Sandwich au Saint-Nectaire

An affineur lifts a Saint-Nectaire off its bed of rye straw and turns it over, and a faint reed-print stays embossed on the rind for the first weeks of its life. The straw is the working bedding the cheese spends a month or two on, packed into shallow stone-floored cellars in the volcanic country of the Monts-Dore where the wheels are kept cool and turned by hand. It lets air run under each disc, blots the surface humidity, and seeds the wash with the cellar moulds that drive the rind from white through grey-pink to the colour of damp granite. The sandwich works from that bedding outward. Take a length of baguette, scrape on a thin beurre demi-sel, and cut the wheel into honest slabs that lay flat down the crumb, rind kept on.

The defining note in the bite is mineral and earthy rather than sharp, and that note traces back to the pasture before it traces to the cellar. The herds graze the high meadows of the Monts-Dore, the Massif Central's eroded volcano range, on soils mixed from old basalt and trachyte. The grass takes up the minerality of those soils, the milk carries it, and the pressed paste holds it as a low granite-and-mushroom finish that lifts at the rind. The slab is supple enough to bend rather than crumble under a thumb, dense enough to slice clean, and it lands in the bread as a single defined layer rather than a smear.

Two grades carry the name on the label and the eater chooses between them at the counter. The green oval reads fermier, made on the farm from the raw milk of one herd, twice a day, with the deeper barnyard character single-herd raw milk gives. The red square reads laitier, made in a cooperative or industrial dairy from milk pooled across many farms, often pasteurised, milder and more even. Either disc carries the appellation; the green oval carries the longer flavour and the wheel-by-wheel range, the red square the dependability a Lyon supermarket counts on.

The build fails in specific ways. Cut the cheese cold from the case and the paste reads chalky and shut, the mushroom note gone. Trim the rind off for the milder eater and the cheese loses its lift, since most of the granite-and-cellar register lives in the washed surface. Slab the wheel too thin and the disc disappears under its own modesty against a baguette; cut it in honest pieces and the cheese gets to be itself. Spread the butter thick and it muffles the earth in the paste; skip it altogether and the loaf drinks moisture out of the cheese as it sits.

Unwrap one at a market stall on the plateau and the aroma rises slow, damp-cellar and faint mushroom, nothing of barnyard sharpness. A bite gives a quick dry crack from the crust; the slab behind it is springy through the centre and slightly tacky where the grey-pink rind meets the bread. It is cool, not cold, and warmed against the tongue the paste turns supple and the wash opens fully. The first taste is milky and rounded, mushroom and granite arriving a beat behind, the rind a long earthy band at the swallow. The buttered crumb takes the cheese dry, and a faint mineral note lingers on the palate well past the last bite.

In the country around the village of Saint-Nectaire-le-Bas the cheese is daily eating, sold by the disc at the Saturday market in Besse-et-Saint-Anastaise and at the cheesemonger's in Murol below the medieval castle, and the buyer is told to wait until the wheel softens at room temperature before slicing. The auvergnat habit lays a few slices of cured mountain ham alongside it, the salt of the ham picking up the granite in the paste; a Côtes d'Auvergne red is the regional pour. The closest sibling in this family is the Sandwich au Livarot, the other great washed-rind disc but built on Normandy orchard pasture instead of Auvergne lava soils, and the contrast in the bite is the contrast between two completely different valleys.

The rye cheese of the Monts-Dore

The cheese was called fromage de seigle, the rye cheese, through the medieval period in the Auvergne, because the rye straw the discs were aged on was the most visible thing about them at the village fair. The marshal of France Henri de La Ferté-Senneterre carried it to the table of Louis XIV in the 1660s and fixed the family name that the village and the cheese still wear. By 1768 the lawyer and traveller Pierre Jean-Baptiste Legrand d'Aussy passed through the Auvergne and wrote that any feast a visitor was offered in the region would close on a wheel of Saint-Nectaire, the cheese already a regional standard by then.

The legal protection arrived two centuries later. Saint-Nectaire received its French Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée on 23 December 1955, one of the earliest French cheese appellations after Roquefort. The European Union confirmed it as a Protected Designation of Origin in 1996. The rules fence production to seventy-two communes across the Puy-de-Dôme and Cantal departments around the Monts-Dore range, and require milk from herds grazed on the volcanic plateau for at least 140 days a year.

The rye-straw bed is older than either protection, and the AOP specification preserves it as a working method rather than a decorative tradition. A modern affineur in Murol or Besse still presses the freshly washed wheel into shallow rye-strewn racks for the first weeks of cellar ageing, because the straw blots the surface moisture and admits the air the rind needs to set, and a Saint-Nectaire aged on a plastic mat develops a different wash and a flatter finish. The cheese now exported across France from cooperative dairies in Riom-ès-Montagnes still arrives at the rind through that bed of rye, the working detail that gave the medieval Auvergne its fromage de seigle centuries before Henri de La Ferté-Senneterre carried it to Versailles.