Chèvre Comes to America

Slow Food not only supports the recognition of distinct regional foods and heritage breeds.  It also recognizes the importance of local food processing techniques.  Until the late 1970s, the production of goat cheese was limited to Europe, with France the acknowledged star.  The United States had no commercial operations to produce goat cheese, now a wildly popular artisanal product.

If Slow Food ever publishes a list of people important to expanding the types of food processing practiced in the United States, Laura Chenel must appear on the list.  It was her single-minded effort to study French-style goat cheese production and replicate it in California that brought chèvre to America.  After participating in a series of cheese apprenticeships in France, Laura returned to Sonoma County with a viable recipe to make a bright, white, tangy cheese that quietly announced itself as made from goat milk.

Laura began production of her signature chèvre in the late 1970s.  I met her shortly thereafter.  As I remember, her cheese production at the time was housed in a cinder block building on the outskirts of Santa Rosa.  Inside, the building was cool, the light dim.  The interior climate contrasted sharply to the day’s summer temperature.  Wooden racks with slatted shelves held the current batch of carefully placed pillows of cheese dusted with a coating of gray ash. 

Across the Bay, another important taste-maker was building her business.  Alice Waters opened her now famous restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley in 1971.  The restaurant was inspired by a tip to France during college.  Originally conceived as a semester to study French literature, the trip turned into an extended excursion that became a serious study of French food: where it came from, how it was cooked, how it was presented.  Alice haunted Paris’ open-air markets, cooked her way through Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking, visited southern France where sumptuous flavors spilled from hillside fields into local markets: fresh picked herbs, garden grown vegetables, olive oil, garlic.