeeded, would have denied us his epic Les Miserables and, less worryingly, the spectacle of Russell Crowe singing.

On the members of the Assemblée Nationale who felt obliged to make a stand against Napoleon’s coup was Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Baudin, a doctor from Ain in the far east of France.

Across Paris barricades were erected.  Troops loyal to Napoleon began to murder people indiscriminately with people even being murdered in their homes.  Over 350 prisoners were shot at the École Militaire.

A particularly enormous barricade was erected on the Rue Faubourg St Antoine, next the junction with Rue de Cotte.  According to Hugo, this barricade was as high as the second storey of the surrounding buildings and was built in a similar location to that described Les Miserables by the barricade builder Frederic Constant Cournet during the 1848 revolution.  Cournet was one of the leaders of the 1851 revolution against Napoleon and he read out the proclamation of rebellion that was written by Hugo.  The revolution posters and declarations covered the barricade and many people gathered to discuss and read them.

It was at one point, whilst the crowd gathered to read the posters that, according a possibly apocryphal story, an old woman said that “The Twenty-Five Francs are crushed.  So much the better!”.  She was referring to the twenty-five francs per day that the members of the Assemblée Nationale received as remuneration, compared to the wage paid to the men and women who worked in the National Workshops of 2 and 1 franc per day respectively.  The troops of the 19th Leger formed into ranks on the street and Baudin attempted to motivate the workers to join the barricade.  Asked whether Baudin truly expected the workers to do die so that he could keep his twenty-five francs per day, Baudin made his grand comment, “I’ll show you how someone dies for twenty five francs” and climbed onto the barricade where he was shot and died.

In order to recover Baudin’s body for burial, his family was obliged to make some commitments to the government about not making a fuss or political statements and Baudin was buried secretly in Montmartre, where is grave became a meeting point for Republicans.  A campaign was launched some years later to recognise Baudin’s sacrifice, for which Charles Delescluze, the journalist responsible,  was jailed for six months.  Delescluze was later killed by government forces during the Commune.  In 1879 a plaque was fixed to the house at the location of the barricade, which reads “Before this house fell gloriously Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Baudin, representative of the people for the department of Ain killed Dec. 3, 1851 Act defending the law and the Republic. ”

In 1901, a statue was erected, not at the site of the barricade but at the junction of Avenue Ledru-Rollin and Rue Traversière.

Statue of Baudin at the junction of Avenue Ledru Rollin and Rue Rue Traversière, from an old postcard.

 

In 1942 the statue was taken during the Nazi occupation and melted down.  This rationale hides another truth.  The government officials, acting on the wishes of Marshal Pétain, were happy to perform, in the words of the Minister of Education, “a just and salutary revision of our glories, so that there are no more intruders or unworthy people represented by statues.”  Victor Hugo, among others, had his statue taken down.

After the Liberation  many of the statues, including Hugo, are restored. But not that of Baudin.  In 1977, the base of his statue was even removed so as to permanently prevent any possibility of reconstruction.

So is there something unsavoury about Baudin to the French officials?  Is it the fact that he was a member of the government that turned against his own?  Is that enough?  Or is he really a person unworthy of a statue?  There is clearly some support for his recognition as can be seen by the recent plaque shown earlier but I don’t get any sense of widespread coverage or support.  He has a street [a rather insignificant street], a one star hotel and a school named after him.  Is that enough?

Today’s Cheese is Bleu de Laqueuille

Another day, another cheese.  And another blue cheese.

This one is an industrial, pasteurised cheese from the Auvergne although it wasn’t always this way.  This is what comes from mass production.  You get standardised cheeses that really don’t reflect the place where the cheese was made or the season when it was made.  This cheese could probably be made from cows milk from anywhere and it would be quite likely pretty much the same.  Is that a bad thing?  Well, yes and no.  You lose a fair amount of the authenticity of the cheese but the dairy farmers who are not cheesemakers have a market for their milk and we have a decent cheese in return that will be pretty much the same every time you buy it.  And that reliability is something that some people prefer over authenticity.

This cheese was formally a traditionally made cheese and there is, apparently, an unpasteurised fermier version still available.  The cheese was invented [in as much as you can invent a cheese] by a cheesemaker called Antoine Roussel in the mid 1800s who combined the moulds from his rye bread with his cheese and voila.  Antoine is also credited with inventing the more popular and more common Bleu d’Auvergne but I suspect that the Bleu d’Auvergne simply evolved from the wider application of Antoine’s discoveries.  Antoine’s innovations were based on recreating the naturally occuring moulds that caused his caved aged cheeses to develop mould and then to also “needle” or pierce his cheeses to enable oxygen to penetrate the cheese and cause allow the moulds to flourish.

The use of the mould to create blue cheeses was already well known and the legendary and ancient Roquefort is a cheese that is made to the south of the Auvergne.  What Antoine wanted to do was make the production of his cows’ milk blues more reliable.  He experimented with different moulds [the container used to give form as opposed to the fungus this time] and then hit upon using bread moulds and knitting needles to standardise the production of his cheeses.  This was the time of the industrial revolution and Antoine was perhaps very much a man of his times with regard to these ideas of management, control and regularisation.

These discoveries soon spread in the region and you have two very similar cheeses.  The Bleu d’Auvergne has received its Appellation d’Origine Protégée [AOP] whilst the Bleu de Laqueuille is unprotected and perhaps this has impacted on its success.  The AOP does seek to protect products that have a history, are strongly linked to an area of production and to a specific knowledge regarding the making of the cheese but, for me, as soon as you pasteurise the cheese you do lose some of the effects of geography and terroir.

But these two cheeses are very similar and if you were faced with a choice, you might be more likely to buy the AOP cheese.  The Laqueuille is also a slightly milder cheese than the Auvergne.

This is an unpressed, uncooked, pasteurised cows milk cheese that has been matured for at least six weeks and probably a little longer.  The rind is pale grey and brown with some white bloom, dry with sticky patches and quite edible.  The paste is creamy and ivory coloured with the pockets of blue, these varying from the size of a grain of rice to pockets the size of a nib [is that what they are called or have I just made that up?] of sweetcorn.  The paste is soft, creamy and occasionally slightly crumbly.  It is well salted but it lacks the bite of a Bleu d’Auvergne or the hefty bite of a Roquefort [unsurprising since the Roquefort is a sheep’s milk cheese].  There is a slight bite there though and this nicely cuts through the creaminess.

This cheese would be quite happy on a cheese board, perhaps served with something a little sweet such as fruit chutney but would also go well in a salad too.  You can try it with pears as you might a Roquefort but the contrast between the saltiness and sweetness will be lost.  A red wine might overpower it, unless you have a light red but a white or a fine sherry will probably be better suited.

Today’s Cheese is Bleu de Chèvre

This is a cheese so authentic that it doesn’t have a fancy name.  Just Bleu de Chèvre, or Blue Goat’s Cheese for a direct translation.  It is made in Boissy-Saint-Léger, a commune to the south east of Paris and, to add to its rarity, it’s a fermier cheese made from the milk from the goats on a single farm.

Now what’s interesting for me is that you don’t get many blue goat’s milk cheeses and there certainly aren’t any famous ones.  There are plenty of well known blue sheep’s milk cheeses, including the mighty Roquefort and loads of famous blue cow’s milk cheeses such as Dorset Blue Vinney, Stilton and Gorgonzola but there are no celebrated goats milk blues.  Off the top of my head I know of Harbourne in the UK, and at a push you might say the Picon from Spain qualifies but that’s a mix so I have disqualified it under my somewhat arbitrary legal system. And that’s pretty much it.

I have to be honest and say that I have no explanation for this.  Maybe the flavours that everyone likes from a goat’s cheese is not in tune with what the bacteria add.  Next time I find Baptiste, the one person who will know, I will ask.  That’s not to say that you shouldn’t make a blue with goat’s milk.  This one is a fine example of a good one and I’m sure that there are others.

So on to the cheese.  The rind is grey and covered with ash and quite edible [i.e. you really should eat it] and the paste is just off-white, soft, supple and uniform with pockets of blue mould well distributed throughout.  Since the cheese is relatively young it doesn’t have a strong aroma and also lacks the sharp freshness that you might expect from a goat’s cheese.  It does have a slight hint of lemony sharpness when you first bite it but this is soon overcome by the satisfying creaminess and the saltiness of the cheese and there’s a hint of pepper and grassy herbs at the end too.

It’s a canny enough cheese and I would gladly eat it again but it lacks a real character and a distinctive taste to be really memorable.  For wine, I’d go for a nice, crisp white such as a sauvignon blanc, quite possibly from the Loire valley just for a hint of locality to the event.

Today’s Cheese is Bethmale Vieux

It has been said that cheese is milk’s attempt at immortality and, like all of us, age does wonderful, and not so wonderful things to cheese.  It is the job of the cheesemaker and the affineur to make sure that the cheese matures and ages properly.  Today’s cheese is one where aging has created a much improved cheese but, perhaps for cultural reasons, the aged version is somewhat rarer than the more common version.

Bethmale is named after the village near to where it made, in the Couserans region, in the Pyrenees.  It is an ancient cheese which can apparently be traced back to Moorish times in the early 8th century CE, when the Moorish invasions reached as far as Tours before being defeated by Charles Martel, father of the excellently named Pepin the Short.  Bethmale was also much loved by the equally excellently named Louis the Fat, who apparently died of dysentery brought on by too much good cheer.  I suspect that Louis the Fat, being so obese that he need special carriages to ferry him around, enjoyed a lot of cheese, and since Bethmale was his cheese of choice, then perhaps this is a regicidal cheese.

Now for the technical bit.  Bethmale is a pressed, uncooked cows’ milk cheese.  This means that it is pressed once it is put into its mould.  This gets rid of any excess whey and ensures that the cheese is quite dense.  An uncooked cheese has not had its curds cooked, although the milk often has to be heated as part of the coagulation process, it does not have to be heated again.  Another example of a pressed, uncooked cheese is Cheddar.

The cheese has a good, dusty thick, cracked crust that suggests that there are cheese mites [cheese mites are our friends] present during the maturation.  This is one rind that I am not too fussed about eating.  Normally Bethmale is aged for around three or four months at the most and you end up with quite a mild, creamy cheese.  The one I have has been aged for about 18 months.  The paste is pale yellow and is very much like a proper mature cheddar.  It has a few eyes [the little holes you sometimes see in cheeses, caused by carbon dioxide produced during the maturation process] and is quite crumbly but not really hard.

It’s a strong, piquant, salty cheese with a good hint of mustard.  The taste is not as long as the black brie from the other day but it fills your mouth without burning your gums like a potent cheddar can do.  Since, this cheese is from the south west of France, why not have some red wine from around here too?  Maybe a nice Madiran.  Go on.  Just not too much.

Today’s cheese is T’Chiot Biloute

I like beer.  I like cheese. A cheese ripened with beer.  OK.  I’ll give it a go.

That sounds like bravado.  it isn’t really.  Other than novelty cheeses [yes, you Wensleydale with Cranberries.  And you, layered cheeses], I will try anything twice.

This is a cheese from the north of France, near to St Aubin from a farm called, rather dramatically, La Ferme du Pont des Loups or the Farm of Wolf Bridge.

You know how I like a good ancient saint.  St Aubin, or St Albinus of Angers, is a pretty good one.  He has some fine legends about getting people out of prison.  In one story he tried to get a woman called Etherie released after she was imprisoned by King Childebert.  His negotiations failed so he went off to visit Etherie in prison only for the prison guard to drop dead at Albinus’s feet.  This was seen as a triumph of his power and Etherie was released.  In another legend, he prayed all night for the release of some men.  In the morning, the wall of their prison cell collapsed and they escaped.  The most important thing you need to know about St Albinus is that you invoke his help when you are threatened by pirates. Don’t forget.

It’s a relatively new cheese, dating from the 1990s.  It’s made from unpasteurised cows’ milk.  The cheese is then brushed with beer [there is a version that is brushged with cider] and is then given a coating of fine breadcrumbs.  I have no idea which beer it is but I guess that it’s not Kronenbourg or something equally pointless.  It’s a relatively small cheese which weighs about 170g and comes wrapped in plastic which I found a little odd.  I expect that this slows the maturation of the cheese and allows it to be more standardised but it also removes the stage of affinage that may0 not be carried out by the cheesemaker but by the affineur, who will bring the cheese to its proper stage of maturity.  Obviously, depending on the affineur, you will get slight variations on the same cheese.

The crust of the cheese is a nice pale orange, much like many of the other washed rind cheeses of northern France such as the Maroilles or the Pont l’Eveque.  The cheese is relatively soft under the skin and gives lightly to the touch.  The crust is not sticky like other washed rind cheeses, I suppose thanks to the breadcrumbs.

The paste is a pale ivory with some eyes, or spaces, throughout and the aroma is, like such cheeses, stronger than the taste.  It is a mild, creamy cheese with a slightly yeasty hint and a slight sweetness and you can eat the paste and rind.  Although you can obviously eat this accompanied by a wine, this is a cheese from the North, not far from Belgium.  I’d take this with a good beer, perhaps not so strong as it to drown the delicate flavour.  Try a decent blonde, ambre or Biere de Garde.

 

 

Today’s cheese is Brie Noir

This cheese is almost mythological.  I mentioned its rumoured existence some time ago here but I have never found it.  Until now.

My preferred cheese shop has set up a little area called the Little Shop of Horrors.  Here they display a range of gruesome misfits, a rogues’ gallery of cheeses.  The tough, gnarly cheeses that you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley when you’re only armed with some flimsy cheese knife and a cream cracker.  But these are the same cheeses that demand and deserve respect.

As a slight aside, I have a bugbear with people who say that people must earn respect.  This is simply not true.  We have a duty to respect everyone we meet or at least respect their existence and their rights.  Of course we are not required to be everyone’s friend but we should at least take the time to understand that everyone has a past and history that we know pretty much nothing about.  We should not assume anything but we should grant everyone the fundamental right of being respected as a human.  That sounds like some terrible platitudinous self help book so I apologise for the phrasing but not the sentiment.

Brie is a popular cheese and it’s fair to say that pretty much everyone knows it.  It is one of France’s classics.  There are two main Bries, the Brie de Meaux and the Brie de Melun.  The Melun is a more powerful and pungent Brie and the Meaux is more approachable and acceptable to the majority of palates.

A Brie is normally matured for a month or two.  But what happens if you have too much Brie.  OK.  It’s a fair question:  Can you really have too much Brie?  I guess yes must be the answer since it seems that, during in a time of such abundance, there was too much Brie.  And the Brie was matured for a lot longer.  Brie Noir, or Black Brie if you must, has been matured for around ten months.  Some will say matured and some will say abandoned.  The pale, young Bries will belong to the foppish aristocracy.  The tough Brie Noir will belong with the peasants and the workers, easily transported in pockets and bags.

Gone is the ivory paste and the white downy rind.  Now we have a cheese with a paste the colour of dark vanilla fudge, if paste is the word for something as firm as a cheddar but drier.  The rind is more brown now and cracked, not just little delicate Japanese crackling in pottery though, these are fissures.

The smell is stronger and obviously less fresh than a typical Brie but it is not offensive.  It’s not an eye-watering cough inducing smell.  You know it’s going to have a kick though.

And the texture is akin to other aged cheeses such as the Comte.  It’s not as granular as a parmesan but it is more punchy.  It’s taste is quite caramelly but with some sharpness.  It is strong though, so don’t eat it as the first cheese on the cheese board.  The taste is very, very long.

But here’s the next odd thing.  It is sometimes recommended that you eat this cheese with some coffee.  Not wine. Coffee.  The more ardent connoisseur will take it with their breakfast coffee.  I discussed it in the cheese shop and we decided that an espresso would be ideal.  Perversely it works. The coffee’s slight bitterness adds to the caramelly sweetness and there’s almost a hint of cocoa.  You don’t need very much either, imagine it’s a small sweet on the side of your saucer since that’s all you need.  This isn’t something to eat in great slabs.  At €60 per kg, you might be wise to measure your intake.  But you don’t need much.  A small piece is enough to give you the taste and experience.  Perhaps like good design or a fine and pure chocolate, less really is more.

Today’s cheese is Le Carré du Père Antoine plus nuns, sex and money

What could possibly go wrong?

This cheese is from a town called Vergaville in the Moselle area of Lorraine, bordering on Germany and Luxembourg.  So they have white wine and decent cheese.

Its name suggests its religious background and it’s made by the Fromagerie de l’Abbaye.  Nuns.  Except there isn’t an abbey in Vergaville anymore.  It was established in 966, pretty much ruined during the 30 Years War, rebuilt in 1745 only to be finally demolished off in the Revolution forty or fifty years later.

There’s a long and venerable history of nuns, and perhaps more commonly monks, being involved in making cheese as well as beer and liqueurs.  The abbeys controlled a great deal of wealth, land and livestock and although they had certain responsibilities toward the sick and poverty stricken the wealth was incredible.

Even now the wealth controlled by the churches is staggering.  The Economist estimated that the U.S. Catholic church spent $171,600,000,000 [yes, $171 billion] in 2010.  That’s a lot of people employed and quite possibly, a lot of good work done.  It is also the biggest landowner in Manhattan.   The Church of England is a financial weakling, controlling a mere £4.4 billion of assets as of 2008.

It was no wonder that medieval Europe saw the rise of many religious and millenarian movements raging against the wealth of the church and how this was in clear contradiction of the Bible and any supposed vows of poverty.

At the times of the great abbeys, convents and monasteries the local peasants couldn’t offer much in the way of donations beyond the tithes that were exacted upon them and so the monks and nuns grew and maintained their own fields and livestock, and from their harvests could produce wines, liqueurs and beers, and from the milk, cheese.

And with these pleasures and the inevitable temptations of the flesh, there was a fair degree of licentiousness within the religious institutions.  Nuns spoke of being visited by supernatural beings bringing sexual satisfaction “Incubi infest cloisters”.  In his entertainingly titled book Coryat’s Crudities written in the early 1600s, Thomas Coryat describes plenty of cases of nuns, and even abbesses becoming pregnant or being involved in scandal.

The hysteria around such incubi led to an investigation in 1565 which discovered that local young men were habitually climbing into the nunnery to carry on affairs with the nuns.  When these visits were stopped the hysteria and visions of the incubi began.  In these cases, the nuns, being women and therefore considered to be completely innocent and incapable of such thoughts themselves were found to be pure and innocent. Whilst any monks and priests that carried on these affairs with nuns and brought about this hysteria were denounced as degenerates and were burned.  One priest who was accused after his death was dug up so that he could be burnt.    There are plenty of other fine stories, especially the sado-masochistic ones, but I feel I am becoming distracted and perhaps mildly hysterical myself.

Where was I?

So this cheese then.

This is a pasteurised cows milk cheese with a washed rind with a white bloom.  In this case, it is washed in an eau de vie made from mirabelle plums.  It’s rind is orange, soft and sticky.  The aroma, like most washed rind cheeses is ripe and pungent but thankfully lacking the ammonia aspect of some cheeses.

The paste is ivory coloured and creamy and will start to run if you keep it out, allowing it to warm [as of course you should or even must].  There are a number of eyes throughout the paste, especially towards the centre but these disappears as the cheese matures and softens.  It is smooth and, like the Pont l’Eveque it resembles, unctious and slightly fruity.  Its smell is not mirrored in its taste but it does have a long taste so save it to the end of the evening.  And for wine, consider either a Gewurztraminer or maybe a Pinot Noir.

And yes, the nuns and sex stuff was really to get attention.

Today’s cheese is Bleu de Montbriac

Today I am ashamed to say that I am betraying the small scale cheesemaker.

There are three levels of authenticity in French cheese.

The first is the farmhouse cheesemaker.  Their cheese is often made on the farm and will be made from cheese from cows that live on the farm.  This is the truest, most honest and authentic cheese.  Here you have a sense of that most important of things in traditional French cuisine, the terroir.

Terroir essentially refers to all of the aspects of the location of production that are inherent in the product such as climate, soil, flora etc.  And a part of this also suggests to me the traditions, history and customs of a place.  And all of these things are found, in one way or another, in a region’s foods, particularly in the cheese. For the French, the place where their food is produced is hugely important.  All of the fruit and vegetable stalls in the markets show where the various items come from, and if they are French, what area of France they come from.  If I wanted to go off one one, here’s where I’d let this blog entry spiral off into psychogeography.  Which is a fine and entertaining topic and style, if not sometimes overly self indulgent.  But if this blog is anything, it’s self indulgent.

The second level is artisanal.  These cheeses are made in a certain place with milk sourced from multiple farms in that area.  As you can see, the sense of place is being diluted.  It is no longer possible to be so specific and the terroir is no longer so apparent.

The third level, and the least satisfactory to the connoisseur, is industrial.  And you can see the disdain for this type of cheese in its name.  Industriel.  How could there be anything authentic here?  This is the world of machines and industrial estates and manufacturing units.

And so today’s cheese is an industriel cheese.  But I did buy it the fromagerie, so I’m not all bad.

This is a bleu, but a lesser blue you will struggle to find.  And it is creamy and sweet.  And wonderful if you have some good bread and some good wine.

It’s a pasteurised [so it’s already losing much of its uniqueness there] cow’s milk cheese made in the Haute Loire, in a town called Beauzac, not far from St Etienne. Yes, that St Etienne.

It’s a relatively small cheese, weighing only about a pound.  The rind is grey from ash and it’s quite edible.  Like many cheeses, you’re just throwing money away if you don’t eat the rind since it’s normally pretty good and will often add to the overall pleasure to be had from the cheese.

The paste is a pale hay yellow with very occasional eyes.  And very occasional hints of blue from penicillium glaucum, the same mould you’ll find in Bleu de Gex .  In the picture, you can just about see some blue around one of the eyes to the left.  And that’s it.  More will come with a little more age but it’s not wildly blue.  It’s not a strong blue and it doesn’t give you a real kick like a Stilton or a Roquefort can.  If you have people coming around who claim not to like blue cheeses, they could quite easily tackle this.

The paste, once you bring the cheese to room temperature, is soft and creamy and will start to run beautifully, perfect for scooping up on some crisp bread and served along side a light fruity red [maybe a Beaujolais] or a fruity white wine [a Vouvray perhaps?].

And apologise and raise a glass to the artisan cheese makers before you take a sip.

Hopeless reporting, FIFA and the Qatar World Cup

If you have even a passing interest in football then you may have noticed there are some issues related to the award of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar.  When I say some, there are some major issues, some particularly terrible.

The most important one to recently come to light is the appalling exploitation of the, primarily, Nepali workers who work with little or no pay in conditions of bonded or slave labour and where the death rates are running at around one worker per day.  Carry on at this rate and the World Cup will have seen the deaths of over 3,000 workers just to build the stadiums.

You can and should watch the video here:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/revealed-qatars-world-cup-slaves

There is also the on-going debate about whether the World Cup should even be played in Qatar, where FIFA members have been shocked to discover, temperatures can rise to well over 40 degrees centigrade and often do. Especially during the summer, when the World Cup is due to be played.

These debates have been developed a discussed elsewhere in greater detail.

FIFA allegedly carried out extensive research into the viability of the various bids to host the World Cup.  The bids from Australia and the USA appeared to be the other major contenders.

Qatar is a small place.  A small place with no real footballing culture, just lots of money.  It has a population of 250,000 people citizens [who are outnumbered by the foreign workforce].  To make it easy for me to comprehend, that is less than the population of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Everyone knows that the temperature in the Middle East is what one might describe as Very Hot.  And there are many, many people who know that labour conditions and human rights in Qatar and its surrounding countries are appalling.  And that the labour system is based on something called kafala, which requires migrant workers to have a sponsor and which can, and often does, lead to abuses of the worker’s rights as well as cruelty and physical abuse. [See here and here].

The whole of the Qatari construction industry is dependent on the migrant workers and abuse and death is commonplace.  So if you were asking the Qataris to build a lot of football stadiums, you might then ask how they were going to do that.  And you might also ask yourself about labour conditions. And you would quickly find out about these problems.  That this issue has arisen is sadly not a surprise.  Nor is FIFA’s shocked stance or the laughably naive denials of the organising committee.

So FIFA’s researchers and delegates have failed to think about these two major and pretty obvious problems.   I am left to surmise that the whole decision to award the World Cup is based either on corruption, incompetence or political interference.  Or maybe a mix of the three.  Who’d have thought it?

But will anyone be held to account?  Will FIFA or the Qatari authorities really act to resolve these issues.  Will labour laws be changed and enforced?  Not just for World Cup stadiums but for all workers?  I really do doubt it.