Sandwich Époisses

You smell it before the paper is open. Époisses arrives ahead of itself, a barnyard, ammoniated pungency that fills a room and, by reputation, empties a train carriage, the orange-brown rind glistening from its washings. Cut one at full ripeness and it does not slice so much as slump: the paste under the rind has gone to a near-liquid, spoonable softness that no other cheese on the French rack reaches. A sandwich built on it is less a stack than a controlled spill, the cheese spooned thick onto split bread with almost nothing beside it, because almost nothing can hold its ground next to it.

That softness sets the whole problem. The cheese brings no structure, only flavour and a paste that wants to run, so every load-bearing job falls to the bread. The loaf needs a genuine crust and a tight crumb that can carry a spreadable filling without turning to paste itself; an airy supermarket roll dissolves into it. A thin layer of butter is the one useful addition, less for taste than to seal the crumb and bridge the cheese's salt to the wheat. The build is close to bare not from restraint for its own sake but because the cheese is loud enough to be the entire event.

It is also salty, and salt is the second constraint. Époisses is seasoned hard, and a sharp condiment or a second strong flavour does not complement it, it argues with it. Mustard fights, a pickle fights, a cured meat fights; each tries to lead and the cheese simply wins, leaving a muddle. The successful sandwich concedes the point and clears the field, the cheese and the loaf and the butter, so the one big flavour reads clean instead of buried under a chorus of others trying to match it.

Temperature is the hinge. Époisses wants to be served at room temperature, when the paste is loose and aromatic and floods the crumb. Straight from the refrigerator it firms up and mutes, the smell recedes, the texture turns to a dull plug, and the reason for the sandwich goes quiet. Left out to ripen and warm, the same cheese opens up: softer, stronger, runnier, harder to keep on the bread and far better to eat. The cook's small task is timing the warmth so the cheese is molten but the sandwich is still a sandwich rather than a puddle.

Eating it is a sequence of sensations in order. The smell hits first and does not stop. The crust gives, then the paste coats the tongue, salty and meaty and faintly of the spirit it was washed in, a long mushroomy, barnyard finish that sits in the back of the mouth after the bite is gone. It is warm only to room temperature, sticky on the fingers, smearing the inside of the crust. There is no crunch under it, no acid cutting through, nothing cold; the whole thing is one enormous savoury note carried on bread, the reason it works and the reason a timid eater puts it down after one bite.

The honest variations stay on the Burgundian shelf. A younger, firmer Époisses, a half-step less feral, suits a build that wants the cheese to read as a flavour rather than a flood; a few walnuts or a thin sweet smear are sometimes set against it to round the edge, the way a glass of the same region's red rounds it at the table. What does not count is the bland industrial "washed-rind" lookalike sold under a similar orange skin but never near the marc, a cheese wearing the colour without the wash that makes the name mean anything. Its near neighbours are Burgundy's own, Soumaintrain and Langres, smear-ripened cousins from the same tradition, each strong, each a distinct cheese, none quite as molten or as loud.

The Village, the Monks, and the Revival

Époisses is named for a single village in the Côte-d'Or, between Dijon and Auxerre, and the cheese is genuinely old, though its most-told origin is a legend rather than a record: the standard account credits sixteenth-century Cistercian monks at the Abbey of Cîteaux with the washed-rind technique, handed to local farmers when the monks stopped making it. The flourish that Napoleon adored it is folklore with no source behind it, and the famous line crowning it the king of cheeses is the attribution everyone repeats to the gastronome Brillat-Savarin without a firm citation. The rind, washed in brine and the local pomace spirit Marc de Bourgogne up to three times a week and brushed by hand, is the part that is documented and that makes the cheese what it is.

What is firmly dated is the rescue, and it is recent. Production fell through the First World War and had all but ceased by the 1950s, until in 1956 a farming couple, Robert and Simone Berthaut, relaunched it by gathering the few people who still knew how. France granted it an AOC in 1991 and Europe an AOP in 1996, and the split that defines Époisses today is a live one between its makers: Berthaut, now run by the founders' son Jean, works in pasteurised milk for a milder, steadier wheel, while the Gaugry dairy is the last to make it with raw milk, the older and fiercer version, the two of them dividing between them the strongest cheese the region knows how to spoon onto bread.