Sandwich au Livarot

Five thin strips of dried reed wrap the side of a Livarot, and the locals call the cheese le Colonel because the rings read like the stripes on an officer's sleeve. Those bands are not decoration. Livarot is a cow's-milk cheese from the orchard country of the Pays d'Auge, its rind washed and brushed until it turns a deep orange, and the reed was tied around it to brace the disc and keep it from slumping as it aged. Under the rind the paste stays firm and springy, dense rather than runny, and it carries a heavy, meaty, barnyard pungency. The sandwich uses that firmness: a split baguette under a thin scrape of lightly salted butter, the cheese cut into honest slabs and laid flat along the crumb, rind kept on because the rind holds the loudest of the flavour.

The build follows from the paste holding its shape. A ripe Livarot is springy enough to slice cleanly, so it stacks as defined slabs and lands as separate bites rather than a single smear, which matters because a smear of something this strong would never let up. Butter is the brake on it. Spread thin and even, a film of beurre demi-sel rounds the salt of the washed rind and pads the meaty edge so the pungency reads as savour rather than a blow. The disc wants to be at cellar temperature, where the paste eats springy and the wash tastes of cured meat and damp earth. Cold from the refrigerator the same cheese clamps tight and the flavour reads only of dull salt.

Each component has a way it goes wrong. Too much cheese and the sandwich becomes one hot, unbroken note that runs the length of the loaf; too little and the bread tastes mostly of crust. Strip the rind off and the slab loses the bulk of its force and reads flat. The gravest fault is a slack loaf, since a soft and assertive filling brings no body of its own and a weak crust simply gives way beneath it. Butter laid thick turns the bite greasy without buying any more balance, since the cheese is already rich; butter skipped entirely lets the salt land hard and unbuffered.

Unwrap the paper and the smell arrives before the cheese does, ammoniac and farmyard, hotter and longer than a Camembert cut from the same Norman pastures. The crust splits dry under the teeth; the slab behind it is firm at the centre and slightly tacky at the orange rind. It is cool, not cold. The first taste is meaty and deep, the wash a salty cured-ham edge that arrives a beat behind the paste, the whole thing coating the tongue heavily before the buttered crumb carries it dry. A slab cut from the firm outer paste eats with a little spring; one cut nearer the soft heart slumps faster against the warmth of the mouth.

In the country around the small town of Livarot this is market and farmhouse food, the cheese sold by the disc and named with the easy familiarity of a local staple. The region keeps it on the same cheeseboard as Camembert and Pont-l'Eveque and treats Livarot as the loud one, the cheese for a strong appetite, set against a glass of dry cider or the apple brandy the same orchards produce. The cheesemonger reads a good disc by its bands: five clean even rings of reed and a rind coloured right through.

Variations stay in the orbit of the washed-rind disc. A few slices of firm pear push a sweet, crisp counter against the meaty bite. A sliver of air-dried ham gives the pungency a cured partner that meets it on its own level rather than ducking it. A younger, less-affined Livarot pulls the whole sandwich down a register for an eater the full-strength version overwhelms. Every one of those leaves the bread and the butter untouched and moves only the counter, so the sandwich stays itself throughout. The nearest sibling is the Sandwich au Pont-l'Eveque, the other great washed-rind square of the same orchard country, milder and suppler where Livarot stays firm and forceful.

Origin and history

Livarot takes its name from the village of Livarot in the heart of the Pays d'Auge, the town where the cheese was traded most heavily and which fixed the boundary of its production. It was eaten in Paris by the close of the seventeenth century and was the best-known cheese of Normandy through the nineteenth, before Camembert overtook it.

The numbers from its peak survive. In 1877, Norman dairies sold roughly 4.5 million Livarot against about 2 million Camembert, the washed-rind disc still well ahead of the bloomy-rind round that would later eclipse it. The reach was built by rail: the cheese spread far beyond its valley once the Paris-Lisieux-Caen line opened a route to the capital, and the reed bands, first a structural brace, became a recognisable mark on a cheese now travelling to strangers.

The legal protection came in the modern era. France registered Livarot under a national appellation in 1975, and a Europe-wide Protected Designation of Origin followed in 1996. The rules confine production to a defined zone across the Calvados, Orne, and Seine-Maritime departments, and require the milk of Normande cows, the framework that now governs the disc the railway once carried out of the valley.