Camembert: The Fermentation of a National Myth

Camembert: A National Myth. Pierre Boisard. Richard Miller, transl. Pp. 254. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. $29.95 (cloth).

Following Feuerbach's famous motto that man is what he eats (it works better in the original German: man ist, was man isst), Joyce was the first to rewrite universal history as the history of food, or rather of foodstuffs derived from milk. Thus we see in Finnegans Wake how Brutus and Cassius morph into "Burrus" and "Caseous" (respectively butter and cheese) as Joyce pays homage to Normandy as a key site in this archetypal battle for political power: "whiles eggs will fall cheapened all over the walled the Burre will be dear on the Brie."¹ He explains how these "products of our social stomach" (FW, 163.34) will soon be digested by "very wholesome criticism" (FW, 163.36) and relates "the gradual changes in our body politic" to the invention of boîtes in which a cheese keeps its soft "crust" intact (FW, 165.30-166.01). Finally, the historical evolution boils down to male rivalry for the attentions of a "cowrymaid" who provides the best milk. Known either as "Marge" for margarine or as "Margeena" when she is a "cleopatrician," she is the one Burrus and Caseous are fighting for, while she ogles Antonius, "a wop who would appear to hug a personal interest in refined chees of all chades ..." (FW, 166.34-167.02) No need to rehearse the end of a well-known story; a similar point of view, which could be called a "tyrosemiophile" version of history, is developed with gusto, brio and a born raconteur's assurance by Pierre Boisard in his engrossing book on Camembert.

We have learned from Asterix that the Gauls' resistance to imperial Romanization took the shape of a predilection for local tastes; bread, wine and cheese often providing French people with a sacred trinity of home-grown fetishes. Such a conflict has been reawakened more recently by local peasants' populist rejection of American junk food, always condensed into the fast and easy synecdoche of the MacDonald's hamburger. Pierre Boisard invites us to consider a similar synecdoche when he demonstrates in his witty and informative book that Camembert represents, as part for the whole body politic, the production not so much of a delectable addition to the menu as of a myth of national identity and stability. The connection between the cheese itself and its evolution over time, which may have turned it into a shadow of its glorious past as much as the contemporary McDonald's is a debased trivialization of the old home-made hamburger, is underpinned by an economic logic. This logic leads us slowly from the echoes of the French Revolution to the consolidation of bourgeois power in the nineteenth century and finally to the current industrialized globalization. While General de Gaulle wondered how it was possible to govern a country in which there are more cheeses than there are days in a year, it fell to one cheese to embody a contrary figure of unanimity and national unity. In this case, modernization was concomitant with an expansion of the myth, in an endlessly productive fermentation of savors and significations. How this momentous role happened to be played by Camembert, allegedly the one cheese among the 365 other types that all French men and women will recognize and identify immediately, is the object of Boisard's extensive reconstruction.

This book will provide you, among other things, with all the details of how Camembert is made: the collection of milk, the ladling of the curd into moulds of a certain size, and the delicate operations that then mature the cheese over a number of weeks (though this period is drastically reduced in the modernized version of the cheese's production). Finally Boisard sketches the process by which cheese-making became industrialized, from small family-based concerns making a few hundred cheeses...