Appenzell and the Constellation Gallia
St. Deuberex Montclair rode these rails in 1925. We follow him in a blue Opel.
"It's not about the cheese!" might have been St. Deuberex Montclair's most famous words. But Montclair doesn't exist.
A few years ago, Jane and I decided to follow in the footsteps of the world's greatest cheese traveler in search of the world's finest artisanal cheeses and the places where they are made. We began in Tangier, and followed him across the Strait of Gibraltar into Spain and Portugal. Now we have come north, to the Alps.
Other travel writers seem to be doing it all the time, following the routes of their favorite icon or explorer. But after agreeing to a lifelong journey, we found that the subject of our travels simply didn’t exist. And so we invented him, along with the imaginary book he left behind, The Cheese Traveler — an imaginary guide whose wisdom exceeds that of every other travel writer’s muse.
Jane and I carry our sleeping son to a restaurant in a small alpine town in the Allgäu region of Bavaria. This is a favorite of my parents, and a chance for them to show it to Jane's mom in the few days we have left before fifty friends and family converge here.
My family orders all the specialties of this restaurant — deer and local lake fish. But I haven't the appetite for the hearty Bavarian restaurant fare. Instead, I look for the plate that most resembles what Bavarians eat at home — a simple plate of bread and cheese.
The right fromage, caseophiles might say, requires a perfect pairing of the appropriate wine. In Bavaria, and for this particular cheese, however, the perfect wine is a beer. A pils in a tall glass.
The Marktplatz in Lindau, Germany
The traditional cheese plate in Bavaria is thick cuts of Bergkäse ("mountain cheese") and dark rye bread, and cuts of smoked ham or pickles.
The mountain cheeses of Bavaria owe a debt to the Roman Empire, like many of the famous cheeses of Europe. The Romans did not invent cheese, and the Celtic and Alpine peoples here were making it before them, but Rome spread the methods and the markets that paved the way for the great cheeses that followed. What separates the high mountain cheeses of the northern Alps from other cheeses is climate: they didn’t need the heavy salt of cheeses from the warmer south.
An Alpine cheese, then, is less about salt, and more about the taste of the plants ingested by the cheese-producing animal. Bergkäse has a nutty, rich flavor. It is mild but with a nice complexity that fits a good beer well.
The Constellation Gallia
A European fromager by trade, Montclair left his post at a fine urban fromagerie later in life, for what he called The Constellation Gallia.
Although history has buried Montclair's actual nationality, we know, based on his imaginary journals in English and French, that he was, as a man and a traveler, entirely a product of the Enlightenment.
Montclair's Constellation Gallia was itself an Enlightenment allegory. What he meant is that he saw each cheese-producing town as a bright light, like a star. And so, looking down on the Old World, you would see the brightest stars of the constellation as places like the Pyrenees, Savoie, or Emilia-Romagna, where production of the world’s finest cheeses is concentrated.
Montclair's window of opportunity to enter into Bavaria would have been around the year 1925.
As a child of the age of the Enlightenment, Montclair would have been very conscious of the German contribution to the age that created the modern world. The Enlightenment’s earliest ideas came out of England, France and the Netherlands and spread as far as New England, but its greatest philosopher was German. Today, we see Immanuel Kant, writing in Königsberg in the 1780s, as the age of reason’s great summation.
Kant questioned darker ages with simple words:
“All that is required for this Enlightenment is freedom; and particularly the least harmful of all that may be called freedom, namely, the freedom for man to make public use of his reason in all matters. But I hear people clamor on all sides: Don't argue! The officer says: Don't argue, drill! The tax collector: Don't argue, pay! The pastor: Don't argue, believe!"
The Weissensee, near Füssen, Germany
Montclair took Kant’s words to heart. “Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination,” Kant had written in 1785. As a successful fromager with big city connections, Montclair had all the access to what people defined as happiness. But at some point in his life, he realized that the collections of furniture and paintings yielded no such happiness.
The more you own, Montclair realized, the less you have. The more you live, the more you love, the more you taste — this is surely what Kant meant. Leave it all behind — walk out that door.
Bavaria, 1925
The Great War would have eliminated any possibility for a man like Montclair to near the German border, but by 1925, the country had miraculously recovered its Enlightenment roots. This was the Germany that was, in Montclair's mind, the end product of the Enlightenment: industriousness alongside art and architecture. Science alongside poetry. Dance and jazz and coffeehouses. Progressive, liberal democracy alongside a renewed interest in preserving the rich fabric of Germany's past.
Those were the elements that would have made entry into Germany possible. But Kant's Germany was, technically, a very different Germany: the Prussian Germany, far to the north and east.
The Germany that interested Montclair, naturally, would have been the part that was brightest on his constellation. The Germany of mountains and foothills and rolling grazing lands — Bavaria and the Alps.
Everything about Bavaria belied the direction of Germany at the time. For one, Bavaria is, as a land of people, much older than most of Germany. Its southern half was the Roman province of Raetia, and its people descend from Celts, Romans and the Germanic tribes who settled here after Rome fell. Rural and Roman Catholic, it was a place the Protestant Reformation passed by, and where the Enlightenment arrived late and from the top down.
This was both reassuring and unsettling for Montclair, who found the country people of Bavaria the most exceptionally welcoming people in all of the Alps. At the same time, run-ins with what he called "uncomfortable people who do not smile" were also frequent here. You would meet these men from time to time. They didn't feel comfortable around men who may have looked like Montclair, British-lanky, with a French nose and olive skin.
Bavaria in 1925 held the roots of the weird and the fringe and the far, far right, and their occasional strange intersection with the far, far left. They despised jazz, the “Americanization of Berlin,” and the early democratic experiment of the Weimar Republic, which, to the extremist groups in Bavaria, was Bolshevism. Two years earlier, a failed beer-hall putsch had been put down in the streets of Munich. Its leader, Adolf Hitler, had walked out of Landsberg Prison just before Christmas, and in February 1925 he refounded his party in a Munich beer hall.
But Montclair was naturally optimistic, and he liked the cheese. I like the cheese too, but it’s not about the cheese. It’s about the experience of eating a new cheese, in a new place. Everywhere you go, when cheese is made by hand locally, it tastes different than any other cheese. And that is the experience that Montclair sought.
As a fromager, Montclair was naturally a collector and a lister. It was only when he broke away from home and gave up on his collections of things that life began to truly resonate for him.
It is a cool evening here in Thalkirchdorf. Jane and I talk about our plans to cross borders in search of more cheese. Our son snores quietly. Outside, a few hundred feet higher in elevation, it snows. The interior is decorated like almost every other Bavarian restaurant — wood on wood on wood. And it gives the place a timeless feel, and I can imagine Montclair himself sitting near our table. Were this 1925, perhaps he would listen in, and admire the fact that a family can enjoy the experience of food in an unfamiliar place together.
Perhaps he would even get up from his table and ask what we think about the cheese.
Cormorants rest on the Weissensee, near Füssen.
At the Edge of the Empire
Winter came early to the Bavarian Alps. Clouds rolled in, fog filled the valleys, and almost as soon as we arrived, all evidence of the migrating birds of Europe was gone. It is mid-October, but the Allgäu at this elevation is white with snow.
Like a miracle, on the day Jane and I are to leave our son behind with family in Bavaria, the skies are bright blue and the road-snow melts by mid-morning. This is our first time leaving our son behind together — instead of a long goodbye, we sneak out on him and in no time, we’re on the road headed west.
We are in a blue Opel, and I might say that we are flying fast on the Autobahn, although it would be more true to say that we are the slowest car on the road, and it’s only that we feel fast. Fifteen minutes into our drive, I am ecstatic to at last be alone with my wife. And at this point, Jane looks at me and tells me she misses our son.
We stop in Lindau to pick up some fruits and crackers for a picnic, and then we enter Austria in the city of Bregenz, south of which is where we pass over the Rhine and turn right onto a road alongside the Rhine Delta levee. This is where I tell Jane that on our first afternoon alone together, we have work to do. For all the cheese we have ahead of us, we have to get some walking in.
At the end of the dirt road, we park the Opel in a dirt parking lot and walk along the spit of sand and rubble created by the Alpine Rhine pushing into Lake Constance. We walk out as far as we can, where we can see clear to the other side of the third largest lake in Central Europe.
Lake Constance is a lake, but it is also the river Rhine, and this matters, because the Rhine and the Danube together formed the northern frontier of the Roman Empire. Bregenz, where we crossed into Austria, began as the Roman town of Brigantium, and the Romans called this water Lacus Brigantinus. The Rhine’s size and navigability made it a crucial highway for Roman commerce. Beyond it lay a very different sort of Europe — the forests and marshes of Germania, which Rome never managed to hold.
The Rhine begins in Switzerland and runs through the rich mountain country of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria and Germany. This, then, explains why so many provinces along the river glow so brightly in Montclair’s Constellation Gallia. The Romans carried a sophistication for cheesemaking to the far edges of their world, so that by the time Pliny the Elder was praising the cheeses of the Alps in the first century A.D., the art was already well established here on the outer boundaries of the empire.
That is the beauty of cheese in travel. Cheesemaking is a living, breathing craft, and it has been so for a time nobody exactly knows — it is not archaeology or artifact. To eat cheese is to step into a museum and a café at once.
What we think of as European cuisine is something that is relatively modern, a product of the ages of science and reason, the ingredients of the new world and the spices of the far east.
Europe’s ancient contributions to cuisine are best represented by its single foods — bread, beer, oils, wine, salted meats, and of course cheese. Of all of these simple foods, cheese strikes me as one that has changed very little. And because cheese is an experience of taste, what is more true to capturing the essence and passions of older times?
The Kingfisher and the Ruff
Out here, the Rhine delta means marshes and protected waters, and so it is a favored autumn geography for many migrating birds. This means, for one thing, a whole lot of ducks.
It also means this is favorable water to the common kingfisher, a small turquoise and orange fishing bird which sits on lonely posts and tree stumps across Europe, Asia and North Africa.
I came around here a few days ago, really, because the weather was just too awful to go in the opposite direction. I ended up on this very same spit of sand. But then, the weather was just a wreck — raining so hard I could barely see. When I came to some quiet water on the delta, I looked up from my parka and there in all the gray was a shining turquoise jewel on a stick alone in the water.
Just then, in all the racket of the rain and the wind, the blue idol caught sight of me and flew. Most Europeans live their entire lives without seeing the common kingfisher, even though it is quite common, and even though it is the continent’s most brilliant creature.
Now, I want to see if maybe Jane can see this sparrow-sized fisherman. The common kingfisher is a specialist — the master of diving for fish from a perch — and he has evolved special tools to do it. Each of his eyes has two sensitive spots instead of one: one for watching the world to the side, each eye on its own, the way most birds do, and one for looking straight ahead with both eyes together, so he can judge distance as he drops. He also has to correct for the way water bends light, and as he hits the surface, a clear third eyelid slides across each eye like a pair of goggles.
Today, we see no kingfisher. Instead, Jane spots a marsh harrier, hunting in the marsh pond. This marsh harrier has been migrating, marsh to marsh to marsh, from Northern Europe, and may be on her way to Moroccan wetlands, or the Nile.
Then, only a few feet from me, she spots a pair of tall shorebirds walking along the rocks. Jane, who wears leather boots and is dressed in all black and sunglasses, might not admit it, but she is the one who finds them. We’ll learn that these are ruffs, shorebirds that started off in Norway or Finland and are headed for the rice fields of West Africa for the winter.
Montclair might have seen himself as rather more like the ruff than the kingfisher. Both are specialized for extracting certain foods in a certain way. But the kingfisher, though it lives across three continents, spends its life on a single stretch of water. The ruff, like Montclair, covers incredible distances in search of his specialty.
In the late afternoon, we return to the blue Opel, and continue into northeastern Switzerland, destination St. Gallen. This would be the same route Montclair took, but he would be looking out the window of a gray passenger train.
Cheese shop in Appenzell, Switzerland
Four Pawns Crossing a Field
In his years as a cheese traveler, Montclair spent a lot of time looking out the windows of trains, crossing through the Alps with little more than a briefcase or a satchel. When he crossed out of Bavaria in 1925, and into Austria and Switzerland, he would no doubt be troubled by his growing collection of run-ins with people of unusual ideas — about immigrants, about education, about Jews, about economies, about art, about homosexuals, about science. And he could feel it in the newspapers too. The newspapers were no longer telling the news, but were creating the news; what had never crossed a mind before suddenly became a compelling issue. And this phenomenon, which would later overtake all of Germany, had deep roots in these mountains.
In Bavaria and Austria, regional papers were being bought up by men with agendas. Those agendas were evolving in the country, in churches, and in the beer halls of the valleys beneath the Alps. Montclair, who never followed anyone, had an early understanding of what was happening — that men who want to be led are prime targets for being misled, and that the countryside that he so loved was the breeding ground for anti-Enlightenment ideas. And Montclair knew that the newspapers and the talk in the pews were a direct affront to what he was so optimistic that Northern Europe was going to become.
Those long train rides would have given him the time to reflect on the significant changes in his life, as he withdrew from his past as a successful big city fromager. Montclair grew up in a boisterous community in a family of successful doctors and merchants, and this made him a gifted conversationalist. This was his greatest asset as a fromager, because selling handmade cheese required a social personality and the ability to free-form stories to hold customers in rapt attention. With no close friends but thousands of acquaintances, Montclair’s personal life and salesman life were interlocked. At the bar, he was still the fromager.
Montclair was also an autodidact, which was a component of his character that was sometimes at odds with his exceptional social skills. Montclair would never make a good apprentice and he didn’t have the type of patience for traditional learning. This is perhaps why the boy who had the potential through family to become anything he wanted chose such a peculiar trade for his class. He simply could not do things anybody else’s way, and that made him as unqualified for merchant trading and the medical field as he found these professions unsuitable to his nature.
Managing an urban cheese shop was honest work to Montclair, and he found a sort of intellectual challenge in cheesemongering. He enjoyed exchanging letters with cheese producers hundreds of miles away. He appreciated the exotic stamps that came back to him, and the personalities that walked into his shop. He saw each face that walked through the door as a nut to crack. If they were set on a fresh goat cheese, for example, he would break them down somehow, using every note of their clothing and accent to send them home with a pungent, washed-rind Époisses, because deep down, he believed he could make them better people by expanding their horizon and shattering their prejudgments about cheese.
A World of His Own
As an autodidact, Montclair really did live in a world of his own. He had his own rules, his own way of learning, and his own suite of mental challenges racing through his head. Europe in the early twentieth century — war, revolution, hyperinflation — gave Montclair a deep sense of uncertainty, and so he was also an insomniac.
Growing up in a tradition of science and competition and status, ideas raced through his head late into the night. While he never had the patience to learn chess play through the books about openings and endgames, Montclair could replay a chess game he had played that day over and over again in his mind. By refusing to learn chess traditionally, he would never be a very good player, because good chess play required standing on the shoulders of giants — reading the books, becoming a follower of a master.
Montclair did not understand these basic principles of success in the human world, and he may have wrestled with chess moves and all the other problems of the day. By the time Montclair was in his twenties, he lay awake each night, distracted by racing thoughts.
One night, he let his racing thoughts of chess transform into something new. In his head, he turned four pawns into soldiers walking across a field. He gave them a challenge that might have been simple for his mind to grasp — maybe they were defending a fort on a cliff. And for the first time in years, he fell quickly asleep.
As he grew older and fell into the world of cheese, his nighttime imaginations evolved. The pawns became nations, and each night he would reconstruct new nations, entirely imaginary nations from the fantastical older Europe of chessboard artwork. Each nation would have a certain type of economy, a certain number of soldiers, a certain kind of cheese. And he introduced a conflict into each imagined world, and this slow-paced mind game, leading him away from the worries of the day, would set him into deep sleep.
Montclair worked hard, and he enjoyed the challenge and the social environment of the fromagerie. But it would be a long time before he realized that he was far from content or satisfied. As a self-learner whose mind kept leading him in new directions, Montclair would come to learn that it was that field between four nations where he belonged. Because the world he had been constructing in his mind at night was his subconscious easing him into the focus that suited him best. He was a ruff, and not a kingfisher. He was a foot soldier, not a merchant. And he was, more than anything, a product of the age of reason and enlightenment.
And when he finally stepped off the cobblestone doorstep of the fromagerie for the last time, giving up his financial security and the warmth of his network, he at last found peace and contentment as a simple gallivanter, out there riding the trains between nations.
The Secret in the Rind
We pass through St. Gallen, the stunning urban center of Eastern Switzerland, flanked by the Appenzell Alps, and we continue into the foothills of the Alps.
We drive up small, winding roads into the Appenzell region. Up here there are farms whose grassy meadows lie in the shadows of steep, snow-covered mountains. Cows chew at the grass in the fields, mostly mouse-brown Brown Swiss, with a few pale Simmentals among them. Their raw milk is what goes into Appenzeller, the cheese that has led us here.
These are a few of the farms that supply the few dozen village dairies that make Appenzeller. One such farm would have been Montclair’s destination, because he would have known the families that produced the best, and he would have enjoyed a cheese right here with one of his former suppliers.
But for us, these hills are just a chance to see the cows that produce the cheese. We make our way to the town of Appenzell by nightfall. This lovely town is packed with old Swiss buildings, flags and decorative flowers hanging from windows. At the heart of the city, we find the local cheese shop. The fromager explains the three categories of the cheese — Classic, aged about three months; Surchoix, aged four to six months; and Extra, aged over six months.
Each of the three varieties comes in a small, yellow wheel. The semi-hard cheese is the color of wheat, and just inside the rind, its color darkens. That rind is the magic of Appenzeller. For more than 700 years, the wheels have been washed and brushed with an herbal brine, the Kräutersulz, of herbs, roots, flowers, wine and salt. The recipe is one of Switzerland’s best-kept secrets — supposedly only two people know it — and the herb mixture is prepared in one place and sent out to the dairies. The effect is the specialty of Appenzeller: an explosion of rich, spicy flavor. We test each of the three varieties and agree that the Surchoix is richest — tangy, salty, but with an almost floral delicacy.
It is good to have come this far to taste a cheese we have imagined for a very long time. At home, we prefer eating cheese from our own backyard. To first taste something right where it is made makes it unforgettable.
Montclair, of course, does not exist. He is a figment of our imagination, and this is why, perhaps, we have created him as a man troubled by imagination. Some people believe that the consistent factor of unhappiness around the world in this modern age is the pull of information, the noise of a connected society and the weight of every direction all at once, by the simple fact that we cannot ignore every temptation and distraction. Montclair is a man who learned to step away from that noise and to follow his focus.
In the morning, Jane and I share a simple breakfast of eggs, toast, and cheese. On this bright sunny morning, we are here in Switzerland because we are following in the footsteps of St. Deuberex Montclair. But we are not following him, we are constructing him out of our own imagination, to give us the focus we need to search for cheese.