Real Camembert?

In a land internationally reputed for both the quality and uniqueness of its traditional food and wine, it's hardly surprising that the French state should have gone to considerable pains to guarantee that the words printed on the bottle, box or package accurately describe the products contained within by instigating a system of norms, labels and 'appellations' which require a producer to respect a certain number of rules and criteria in order to have the right to use a given name. And when it comes to traditional food what could be considered more typically French than such a distinctly flavoured, world-renowned cheese as Camembert?

     Now, as all gourmets certainly know, Camembert is a soft cheese with a slightly salted, flowered crust, made using raw, unpasteurized milk drawn exclusively from the udder of a Normandy breed of cow grazing in Normandy pastures, and which has been moulded by the traditional 'à la loupe' (using a ladle) method, with a minimum fat content of 45%, and a maturing process lasting at least 21 days in one of the five Normandy départements. These same gourmets might also be aware that the cheese owes its name to the small village of Camembert near Vimoutiers in the region of Argentan in Normandy where it was first produced around the time of the1789 Revolution, and that the beginning of its national and international reputation can be traced back to 1863 when the Päris-Granville railway line was inaugurated, and the Emperor Napoléon III tried it (and found it very much to his taste) during a halt at a station along this line. 

     As a result we might be excused for thinking that the box labelled 'Camembert de Normandie' lying on our local supermarket's cheese shelf contains a real Camembert - that's to say one which has been made and matured in strict accordance with the description provided above. Well, I'm sorry to have to inform you that you'd be horribly wrong! For the label 'Camembert from Normandy' simply means what it says: that it's been produced in the geographical region of Normandy with a minimum fat content of 45% - and nothing more! Not only can the milk be either raw or pasteurized, but it can be drawn from the udder of a non-Norman cow which has been grazing in non-Norman pastures in the Jura, in Lorraine, in the Haute-Saône, or anywhere else for that matter. As for the production and ripening process, well, there are simply no requirements at all!  Mind you, it's still reassuring to know that today's biggest French producer of Camembert cheese is located in the Normandy département of the Orne. What's less reassuring, however, are the methods of production which have got nothing to do with the original process.

     The milk (which, I repeat, can come from anywhere) is first heated to 72° for 20 seconds in order to kill all the pathogenic micro-organisms, and especially the active bacterial flora. This results in what is called a 'lait mort' - a dead milk, to which a modicum of life (and taste) is restored by the addition of laboratory-cultivated 'aromatic' ferments (yeast, bacteria fungi). The milk is then curdled by injecting an enzyme found in the stomach of young calves, after which everything is immersed in a solution of brine, and finally sprayed with mould! Even though a Camembert produced in this way offers all necessary hygiene guarantees (at least, let's hope this is the case), can it be guaranteed that the average consumer is fully aware that when he buys a box labelled 'Camembert fabriqué en Normandie' he's buying a cheese which has been made in such a radically different way to that which he's being led to believe, and that if he wants to have the guarantee he's buying the real McCoy, the label on the cheese box should read 'Camembert AOC (Appellation d'Origine Contrôléé) de Normandie?' I'm not so sure. And it's perhaps significant that the production of real Camembert represents just 4.2% of the total quantity of French-produced Camembert.

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