Fromagerie

We are back in Montréal after yesterday's long rambling drive through the Quebec farmland. We went around the normal large crossing, and through a small border station, hoping to avoid weekend lines. It's never bad in this direction, but going into the U.S. can be. To our astonishment, the lines at U.S. customs stretched for half a mile; people were out of their cars, leaning on them, talking, pacing, looking annoyed and tired -- they told us they had already waited an hour. We breezed through the other way, feeling fortunate and outraged and ashamed all at the same time.

We found ourselves on a small road that wound through cornfields and past widely-spaced farms. Then we spotted a rough, handpainted sign, Fromagerie, with a painted cheese on it. A friend who lives on one of the islands in Lake Champlain had mentioned a cheese shop just over the border before, saying that the cheeses had won many awards. We pulled into the lane, went half a mile, turned left - and there, in the middle of nowhere, was a parking lot full of cars and a line of jovial people, each holding a number, and waitng their turn to enter the tiny shop. We listened to them chatter in French, and pretty soon I struck up a conversation with the woman in back of us, who seemed willing to tolerate my lack of fluency, and she told me a good deal about the cheese and other attractions of the immediate region.

The shop was unexpected and amazing. Tiny, it held a display of European chocolates and another of Héro jams and jellies, but the real attraction was a single refrigerated dairy case filled with wheels of beautiful cheese, some in wax and some with a natural rind, some in small rounds, others in large wheels designed to be cut into pieces -- and the whole presided over by three attractive young women in white coats and the straight-sided pillbox-style hats that fancier food-shop workers wear here. At least twenty different kinds of cheese were listed on the handwritten sign behind the counter.

The three young women barely had room to stand more than shoulder to shoulder, but they had a finely-tuned system in which two of them alternated giving tastes of the various products, answering questions in fluent English, French, and German, taking the orders and cutting the cheeses. The third girl wrapped the cheese in special waxy paper, added labels from the rolls hanging on the back wall, and completed the financial transaction. The middle girl - tall, blonde and Germanic - left the counter for a moment and came back through a side door bearing an armload of cheeses, as much as she could carry: each wheel was about a foot across.

Then it was our turn: we asked for tastes of five or six, and chose a strong semi-soft goat cheese called Noyan, for the nearest town; a milder semi-soft cow's milk cheese called Haut-Richelieu, for this region above Lake Champlain and near the Richelieu River; a slice of their famous Douanier, a morbier-style cheese with a thin line of blue mold running down the middle; a piece of raclette studded with green peppercorns; and a small round of their signature camembert, L'Émperateur. The bill came to $20.00 Canadian; I was expecting to pay twice as much. "You should see the line at Christmas," the woman whispered, and gestured to show me that it went all the way around the factory-building. "If you're interested, there is a place nearby that sells very good homemade saucisses..."

Outside, a family was passing a bar of chocolate around the interior of their car as it pulled out of the parking spot, and the line to get into the shop was getting longer. We determined that we would come back soon, and, foregoing the sausages and nearby vinyard, made our way back to the main road, past the cows that made the milk that made the cheese.

Comments

[Rachel]

What a wonderful vignette.

I love that last line. "...past the cows that made the milk that made the cheese." It reads like poetry, or a nursery rhyme, and there's a lot of significance in its simpllicity.

[Pica]

Looks like you've found a new route into Canada... what a joy a good cheese shop is.