Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 February 1893 — Roquefort and Its Cheese. [ARTICLE]

Roquefort and Its Cheese.

Cheese, which has been the fortune of Roquefort, has destroyed its picturesqueness. It has brought speculators there who have raised great, ugly, square buildings of dazzling whiteness, In harsh contrast with the character and somber tone of the old bouses. Although the plac&is so small that it consists of oniy one street and a few alleys, the more ancient dwellings are remarkable for their height. It is surprising to see in a vtllage lost among the sterile hills houses three stories high. The fact that there is only a ledge on which to build must be the explanation. What is most curious in the place is the cellars. Before the cheese became an important article of commerce, these were natural caverns, such as are everywhere to be found in this calcareous formation; but now they are really cellars that have been excavated to such a depth in the rock that they are to be seen in as many as five stages, where long rows of cheese are stacked ohe over the other. The virtue of these cellars from the cheese-making point of view is their dryness, and their scarcely varying temperature of about 8° C., summer and winter. But the demand for Roquefort cheese has become so great that trickery now plays a part in the ripening process. The peasants have learned that “time is money,” and they have found that bread crumbs mixed with the curd causes those green streaks of moldiness, which denote that the cheese is fit for the market, to appear mrch more readily than was formerly the case, wheft it 'was left to do the best it could for itself with the aid of a subterranean atmosphere. This is not exactly cheating; it is commercial enterprise, the result of competition and other circumstances too strong for poor human nature. In cheese-making, bread crumbs are found to be a cheap substitute for time; and it is said that those who haVe taken to beer brewing, in this region have found that box, which here is the commonest of shrubs, is a cheap substitute for hops. The notion that brass pins are stuck into Roquefort cheese to make it turn green is founded on fiction.—Temple Bar.