La Creme de Paris

On my first day in Paris, on our first tour around the Jardins Luxembourg, a charming Persian woman with bouncy curls and smiling eyes stopped me and my entourage of children and a dog for a chat. "The French drive me crazy," she pronounced. "But living in Paris will mean two things for you. You will become both more refined, and more humble." And so the adventure begins... 

frenchcheese.jpgIt turns out that there is heaven on earth.  And it lives in an inauspicious plastic saucer, covered in cling wrap.

This week’s cheese was a seemingly unassuming Saint Félicien.   This little number is made in the Dauphiné region of France, and it is soft and extra creamy.   We took our first bite over lunch with the girls, and at Twiggy Sanders’ suggestion, I was armed with a fresh baguette.   

The cheese starts out relatively contained, but by the third bite, the fresh cream had runneth over into the container.  We started to eagerly mop it up with pieces of bread, and within about ten minutes flat, the entire saucer had been wiped clean.

Saint Félicien is made of cow’s milk, which makes sense.  Remember the ad for California cows?   “Great milk comes from happy cows – and happy cows come from California”?  The milk in this little cheese ‘a la Lyonaise’ must come from a very happy place – where the grass is thick and green and dewey and delicious.  I’m quite sure that I could taste the sunshine in each increasingly drippy bite.

A bit of online research confirms what we already knew: “the taste is creamy and soft and will delight amateurs of soft cow’s cheeses.”  This amateur is indeed delighted.