In the months leading up to the very first cheese-focused iteration of the Meilleur Ouvrier de France (MOF) competition, held every few years to recognise the country’s the best craftspeople, Nathalie Quatrehomme remembers her cheesemonger mother, Marie, taking over the family living room, assembling and disassembling a plexiglass apparatus supporting dozens of different cheeses.
“It was 2000, and I was 17,” Nathalie recalled. “She practiced building it on our living room table for a whole year.”
Marie’s final project, a true work of art dubbed “La Pyramide des Saveurs” (pyramid of flavours), began, Nathalie recalled, with a base of real grass above which grew a veritable tower of cheeses that ranged in flavour and texture, progressing from mild to assertive, from milky and whey-weeping to dense and crumbly.
“She really started from the milk,” Nathalie said. “The grass, then bottles of milk, then the cheeses, and up and up and up… it was really very pretty.”
By the time Marie Quatrehomme was developing her tower of cheese, she had already undergone a litany of tests on cheese culture, technology and terroir for the competition. She had wowed jurors in blind tastings and fielded questions on French cheese appellations, which now number 46, each governed by a strict charter regulating everything from regional provenance down to animal breed. She was grilled on cheese legislation and interrogated on the economics of building a cheese buffet – all in the pursuit of recognition, not just from her peers, but from the French nation at large.
