Sandwich au Comté

The slab of Comté is graded before it is ever sliced, scored out of twenty by a tasting jury that decides which wheels carry the green casein band and which the brown. That number, fixed months before the cheese reaches a counter, is what a person is really choosing when they ask for this sandwich, because there is almost nothing else in it. The build is a length of baguette with a firm crust, a thin pass of lightly salted butter or none at all, and Comté laid in flat as cut slabs rather than shavings. The cheese came off a cooked-curd wheel from the high Jura, raw cow's milk pressed and held in a cellar from four months to well past two years, and the only real decision in the whole assembly is which age went in.

Age is the entire dial. A four-month wheel is pale, pliable, milky, with a rounded sweetness and a give like firm fudge. A wheel held eighteen months or longer turns deep gold and granular, the flavor running long and savory toward roasted nuts and bouillon, the paste studded with the small crunchy specks of tyrosine that an old Comté throws as it ages. Younger eats fruity. Older eats salty and dense. The same cheese, the same bread, two months or two years apart, makes two sandwiches that share only a name.

Because the wheat carries no other flavor, the cheese has to be set up to win, and the ways it loses are specific. Shave it thin against the crumb and even a long-aged wheel reads as a smear with no chew, so it goes in as honest slabs that the teeth meet as a layer. Serve it straight from the refrigerator and the paste stays waxy and shut, the crystals dull, the fruit muted, where forty minutes in the warm lets an old wheel open and the specks turn distinct against the tongue. Reach for a soft loaf to be gentle and the crust gives the cheese nothing to brace against; the baguette has to crack and hold, because a slab of Comté props up nothing on its own. Lay the butter on thick and it coats the palate before the Comté can, flattening the very length the aged wheel exists for.

Break one open near room temperature and the smell is brown butter and toasted hazelnut, clean and dry, nothing like the cellar funk of a washed rind. The first bite is the crust splitting, then the cheese giving under it in a dense, slightly grainy mass that coats the mouth and stays. An aged wheel lands its crunch a beat in, the tyrosine specks popping fine and salty between the molars while the long savor builds behind them and the wheat turns sweet underneath. A young wheel skips the crunch and goes straight to milk and cream, softer and shorter, the bread doing more of the talking. Either way the finish is long and the hand stays dry, the loaf still firm minutes after a softer one would have gone limp.

This is cheese-counter food in a region that organized itself around the cheese. Comté is made in cooperative dairies called fruitières, roughly a hundred and thirty of them scattered across the Jura massif, each pooling the milk of about seventeen neighboring farms within an eight-mile reach, then handing the young wheels to an affineur to age. A careful buyer in Besançon or Poligny does not just ask for Comté at the stall; they ask how many months, and whether the wheel is a summer make off mountain pasture or a winter one, the way a Burgundy drinker asks the year. The honest answer changes what goes in the bread, and the seller who can give it is the one worth returning to.

Variations move along the Jura rack and the months. A longer-matured wheel makes the sandwich drier, sharper, crunchier; a milder twelve-month make keeps it round and easy. Morbier, the Jura cheese split by its dark line of ash, slides in for a softer center and an earthier note, and a young Beaufort from the Alps next door reads creamier and more grassy, a different mountain in the same shape. None of those is a substitution that hides; each is a recognizable adjustment of one firm, sliceable idea. What does not belong on the list is anything melted: run Comté under heat and you are making a gratin or a croque, a hot dish with its own entry, not this cold loaf at all.

The cheese the Jura banked against winter

No date marks the first of these sandwiches, and the history that counts is the cheese's, which is governed by law and the biggest of its kind in the country. The Jura turned milk into great pressed wheels for a hard economic reason: a thin upland soil grew little grain, yet a whole summer of grazing could be stored as a wheel that fed a valley clean through to spring. The fruitière was the social answer that made it possible, a cooperative dairy pooling enough milk from neighboring farms to press a wheel no single herd could fill.

The law caught up to the practice in the twentieth century. France granted the cheese AOC status in 1958, its protected-origin label, the ruling that tied the name to the milk and the method of Franche-Comté, and the European PDO followed in 1996. The grading jury that scores each wheel out of twenty sits inside that system: a mark above fourteen earns the green band of a Comté Extra, twelve to fourteen the brown, anything lower loses the name entirely.

Today Comté is the most-produced protected cheese in the country, around sixty-five thousand tonnes a year off some four hundred litres of raw milk per forty-kilo wheel, eaten in roughly two of every five French households. The affineur Marcel Petite ages tens of thousands of those wheels slow and cold inside Fort Saint-Antoine, a nineteenth-century military fort high in the Doubs, on the bet that a cellar built to hold soldiers would hold cheese better than anywhere warmer.