by Austin Coe Butler
Ossau-Iraty is the ancestral cheese of the Basque, or Euskadi, as they call themselves. These timeless, mysterious people have been living in Europe from the Pyrenees mountains to the Bay of Biscay so many millennia that their history is obscure. They are the last indigenous people who lived in Europe before the arrival of Indo-Europeans, and as a result the Basque language, Euskara, is a language isolate, meaning it has no relationship to any of its neighboring European languages or even any other Indo-European language. From the impenetrable reaches of the Pyrenees mountains, the Basque have seen kingdoms and empires rise and fall. And all that time the Basque have been making ewe’s milk cheeses.
The Basque call their cheese Ardi-gasna, which translates simply to both “local cheese” and “sheep cheese.” Sheep are essential to Basque culture. Their distinct breeds like Latxa and Manex tête noir (black headed) are especially hearty and suited to the rugged beech forests and mountainsides of the Pyrenees. The sheep provide milk, meat, fiber, hide, and warmth to the shepherds, who in turn tend to the sheep. In a traditional Basque house, whitewashed with green or red trim with festoons of Espelette peppers drying in the sun, the sheep live on the ground floor, while the shepherds and their families sleep above them, benefitting from the rising animal warmth. Only the tête noir though are taken up into the highest reaches of the mountains to graze on the remote estives, high mountain pastures rich with fragrant grass and wildflowers.
Isolated on these estives from the nearest towns, shepherds collect milk from their herd and move into their chalets or cayolars for the summer. These chalets are not the grand, imposing wooden structures found in the Alps or Rockies, but small, stone huts like burons that pass from generation to generation and where the cheese is made for the season. It is a site of labor and rest. Estive cheese by its nature is made from raw milk and in small batches. The fresh milk is gently warmed and coagulated before the curd is cut and pressed into wheels, sometimes only with the use of hands.
Our Ossau-Iraty are estive wheels made by Les Bergers du Haut-Béarn and matured for 4 to 6 months by Beillevaire at Cave du Haut-Béarn. The cheese has a rich, roasted chestnut sweetness to it and a pleasant subdued tang. Like Manchego or the many Pecorinos of Italy, Ossau-Iraty has the classic granular texture of a sheep’s milk cheese, but it is also remarkably creamy. It is fantastic with American Spoon Sour Cherry Preserves in a nod to the Basque tradition of serving Ossau-Iraty with cherry jam, and enjoyed with a young, fruity red or bright, zingy Txakoli.