Archive for the ‘Dairy production’ category
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Mimolette: a 17th century wartime initiative
Monday, July 27th, 2009
The round Mimolette cheese was an unlooked-for byproduct of hostilities between France and the Low Countries in the 17th century. The people of northern France were passionately attached to Dutch hard cheeses, such as mature Gouda, but these were no longer available while French and Dutch cannons were facing each other across the plains of [...]
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Keeping cheeses in shape
Sunday, July 26th, 2009
Why is a Mimolette cheese round? To be sure, it comes out of a spherical mould, but as a young cheese, these 3kg cheese balls would soon take on irregular shapes unless they were turned at frequent intervals by attentive cheesemakers. This means once a week while the cheeses are young and once a month [...]
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What better topping for ice cream?
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
During the 1950s, the Isigny factory shop – sometimes referred to as the ‘sales shed’ – the summers saw a roaring trade in dairy ice creams for visiting tourists. Nobody quite remembers where the idea came from to top ice creams with Chantilly cream (very light and fluffy vanilla flavoured whipped cream). But it was [...]
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Médaillon: a new departure for Camembert
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
In the late 1960s, the traditional Paris cheese and dairy shops (crémiers) were running out of space to hold two or three weeks’ worth of young Camembert cheeses and ripen them on the premises. So the Isigny cooperative found that sales were falling among their key customers. The cheesemakers’ solution was to develop a top [...]
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Visits are good for business
Monday, June 29th, 2009
When Henri Babeur addressed the cooperative’s 25th anniversary celebrations in 1957, he stressed the fundamental importance of maintaining direct contact with customers. “We will continue encouraging and intensifying direct personal contact between farmers, factory workers and customers, by organising collective visits, as we have done in the past,” he explained. “This will enable all of [...]
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Milk powder earns it keep
Friday, June 26th, 2009
Powder milk was more than just an afterthought: during the 1960s, the drying towers would handle 260 tonnes of milk a day at peak periods, buying in additional milk from neighbouring dairies to make a range of milk powders for livestock. “The production of powdered milk was an essential diversification,” explained Réné Vemclefs, the cooperative’s [...]
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Postwar powdered milk: the height of modernity
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
Isigny’s first drying tower for powdered milk started work in 1949 and was such a resounding success that by 1959 the cooperative had built a second one, three times the size. Capable of processing two and a half tonnes of milk an hour, the second tower was housed in an ultramodern glass-walled building. It was [...]
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France's first spray drying tower
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
By 1946, Henri Babeur had decided that the cooperative should build a milk drying tower and make soluble milk powder from what had previously been given back to the members. “It will not only increase the value of the skimmed milk above what it is worth as a cheese by-product, but will allow us to [...]
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Postwar reconstruction
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
As the liberating armies moved on to Caen and Paris, the Isigny dairy farmers returned to developing their cooperative. There were just 28 of the founder members who had survived the war: they were joined by a further 208 new members. As the war drew to a close, the Bessin exceeded a previous 1938 high [...]
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Visits become part of butter calendar
Monday, May 25th, 2009
The first group of visiting crémiers must have talked about little else than Isigny on their return from Normandy. The visit to Isigny sur Mer for a study tour became an annual fixture for the Parisians, for whom the invitation to Isigny was a source of both inspiration and enlightenment. Visiting a farm in the [...]
