The whey of life

FRANCE'S most famous foodstuff received its wittiest compliment in Cole Porter's song “You're the Top”:

You're the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire

You're an O'Neill drama

You're Whistler's mama

You're Camembert.

That criminally delectable cheese is said to be the invention of a milkmaid named Marie Harel who lived in the Normandy village of Camembert. In 1791, with the help of a recusant priest from Brie, she produced the first Camembert by combining the recipe for Livarot, a local cheese, with the process of ladle-moulding used to make Brie. Thus, the story goes, the birth of the French Republic neatly coincided with the birth of a national symbol.

Alas, the story is false. The priest was plucked out of thin air; Marie Harel was not living in the village of Camembert in 1791; and a cheese of the same name had been produced there for at least 80 years. (Thomas Corneille, the brother of Pierre, mentioned it in his geographical dictionary of 1708).

Nevertheless, the tale of the travelling priest and the experimental milkmaid stuck. Pierre Boisard, a French academic, reckons the persistence of this national myth, as he calls it, has to do with the way it brings together elements of tradition and modernity, ancien-régime know-how and revolutionary innovation. He sees the history of Camembert as a mirror which reflects many of the more general developments in French history, particularly the shift from a rural to an industrial economy and from manual to mechanised methods of production.

Much of this makes for entertaining reading. But there is a distinctly overripe whiff to Mr Boisard's prose, as when he suggests that “Camembert, a living substance produced by an animal organism, constantly reminds us of the body, of sensual pleasure, of sexual fulfilment, and of all that is forbidden in it.” And something, surely, seems to have been lost in the translation when he urges his readers to “enjoy a brief and delicious moment of transgression with a piece of Camembert.”