Cheese has a rich history of being central to governmental affairs. Banks in Italy accept Parmigiano Reggiano as collateral for loans and for decades Switzerland had literal cheese cartels. So if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “You know, the Cheese Illuminati seems like it could be a thing,” well, you wouldn’t be entirely off the mark. It’s not some secret society conspiring to pull the levers of government or influence world events so as to establish a cheesy equivalent of a New World Order. Members do, however, dress in long cloaks and elaborate headwraps and wear heavy medallions with pyramidal shapes on them and generally all this regalia is strikingly similar to that of Professor Quirrell, so you’d be forgiven for assuming something surreptitious was afoot. This not-so-secret society is called La Guilde Internationale des Fromagers, and as French Cheese Month comes to a close, we want to tell you a bit about it.

In a nutshell (or, more appropriate, a cheese rind) the Guilde is a group of the most tenured, influential, well-connected, and essential individuals in the world of cheese. Earlier this month we featured a post on Pascal Vittu, Head Fromager at Restaurant Daniel. He’s in the Guilde. We here at Murray’s are proud to have four current team members who have been inducted. The Guilde’s roster essentially doubles as a who’s who of the artisanal cheese industry.

Great, so the movers and shakers of high-quality cheese gather from the world over and wear robes together—but what exactly does the Guilde do? The official mission is “to transmit knowledge through cheese companionship.” If you care deeply about cheese (and of course you do, you spend your time reading the blog of a cheese company) you would want the world’s cheesiest individuals—dairy farmers, affineurs, mongers extraordinaire, fromagers like Pascal—to all have a way of being in touch with one another, sharing their wisdom and methods. The Guilde exists to facilitate that very thing.

This all started back in 1969, when a man named Pierre Androuet decided the world of cheese could benefit from such a network. Today it is run by Roland Barthelemy, whose official title it “Provost,” but who one of Murray’s Guilde members refers to as the “Pope of Cheese.” Barthelemy began his cheese career close (in both time and place) to where the Guilde was founded. In the 1970s, he had a small Parisian cheese shop and affinage space. His displays were so aesthetically beautiful that it was almost like he was making floral arrangements, and patrons would queue up for hours to shop there. Before Barthelemy’s cheese papacy, cheese wasn’t always scrutinized and considered with the same level of refinement as high cuisine. He’s in large part responsible for encouraging the boom in artisanal cheese in the past few decades.

(Our own Walshe Birney [blue shirt] and Elizabeth Chubbuck [blue dress] being inducted into the Guilde this month.]

But Provost isn’t the only rank in the Guilde. There’s Protectors, Ambassadors, Masters, Judges, and on and on. Expect nothing less from a society so finely tailored. And next time you notice that the quality and assortment of cheeses available near you has improved, or that imposter cheeses are no longer as prevalent beside their AOC and PDO counterparts, or that you’re seeing more cheese programs at your favorite restaurants, think of these Protectors and Ambassadors and Masters. They may not be covertly directing the global order, but they are making life cheesier, and that’s something we can all be happy about.

There are so many great, knowledgeable people who work at Murray’s that we wanted to highlight some of them and ask some cheese-centric questions!

This month, meet Michael, a Cheesemonger at the Murray’s Bleecker St. Flagship Store. If you’ve been to our Flagship in the last decade or so, you have without a doubt seen, heard, talked to, laughed with, gotten grief from, or if you’re lucky, consulted on cheeses with Michael. He’s a one of a kind character, but he’s dead serious about cheese, meat, and making sure his customers find exactly what they’re looking for.

When he’s not on the counter at Murray’s, he’s galavanting around the city eating and writing for Real Noo Yawkas Eat, his chronicles of the best old school NYC restaurants. He’s one of our favorites behind the counter, and we’re sure after a visit or two he’ll be one of yours too! Read on to learn his favorite cheese, meat, and more.

Where are you originally from? 

Queens Noo Yawk (spell it that way).

How did you first get into cheese? 

I had a similar background in the  Macy’s Marketplace Department, but was working for the New York Fire Patrol. When the NYFP was disbanded, I needed a job. Murray’s wanted me. I wanted Murray’s.

What is your favorite cheese at the moment? 

Moliterno al Tartufo. Forza Italia!

What’s your favorite thing that your Murray’s sells?

Salumeria Biellese Hot Coppa is my favorite right now [Editor’s note: this product is only available in NYC stores]. I can slice it thinly enough to read Il Progresso through.

What do you love about Murray’s?

I get paid to march to my own drum. Not only is my off beat style appreciated, it’s expected of me as part of the Murray’s dynamic.

France is a country with an enormously influential culinary tradition, so it must be a point of particular pride for the Loire Valley to be known as the “Garden of France.” The region is right there in the heart of the country, a straight shot down from Paris, and it’s fed by the Loire River, which nourishes a preponderance of vineyards, orchards, fields, and farms. Standing in harmonious contrast to this rather agrarian setting is an equal abundance of châteaux, dotting the valley like a medieval boardgame or the map in the front of some fantasy novel about a knight’s tales of gallantry. Close your eyes and picture the archetypal French countryside: old, majestic castles and palaces, gurgling rivers, lush terrain. What you’re picturing is the Loire Valley.

July is French Cheese Month, and we’ve been celebrating by focusing on a different region of the country each week. And we are ending where so much of French cuisine originates: the Garden of France.

Of the hundreds of types of French cheese, only 48 are protected with AOC status. Six of those cheeses are from the Loire Valley, where the signature style is chèvre. Why does the Loire Valley specialize in goat cheese? Like so much about cheese history, the answer is somewhat apocryphal. In 732, the Franks and the Umayyad fought the Battle of Tours in central France. The Franks were victorious, driving the Umayyad south. As they left, the defeated forces supposedly left their goats behind, and ever since then they’ve been plentiful in the region.

Regardless of how the Loire Valley came to acquire its goats, there is no debate that they make some of the best chèvre in the world. Indeed, no place on earth has as storied a tradition of goat cheese than the Loire. France is the leading producer of goat cheese in the world—we’re talking about 265 million pounds a year—and the lion’s (or, as it were, goat’s) share of that comes from the country’s Garden.

So since we are celebrating the Loire Valley’s tangy, lactic, goat-a-licious cheeses this week, we want to share some of our favorites with you.

VALENCAY

Here’s some more apocrypha for you: Valencay looks like a pyramid with the top lopped off, and legend has it that it used to be made as a true pyramid.  Then Napoleon returned from his failed campaign in Egypt and, upon seeing the shape that symbolized the location of his defeat, ordered the cheese to be formed incomplete. Like all our Loire Valley cheeses, we receive Valencay young and develop the rind in our caves to ensure a thin, cohesive skin and dense paste that’s lightly piquant with slight minerality.

To show how a Loire Valley cheese gets its rind, we put this video together of Valencay aging in our caves:

SELLES-SUR-CHER

A delicate rind, an oozing creamline, and a fluffy interior paste with the pleasant texture of damp clay—Selles-Sur-Cher is a harmony of texture. The rind delivers insistent mineral notes, while the center is all briny, goaty tang and new-mown grass. Like many goat cheeses, this one is known for its compatibility with Sauvignon Blanc or something bubbly.

SAINTE-MAURE

Chèvre’s most iconic shape is undoubtedly the log, but Sainte-Maure is so much more than that standard stick you pick up from the store. It’s coated in vegetable ash and reinforced with a piece of straw. The hand-ladled logs then develop a wonderfully thick creamline, becoming gloriously gooey on the edges of a paste that has the dense texture of cheesecake.

BREBIS NOIR

We were so inspired by the bloomy rinded cheeses of the Loire Valley, that we began wondering what the style would taste like with a richer milk. So we paired up with Agour, renowned makers of sheep’s milk cheese in the French Pyrenees, and developed Brebis Noir. They make it in France, we age it in our NYC caves. It has a profile that’s rich and creamy in texture, with flavors that are equal parts savory and umami. There’s mushroom, there’s almond, there’s fresh milk—it’s like a porcini frangipane that’s been left to cool on the windowsill.

There’s no more of a summer-centric way to send off French Cheese Month than with a little something from the Garden. The Loire Valley’s cheeses are terrific snackers, and we recommend taking them outside with some dried cherries and a bottle of bubbly for maximum French Cheese bliss.

“You know how when you grow up with something you take it for granted?” asks Laure Dubouloz. I do. For me, it was absurdly temperate weather. I was born in southern California, and for the first 18 years of my life I checked the weather by looking out my bedroom window. If it was cloudy, I brought a sweatshirt with me. If it wasn’t, I didn’t. Ever since then I’ve lived in climates with legitimate, stinging winters, and it still takes me half the season to remember to layer appropriately.

Laure grew up in the French town of Annecy, straight east of Lyon and just south of Geneva. You do not take good weather for granted in this part of the world. Rather, Laure assumed that, just like her, everyone had family cheese caves below their houses.

Laure is the U.S. President of Mons Cheeses, one of the most renowned affineurs in France, the country that invented affinage. Mons was founded in the 1950s by Hubert Mons, who began selling cheese out of his truck, and then in markets, ultimately developing his own network of caves. At this same time, Laure’s grandfather was selling cheese to markets, and the two men got to know each other, at first in a business capacity, then in a social one. Twenty years later, Laure’s grandfather built a small trio of personal caves under his house, and this is where she grew up.

(Photo credit: Mario Delgado)

So how did Laure come to work for Mons? The Mons and Dubouloz families worked alongside one another for decades, but never in competition. Eventually Hubert’s son Hervé became old enough to begin helping the family business, right as Laure’s father began doing the same thing. While the older men were sipping coffee and talking shop, the kids would be loading the trucks. The same process repeated when Laure turned 13. Eventually Hervé took over his family’s business and Laure went off to attend an agricultural university. On the other side of Laure’s schooling Hervé offered her a position with Mons, and through this multi-generational relationship she’s now been working with her family friends for seven years. For much of that time Laure has been out in Brooklyn, responsible for bringing Mons’ cheeses to the U.S. ever since.

Here at Murray’s we are celebrating French Cheese Month, and to do so we have brought five of Mons’ cheeses in house for a limited time. That includes…

This hazelnutty, stone fruity Bethmale Chèvre:

This cheddar & sour creamy Cantal:

 

This herbaceous, porcini rich Petit Héletar:

This 1924 Bleu, an old-school, proto-Roquefort style:

And a supremely balanced Tomme de la Chataigneraie:

Speaking of Tommes, the area surrounding Lyon is particularly known for the style, so of the three family caves below Laure’s childhood home, one was devoted entirely to Tommes. The Tomme Tomb, you might call it. Of the two other caves, one was for the more delicate types of goat cheeses often associated with the Loire Valley, and the other was for harder wheels like Comté and Beaufort.

Some of Laure’s earliest memories were formed in these caves. The smell of the hard cheese cave is like no other place in the world, she says, and it always takes her back to her childhood. By age ten, she’d broken down her first wheel of Comté, and that’s where it happened.

Whereas a family set of cheese caves are undeniably charming, the Mons caves are a sight to behold. There are two separate locations. In 2006, Hervé brought down the caves his father built in order to build them back to better suit the practices the family had developed over the years. There’s a natural spring nearby, which provides a natural level of humidity that differs from cave to cave. Along with humidity, each cave has individual levels of temperature, air flow, and bacteria types, so that each style of cheese can have its own optimal conditions. Along with this set of caves, Mons converted an old train tunnel into another cave, bricking it up to achieve regulated conditions. For affineurs, cave conditions are as important as weather is to farmers. If conditions are off, that will translate to the final product, so you better believe that the caves of an operation as celebrated as Mons are as good as it gets.

So for someone who grew up in the French cheese industry and now lives stateside, what differences does she see between the cheese cultures of France and the U.S.? The first, of course, is that French law allows for raw, unaged, unpasteurized cheeses, whereas those of the U.S. do not. American affineurs, she’s observed, are much more rigid and regimented in their treatment of cheese, whereas their French counterparts work more on feel, almost like listening to the cheese to hear how it wants to be handled.

The root of these differences, though, is the cheese traditions in the two countries. The French have been perfecting the form for over a thousand years, whereas the artisanal cheese movement only boomed in America a few decades ago. Because cheese became integral to French culture before the country’s towns had easy access to one another, styles are highly regional, and eating habits remain that way. In America, there is a greater emphasis on experimentation. There’s also a place of pride that France takes in its cheese. The French eat French cheese, to the point that it can be hard to access the many great cheeses of Europe within the country. “I was able to discover Europe’s diversity of cheeses in the U.S.” says Laure. “And also, of course, American cheeses, which are exceptional.” Yes, you heard it here from a lifelong French cheese pro. Not to put words in her mouth, but it sure sounds like she’s suggesting that America might just be the most exciting place in the world for a cheese lover.

And that’s especially true right now, when you can get your hands on cheeses direct from the Mons caves. Happy French Cheese Month, and bon appétit!

On Manhattan’s Upper East Side is the modern French restaurant Daniel, operated by renowned chef Daniel Boulud. It bears just about every marker of excellence imaginable: multiple Michelin stars, one of Zagat’s top five restaurants in all New York, one of only five restaurants to earn four stars from The New York Times, the list goes on. As does the list for Daniel’s namesake. Chef Boulud has a James Beard Award for “Outstanding Chef” to go along with another one for “Outstanding Restauranteur.” He’s penned nine cookbooks and currently oversees 12 restaurants around the world. By any measure, Daniel (the restaurant, although the proprietor too) is a culinary juggernaut.

You would expect, then, that a French restaurant of Daniel’s caliber would have a strong cheese game. It would be an understatement to say that you are correct. Daniel doesn’t do a cheese plate or a cheese board-it does a cheese cart. What exactly does that mean? It means that a veritable temple of fromage is rolled right up to your table, from which you select from an assortment of premium cheese to be cut right there in front of you and presented for your enjoyment. Daniel’s cheese cart service is hands down one of the best in the country. In one of its many glowing reviews of the restaurant, The New York Times called Daniels’ cheese cart “one of the finest four-wheeled vehicles in New York.”

Such a lauded vehicle needs a worthy driver at the helm, and at Daniel it has one in Head Fromager Pascal Vittu. A few weeks ago, we visited Pascal at the restaurant to talk about the art of cheese service. He gave us a few pointers on how to translate what he does at the restaurant to an in-home setting, which we shared through Great Taste at Murray’s. He also provided us with the recipes for pickled mulberries and an apricot terrine, two of his go-to cheese pairings, which can be found on the cheese service Great Taste page.

Daniel is currently celebrating its 25th year of service, and Pascal has been heading the restaurant’s cheese program from 22 of them. A French native, he earned his degree in restaurant hospitality before working in some of the foremost French restaurants-not only in France, but in Switzerland and the UK too. It is very likely that he also earned certifications in food hygiene by taking up courses similar to Essential Food Hygiene’s Level 2 food safety course. From his degree, Pascal developed an expertise in presenting French cuisine to non-French diners in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the integrity of the tradition. Chef Boulud then asked him to join the team at Daniel, where he’s been presiding over the cheese program since May of 1996.

For Pascal, cheese has a deeply nostalgic pull. Growing up he rode his bike to school, and he stored his bike in a vegetable closet. When he began his cheese education during his hospitality studies, the aromas of that closet were present in the products he was working with. The French writer Marcel Proust observed that smell is the sense most strongly tied to memory, and a flood of childhood remembrances washed over Pascal as he began studying cheese. From then on, he says, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life.

Every evening, Pascal’s goal is to share the terroir of France with his diners, and this means selecting the best French cheeses, keeping them in the best condition, and presenting them at their peak ripeness. Cheese service typically happens on either side of the dessert course, when guards have been let down and the magic of the meal has loosened up the atmosphere around the table. And that’s why it’s the perfect moment for the cheese cart to roll right up: it’s a moment of sharing, a more relaxed point in the evening, when conversation is at its fondest.

When Pascal enjoys a cheese cart, what does he like to go for? Typically, he says, a diner will like to sample of small selection of cheeses, but he believes there’s nothing better than a single, stellar cheese and an equally excellent wine (or, increasingly, beer) to enjoy it with. Right now, that’s a Beaufort D’Alpage, a Kunik, or a 1924 Bleu. There are, of course, plenty of other wondrous French classics on his cart, including Epoisses, Sainte-Maure, and Comte. And while dining reservations at Daniel tend to fill up far in advance, you can swing by the bar or the lounge whenever you’d like-Pascal’s cart rolls by both sections every single night.