Rensselaer Republican, Volume 25, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 September 1892 — Requefort and its Cheese. [ARTICLE]

Requefort and its Cheese.

Temple Bar, 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 charactei* and sombre tone of the old houses. —Although the place is so small that it consists of one street and afew alleys, the more ancient dwellings are remarkable for their height. It is surprising to see in a village lost among the sterile hills houses three stoyies 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 found in this calcareous formation; but now they are really cellars that have been excavated in the rock so that they are seen in as many aa five stages, where long rows of cheeses are stacked one over the other. The virtue of these cellars from a cheese making point of view is their dryness and their scarcely varying temperature summer and winter. Butthe demand for the Roquefort cheese Has become so great that trickery now plays a part in the ripening process. The peasants have is money," and they nave found that bread crumbs mixed with the curd cause those great streaks of mouldiness which denote that the cheese is fit for the market, to appear much more readily than was formerly the case, when 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 cammercial enterprise, the result of competition and other circumstances too strong for 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 one of the very commonest of shrubs, is a cheap substitute for'hops. The notion that brass pins are stuck into Rbquefort cheese to make it turn green is founded on fiction.