A cheesy mystery
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010322
On 31 January 1958 a Juno I rocket blasted off a launchpad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Stowed in its fourth stage was Explorer 1, the first US spacecraft to orbit Earth. Two Soviet satellites, Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2, had been launched the previous year. The Space Race had begun!
Although Sputnik 2 had detected hints of Earth’s radiation belts, Explorer 1, which carried instruments designed and built by James Van Allen, made the discovery that our planet is ringed by magnetically confined bands of charged particles.
That same year, a French cheese maker called Duquesne invented a triple-cream cheese and named it l’Explorateur (the Explorer). Why did Duquesne choose the name and why, to this day, does the cheese’s label bear an image of a rocket?
Some English-language sources, such as Wikipedia and the cheese magazine Culture , claim that the cheese is named after Explorer 1. But one French website, Fromagère de la Brie, tells a different origin story :
L’Explorateur was invented in 1958 by Mr. Duquesne and named in honor of one of the first Transatlantic flights that Miss Duquesne made to market l’Explorateur in the US. The cheese has a particularly cool label, showing a rocket, a symbol of the great explorations of the 20th century.
I’m inclined to believe Fromagère de la Brie. There’s a rocket on the label, not a satellite. The rocket is a stylized cartoon, not a Juno I. And why would a French cheese maker name his invention after a US spacecraft?
To earn the triple-cream designation, a cheese should contain at least 75% milk fat by dry weight (that is, excluding water). Reaching such a high fat content requires adding cream to the milk before fermentation begins. Although making a triple-cream cheese is no harder than making a less fatty cheese, inventing one that is both tasty and distinctive was likely a challenge for Duquesne.
Regardless of the origin of the cheese’s name, Duquesne’s choice to label his traditionally made product with a high-tech transportation device is less surprising than it might seem, given the historical context. France in 1958 was in the midst of three-decades of sustained economic, technological, and social progress. Looking back from the grimmer 1970s, economist Jean Fourastié named the period les Trente Glorieuses (the Glorious Thirty).
In 1958 Duquesne could have travelled on the world’s fastest passenger train, the Alsthom CC 7107 of the French National Railway Co. He might have driven and owned a Citroën DS , whose pneumatic suspension, front-wheel drive, and disk brakes, made it the most advanced mass-produced car in the world. And in May of 1958 a Dassault Mirage IIIA reached a top speed of Mach 2.2 to become the first European jet fighter to exceed Mach 2 in level flight.
But it is hard to imagine a cheese maker of our time making the same branding choice as Duquesne. In France, as in the US and other rich Western countries, the trend in high-end food production is toward the traditional and away from the high tech.
Like French wine, French cheese from a specific region can be recognized and protected with an official geographical designation, the AOC . The most recent French cheese to receive an AOC, in 2009, is Rigotte de Condrieu , an unpasteurized goat cheese from the Lyonnaise region. Condrieu is a town. Rigotte comes from rigot, a local name for a mountain stream. The official label shows a goat and a bunch of grapes.