In which we visit the Cantal

As I have mentioned before, Blaise has two friends named Sébastien. Both of them are philosophers of mathematics and both of them are currently in Clermont-Ferrand. Sébastien I

(and I feel like I'm writing some bizarre version of The Cat in the Hat here) invited us to his home for dinner on Tuesday night. Sébastien II invited us to spend the weekend at his family's country house in the Cantal.

Friday evening, after spending the afternoon trying to drive up the Puy-du-Dôme and being thwarted by heavy fog that closed the access road (not like we would have been able to see anything anyway), we drove over to Sébastien's house in the suburbs of Clermont-Ferrand and waited for Sébastien and his wife to return from work. Then we headed out for the 2 hour drive to the Cantal, switching up the adults so that each car had one adult who knew where they were going, and the preschoolers since it was by that time clear that Cherry would be miserable riding in the car without me. (As it was she sat in almost complete silence the entire ride in Cathy's car.)

We arrived at the house around 8 o'clock, and pulled the cars into the side yard. A description of the house: It was a traditional farmhouse for that part of France, with the shelter for people on one end and that for the livestock on the other. Perhaps at one time there was a communicating door between the two parts, but the barn had long since been sold and so there was no more. Upstairs were two large rooms, one set up as a bedroom and the second as a sitting room, as well as a toilet and a smaller room which was used primarily for drying laundry. Downstairs, accessible only by going outside, there was a large room which was part sitting room, part dining room, part kitchen, with a large fireplace to one side. Along the back wall were a toilet room and a bathroom, and opposite the fireplace were two smaller bedrooms, one for the children and one for the parents. We had the upstairs, though we didn't spend much time there, and Sébastien and Cathy and their kids, Octave and Sylvia, had the downstairs.

Although we had big plans for all of the things we wanted to do and see during our visit, most of them were thwarted by rainy weather, sick kids, and the desire to get back to Paris ahead of the worst of the returning spring break traffic. We did get to do some things though.

First of all, we got to visit Sébastien's cousins' farm, which was located a literal stones throw from the house. We fed grass clippings to their (enormous) rabbits, and saw their geese and chickens. Then we stopped to see the cows. Only the Salers cows were in the barn in the morning, but we could see all the calves in the back part of the barn. Then we walked across to the building where they make cheese, both cantal and salers, and put blue shoe covers on (to protect the cheese from the farmyard mud, of course) and watched as Sébastien's cousin explained the cheese making process to us.

First, the milk is pumped, still warm, under the "road" and into a huge wooden vat, where cultures are added and the milk is stirred. Once it forms curds, the whole mess is turned out onto a big metal table lined with cheesecloth, and a big press is applied to the top to squeeze out the whey. After it stops dripping, the curd is cut into big chunks and turned and the weight is reapplied. This is repeated 10 times to ensure that all of the whey is removed from the cheese. Next there are a bunch of steps which were carefully explained to me in French, involving cutting the cheese up into little pieces and putting it into buckets and then into a mold that said "Salers" on it. (Salers is made between mid April and mid November. Cantal is made the rest of the year.) After it is shaped in the mold, the cheese is laid on a shelf to ripen and turned regularly to ensure proper aging and the development of a good rind. And then of course comes the best and most important part: eating it!

Also, there was time for playing outside in the yard, or garden as they called it. Mostly this was because the amount of time it looked like rain was imminent was substantially more than the amount of time it actually rained. The little girls played in the sand box and the play house, and Sapphire and Ezio (and Octave when he was feeling OK) played rugby with Sébastien and Blaise.

Before dinner on Saturday we went back over to the farm to watch the cows being milked. The Salers cattle had been joined by lots of Holsteins and a few Montebeliards, and the Sapphire and Ezio had fun climbing and sliding on massive hay bales. Cherry contented herself with grabbing handfuls of hay from the ground and throwing it into the food trough in front of the cows.