‘I ate cheese for breakfast, lunch and dinner’, says French affineur Patrice Marchand
- The master cheese ager and co-owner of Les Frères Marchand, in France, grew up in a family of cheese masters, eating cheese at every meal
- He almost took a job in Phuket, Thailand, but his brothers made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, and now, his adopted son hopes to follow in his footsteps
Tell us the history of ageing cheese in your family. “Our family started ageing cheese in 1880. They were farmers in a small village called Clémery, near Marseilles. The first generation were not cheese masters, but farmers who took chickens, rabbits, eggs, milk and one kind of cheese to the market to sell. By the end of the first generation, our family had built a cellar, not to mature the cheese in, but to store cheese and eggs from nearby farms. The second generation saw the cheese change and mature over time. The third generation really became the cheese masters.
“My grandmother and father worked with 200 small producers our family had worked with for many generations, mostly in France, but also places like England, Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands. Today, we have 450 kinds of cheese in our cellar.”
What was your childhood like? “My older brother, younger brother and I ate all kinds of cheese for breakfast, lunch and dinner. At home we never ate dessert – we stopped at cheese. Even today, at most I will try a spoonful of dessert, but I always finish my meal with cheese.
“For the first 20 years of our lives, Sunday lunch was the only time we sat down for a meal with our father because he was so busy. He would put only one kind of cheese on the table and explain its story – the producers, where they live.”
In 2016, we broke the Guinness World Record for the largest cheese platter, with 730 different kinds, mostly from small produce
Is it true that you didn’t want to go into the family business at first? “I preferred to work for a hotel or restaurant. So I enrolled in Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne, in Switzerland. My younger brother, Eric, became an accountant, and my older brother, Philippe, followed my father and became a cheese master. He spent 20 years working with each of the 200 producers, staying with them a few days or weeks and learning first-hand how they make their cheeses and mature them.
“In the summer, I go with Philippe to visit producers. Most of them are small producers, maybe one or two people. They work every day because the cows need to be milked every day. It’s a hard job. I visit them so when I travel and see customers I can talk about the producers.