Aromes au Gene de Marc

What is Aromes au Gene de Marc Cheese?

The cheese starts as Saint-Marcellin, a soft cow's milk cheese named after the town of Saint-Marcellin in Isère. It is made in a zone matching part of the old Dauphiné province, now inside the Rhône-Alpes région.

Saint-Marcellin turns up early in the written record. The household account books of King Louis XI show it on the royal tables of Plessis-lès-Tours and the Louvre from 1461. The name itself only came into regular use in the 19th century, once better roads and growing demand in Romans, Grenoble, Lyon and Bourgoin-Jallieu pushed the cheese into commercial trade.

To make Aromes au Gene de Marc, a finished Saint-Marcellin is cured in marc brandy for a month or longer. Cure it in white wine instead and you get Arômes de Lyon. Production of the base cheese moved from farmhouses to dairies at the start of the 20th century, and around the 1980s it went from mixed goat and cow's milk to cow's milk alone.

A Saint-Marcellin weighs about 80 grams and carries a mottled creamy-white exterior. It runs more as it ages, and the outside picks up blue and then yellow tones two to three weeks after production. Three stages are recognised: sec, crémeux and bleu. Texture and taste sit close to Saint-Félicien, a larger cheese from another part of the Rhône-Alpes.

Ripeness matters to the people who eat it. Jean Casimir-Perier, President of the French Republic, complained that he could not get his favourite Dauphiné cheese at the right stage, and his father Auguste had it sent to the family château every week after tasting it at the Beaucroissant fair in 1863.