Among the many activities
inside the buron for the cowman and his assistant, the ‘boutillier’, was making
Cantal cheese.
Milking was carried out twice a
day at the ‘fumade’. The ‘fumade’, an encirclement of hurdles, was moved each
day to spread the manure in the area around the buron. The calves were
introduced one by one and shown to their mothers. If a calf ran towards a cow
other than its mother by mistake it was sent away with a kick. Salers cows are
excessively maternal and refuse to suckle a calf other than their own.
After several minutes the
cowman lifted the calf and attached it to a foreleg of the mother. The cow, then
docile, could be milked. To milk the cow the cowman sat on a ‘sellou’, a unique
one legged stool. It was held in place by two leather bands round his waist, and
was therefore easily carried from cow to cow. He placed his head, protected with
a beret, against the side of the beast and milked by hand. He only milked three
teats out of four, leaving the calf to finish the fourth teat and get the best
milk.
The process of cheese making was precise and
unchanging. They started immediately, bustling to collect the warm milk from the last milking.
They collected it in a ‘gerle’, a vast wooden tub that held 120-150
litres of milk. From this it was placed in a ‘cailler', with the addition of
rennet, at a temperature of 36°C, close to that of the cows.
After about an hour the curdle
was broken with a ‘frenhau’, a tool with a metal disc with holes on a
long wooden handle, to separate the curds and whey. The curds were gathered
together with the ‘atracador’, and put into a small press called a ‘cachaira’,
to remove the rest of the whey.
It
would be pressed eight or nine times in succession until the time of the
next milking. The whey, removed with a ‘poset’, was sometimes used to make
butter and sometimes given to the pigs. The first tasty, white cheese that
results is called the ‘tome’. This was then broken in the ‘freseira’, and
gathered and stirred and salted.
Some hours later it was put
into a mould and placed under a press called ‘lo pesador’. Two days later
after several turns in the press, the cheese was removed from the mould and
has the name of the ‘fourme du Cantal’.
It was
then placed in the ‘cave’ to ripen, with a constant temperature of 14°C and
constant moisture. The individual cheeses, weighing about 40kg which took
400 litres of milk, were inverted every two days and brushed once a week.
According to the length of time to ripen the cheeses are called Cantal Doux
for 1 - 2 months, 2 – 6 months is called Entre-Deux more than 6 months is
Cantal Vieux.
