Sandwich Salers

On a high-summer morning in the Cantal a herd of red Salers cows is brought in from the estive pasture for the second milking of the day, and the warm raw milk goes straight into a tall wooden tub called a gerle, never refrigerated, never pooled. That tub is the working heart of the cheese. The gerle is made of spruce staves, scrubbed but not sterilised between batches, and the wood itself is colonised by the lactic flora of every previous cheesemaking; the milk picks that culture up as it sits and the cheese inherits it. Six hours later a single 35-kilo wheel is pressed under its own weight and weight on top, and the Salers the sandwich is built on has begun. The bread is then quiet. Split a baguette down its length, smear a scrape of salted Charentes butter on the crumb, and shingle thick wheels along it.

What lands on the tongue is grassier and more rustic than the closely related Cantal AOP the same farms once made, and the reason is in the calendar. Salers can be produced only from 15 April through 15 November, the months herds are grazing the high meadows of the Massif Central, and never from winter silage milk. The grass on those volcanic uplands changes through the season, the milk fat changes with it, and a wheel made in May from new spring grass eats brighter and grassier than one made in late August from drier herb-flecked pasture. That seasonal sweep is the cheese's signature in the bite.

Two grades carry the Salers name and the buyer chooses between them. Plain Salers AOP can be made from the milk of several breeds, provided the rules on the wooden tub, the season, and the on-farm raw-milk make are followed. The more restrictive sub-designation Salers Tradition is reserved for wheels made entirely from the milk of red Salers-breed cows, the curve-horned mountain breed of the same name. A Tradition wheel runs deeper and more aromatic still, because the Salers cow is bred for the steep summer pasture and gives less milk of denser composition than the Holsteins used elsewhere in the appellation.

Each part of the build can go wrong in its own way. Cut a young Salers cold and the paste clenches tight, the grassy edge folds back into one note of acidic milk, and the crumble at the knife turns waxy. Cut a wheel aged past nine months and the dryness drinks the bread, so a long-aged Salers wants either a thinner slab or a sweet counter to soften the finish. A loaf with a soft crust gives way under a dense pressed cheese; a baguette with real body holds. Butter laid thick masks the grass; skipped, the salt in the rind lands hard. Strip the rind and the cheese loses both structure at the knife and depth in the swallow.

Cut into the wheel and the aroma off the cut face is hay-loft and lactic, a low animal sweetness under it, sharper at the edge where the rind has gone almost orange. The slab cracks along the line of the knife rather than slicing smooth, a sign of a properly pressed paste, and the crumble shows the cheese in fine grain. Against the tongue the paste warms slick at first, then dries through the chew, the grassy note arriving as a long savoury thread, the salt of the rind a separate pulse at the bite. The buttered crumb takes up the dryness and a Côtes d'Auvergne red drunk alongside picks the grass back up at the swallow.

This is mountain eating in the Cantal, sold at the summer markets of Saint-Flour and Salers town and at the buron stalls along the route des fromages, the cheesemonger naming the farm and the milking week. The Cantal habit lays it next to a slice of cured Auvergne ham or a fresh apple from the same valleys, and the local pour is the volcanic-soil red of Boudes or Madargue. A wheel sold as tradition tells the eater the herd was on the burons through the summer; a wheel sold simply as Salers AOP carries the season but not the breed. The closest sibling in the catalog is the Sandwich au Morbier, the other plain regional pressed cheese given a baguette treatment, though Morbier is softer and milder where Salers stays dense and grassy.

The buron, the gerle, and the 1979 AOC

France granted Salers its Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée in 1979 and the European Union confirmed the Protected Designation of Origin in 1996. The decree fences production to a zone covering the Cantal department and parts of Aveyron, Corrèze, Haute-Loire, and Puy-de-Dôme, and writes the seasonal window, the wooden gerle, and the on-farm raw-milk make into the legal definition of the wheel. The breed-restricted sub-mention Salers Tradition was formally fixed inside the appellation in 2000, drawn from the producer association of the same name that had been federating Salers-breed farms since 1991.

The cheese is much older than the law. Production is recorded in the Cantal from the medieval period, and the burons, the squat stone shepherds' huts built along the summer mountain pasture, were the working dairies that turned out the wheels through the warm months when the herds were brought up to the estives. A buron held two or three cheesemakers and a single herd; the cellar at one end aged the wheels through the season, and a winter team carried the cheese down to the valley markets. The framework the AOP wrote down in 1979 is the working calendar a buron ran on for the better part of a millennium.

The Salers cattle breed is older still. The breed's herd book was opened in 1853, and the red cattle of the name had been worked on the high Cantal pasture for centuries before that as a draught-and-milk breed adapted to the steep summer estive. A modern Salers cow gives around 3,000 litres of milk a year, less than half the yield of a Holstein, and the dairy lobby pushed through the 1979 decree partly to keep the small Salers-breed herd from being replaced entirely by higher-yielding cattle on the same pasture.