Coeur du Neufchâtel: Cheese for Valentines

With Valentine’s day coming up next week, I thought I would post about about my favourite cheese – which just so happens to be heart shaped.

France is well known for the overwhelming variety of cheeses. I once heard that there was a different cheese for everyday of the year. In truth, there are more than 365 different cheeses and some of the lessor known cheeses, made using very traditional methods by only a small number of artisans, are in danger of disappearing from the list altogether. But each cheese is associated with a specific region, and named after that region.

If you think you know your French cheeses – take this quiz, and post your scores!

My favourite cheese, however, is made in the area where I live – Neufchâtel-en-Bray, which is in the pays de Bray region of Normandy. Neufchâtel cheese is said to be one of the oldest cheeses in France, and certainly in Normandy – where it is older than the better known camembert and brie.

The earliest record of Neufchâtel cheese is 1050, where it is mentioned as a tithe payment. But from the end of the 18th century onwards this cheese becomes well-known and much liked, it was sent to Rouen and Paris, as well as being exported to the United kingdom. The cheese comes in a variety of shapes, but the most popular shape nowadays is heart-shaped, or the coeur du Neufchâtel.

There is very little known for certain why it is made in this shape, but legend has it that this originates from the end of the 100 Years War. It is said that the women who made the cheese did so in the shape of the heart to express their love to the non-French speaking English soldiers. Who knows if this is true, but it makes a nice story, certainly for this time of the year.

The cheeses come in three different sizes, the small ones are not much bigger than a golf ball. I bake the small cheeses until the inside is runny, and then serve them on lettuce with a red-currant jelly.

If you have not yet planned anything special for your loved one – it is not too late to book a city break in Paris, or even a quiet, rural break somewhere in the country.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 at 4:03 pm and is filed under France. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Written by: Thomas Dowson

6 Responses to “Coeur du Neufchâtel: Cheese for Valentines”

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John on February 10th, 2011 at 9:58 am

Whew! I only managed to score 32 in the quiz, which is pretty poor considering most are named after the area in which they are produced. :o(
Alex on February 10th, 2011 at 6:05 pm

sorry: your phrase re Normandy seems to imply that brie is a Norman cheese, it isn’t, but more of an Ile-de-France variety. What an insult!
Thomas on February 10th, 2011 at 6:32 pm

Alex, of course you are right – my apologies! A careless slip, as I was going to add a few other better known, but younger French cheeses. If it is any consolation, I placed the two brie cheeses on the map in the quiz. I am sure the Normans will not thank me for that error ;-)

John, I only did marginally better – and that was definitely because I recognised a few place names LOL
Alex on February 10th, 2011 at 7:55 pm

not to worry, and thanks for promoting Neufchatel – it was developed as a lovers’ cheese!
Also: you say 365 varieties of cheese. I think De Gaulle mentioned fewer in his famous saying: “how can you govern a country in which there are 246 kinds of cheese?” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese)
Cheers, Alex
Thomas on February 11th, 2011 at 9:01 am

I had not seen De Gaulle’s quote – so thank you for that Alex. Did you know of Churchill’s French cheese comment?
“A country producing almost 360 different types of cheese cannot die.”
Winston Churchill, June 1940

According to a ‘gourmet’ friend who lives in Paris, the number of French cheeses is a ‘political issue’. What isn’t! Interestingly, when I asked him how many different cheeses were there he immediately said 365. I was told, during my first trip to France in 1989, that there was a different cheese for every day of the year.

Doing a google search for “nombre de fromage français” gets some interesting pages – and no agreement, but the consensus seems to be around 400. I suppose it does depend on whether you count the different variations as one or more … for example, there are 7 different Bleu d’Auvergne cheeses, and 4 different variations of camembert.