A soft white cheese shot through with garlic and herbs. It sells worldwide now, but it exists because a newspaper announced a product that did not yet exist.
It began as something guests mixed themselves
France had an old table custom: put out a soft, unaged fresh cheese and set chopped herbs, garlic, pepper and salt beside it, and let each guest mix their own to spread on bread. There was no fixed recipe, so no two plates tasted alike, and that was part of the pleasure. In 1957 a young cheesemaker in Normandy decided to turn the custom into a product.
The kind of fresh cheese that sat on those plates:
Then a newspaper announced a cheese that did not exist
In 1961 a French paper reported that his dairy had launched a garlic version. The difficulty was that no such cheese existed, and none was in development. Readers went looking for it anyway. Orders arrived for something that had never been made. So he set about making it for real, spent several years getting the recipe right, and released it in 1963.
So what kind of cheese is it?
An unaged fresh cheese. Milk and cream are set into a soft mass and garlic and herbs are worked through it; there is no rind and no mould. That makes it a cheese to buy and eat, not one to keep. The texture — crumbling and spreading at the same time — is exactly what high moisture and no ageing produce. It smells assertive, but the cheese underneath is very mild.
How it differs from cream cheese
Both are white, soft and spreadable, but they start in different places. Cream cheese is milk and cream fermented with lactic cultures, so it carries a tang and holds together smoothly. This one is looser and breaks apart in the mouth. Above all it arrives already flavoured, which changes the job it does: cream cheese for the bagel, this for a cracker as it is, or melting over a steak.
The lookalike made a different way:
The first cheese advertised on French television
In 1968 it became the first cheese to run a television advert in France. That sounds unremarkable now, but selling cheese as a brand was then a new idea: in France cheese was sold under the name of a place or a maker, not advertised. Announced into existence by a newspaper and established by a TV campaign, this cheese has been entangled with media from the beginning.
How to use it
Straight onto a cracker or a piece of baguette is the easy answer; give it twenty minutes out of the fridge first, or it will be stiff. Stirred into hot pasta with a splash of the cooking water it becomes a sauce on its own, and spooned over grilled meat or vegetables it melts and releases the garlic. It is already seasoned, so hold the salt until the end. Being fresh cheese, finish it within a few days of opening.