The Ripening Room

About this book

Affinage is the invisible half of cheese. The fruitières make the wheels, one morning's milk of a whole village pressed into each; and then the wheels go into the dark, for months, for years, and what happens to them there, on the spruce boards, in the cave's own weather, under the hands that turn and brush and salt and listen, is the difference between food and glory. The Vasseur family has kept the cave at Ormel for five generations. Claire, thirty four, trained from childhood and certified at the youngest age in the mountains' memory, keeps four thousand wheels with two hands, a sounding hammer, and the Ledger of Wheels, in which her family has recorded every board, every batch and every year's weather since before photography.