Yearly, with out fail, when the primary chilly and wet nights start to look, there’s additionally a refrain among the many French:
“Tonight, lets make a tartiflette?” We could make tartiflette tonight?
The easy, heat casserole hails from Savoie, a area nestled within the French Alps, east of Lyon and west of Milan. Tartiflette is every thing you’d need from a conventional country-style winter dish: potatoes, onions and bacon topped with walnuts and funky Reblochon. The semi-soft cheese is the star of the dish, boasting the perfect marriage of the nutty flavors frequent to many Alpine cheeses and a whisper of washed-rind funk acquainted to followers of Epoisses. (Sadly, as a uncooked milk cheese aged lower than 60 days, true Reblochon isn’t imported from the US, however many People love to change to related washed rind cheeses akin to pasteurized Le Délice du Jura, Préféré de Nos Montagnes and even raclette.)
Belying its old school identify, derived from the native dialect for ‘potato’, the tartiflette has a comparatively fashionable historical past, courting again to the Nineteen Eighties. Some say, in reality, that its invention was purely a advertising stunt.
French meals critic and co-founder of the Gault Millau information, Christian Millau states in his Dictionary of meals lovers 🇧🇷Dictionary for Meals Lovers, a set of essays on French terroir) that now we have the Syndicat Interprofessionnel du Reblochon – the Reblochon Interprofessional Commerce Guild – to thank for the tartiflette. The e-book claims that the Guild invented the dish within the Nineteen Eighties as a strategy to improve cheese gross sales.
Not everybody agrees. Lucile Marton, director of the guild, refutes the story, telling Slate that the guild did not invent the recipe, “though we won’t deny that we benefited from it.”
The reality in all probability lies someplace within the center.
Tartiflette was in all probability invented within the Nineteen Eighties as a strategy to market an overproduction of central Reblochon for the dish. However Reblochon itself has an extended historical past that begins on the border between fashionable France and Switzerland.
Reblochon has been brewed within the Alps because the thirteenth century, when it was invented as a method round an area tax that native landlords levied on farmers in response to the quantity of milk they produced.
Farmers shrewdly determined to scale back the milking of their cows on the day of landlord visits, considerably decreasing the tax due. With the homeowners gone, they milked their cows a second time and, with this richer, creamier milk, made a cheese whose identify derives from the native patois “reblocher”, which suggests “to order once more”.
Reblochon was little recognized outdoors the previously unbiased area till France annexed it in 1860. The cheese’s recognition quickly grew throughout the nation. At a number of totally different factors all through historical past, nonetheless, farmers turned somewhat too zealous, producing reserves of Reblochon that they ended up having to destroy.
Which brings us again to tartiflette. Within the Nineteen Eighties, consultants consider, an enterprising restaurateur in a ski resort within the Savoyard city of La Clusaz determined to utilize a surplus of cheese by combining it with bacon, potatoes and onions. It was the perfect après ski consolation meals to heat up after a day on the slopes.
However he did not simply pull the recipe from heaven.
For hundreds of years, the inhabitants of Savoy cooked a combination of potatoes, cheese and onions that they nicknamed “péla”, for the long-handled poêle or pot by which they made it. Whereas the péla is made with out bacon (and with out peeling potatoes), it may be assumed that it was certainly the ancestor of the tartiflette.
“You’d historically add leftovers [péla]”, explains Anne-Lise Francoz, Director of Communication on the Syndicat Interprofessionnel du Reblochon. As Reblochon and péla are from the identical space, she says, “we are able to assume with out an excessive amount of danger that Reblochon has at all times been the cheese utilized in it.”
Nowadays, each péla and tartiflette are available in as many variations because the cooks who make them – and naturally, every prepare dinner thinks theirs is essentially the most “genuine”.
“All of us suppose now we have the ‘actual’ recipe,” says Frédéric Motte, proprietor of Ache Vin Fromages, a cheese restaurant within the Marais district of Paris.
Motte’s model of the basic includes coating the baking sheet with crème fraîche (a divisive addition that staunch tartiflette followers shun in favor of a purer cheese taste). Then he places in potatoes and a combination of sautéed onions and smoked lardons. Final comes an entire quarter wheel of Reblochon, cut up down the middle in order that its pores and skin turns brown beneath the broiler. The creamy cheese oozes between the potatoes, so each chew is coated with its wealthy taste.
After all, given Reblochon’s central function within the dish, solely the perfect will do for the discerning French palate. In France, producers make two totally different grades of Reblochon: One, with a inexperienced wax seal, makes use of uncooked milk from one (or a number of) of the one three breeds of cows allowed on the farm, as soon as the cows are milked. The opposite, with a crimson stamp, is made in a manufacturing facility with milk from a number of farms.
The previous, unsurprisingly, has rather more character and taste, and is most well-liked not solely on tartiflette, however on a cheese board as nicely.
And that is the place the issue lies: the dish that started off as a technique to devour extra has embodied Reblochon’s id. Nowadays, whereas Reblochon may simply star on a cheese board alongside widespread French specialties like Camembert or Brillat-Savarin, it is usually perceived as little greater than a topping for tartiflette, a actuality that many connoisseurs lament.
“It is a cheese, not an ingredient,” says Francoz, noting that winter, which is the season for tartiflettes, is not essentially when cheese is at its greatest.
“Reblochon is made year-round, but it surely’s particularly good when the cows are at altitude,” she says. Because the cows can solely entry these verdant pastures in the summertime, that is the perfect time to take pleasure in Reblochon – contemporary, not roasted.
Sandra Angelloz is one other producer who’s dismissive of Reblochon’s “garrison” standing. She makes inexperienced branded “Reblochon fermier” within the conventional method: within the valley in winter and at altitude in summer season. Due to the cows grazing for seven full months of the yr, the cheese takes on a hazelnut taste and a shiny, creamy texture.
“Most French individuals suppose that Reblochon is similar as tartiflette,” she says. “It’s a little humiliating for small producers to know that our cheese finally ends up like this, since to start with it was only a cheese that you could possibly merely style.”
As for us, we’ll take Reblochon as greatest we are able to. The most effective wheels are scrumptious nonetheless you serve them: alone, on a pleasant slice of bread or, sure, au gratin on prime of a comforting tartiflette.
Have you ever tried tartiflette? Share your ideas on the dish beneath!