Abondance cheese — the forgotten Alpine cheese of Haute-Savoie — has one of the most extraordinary origin stories in the entire history of French food. This video tells the full story of Abondance cheese from its medieval beginnings in the Abbey of Abondance, where Cistercian monks first made this remarkable Alpine cheese as a way of preserving milk through long mountain winters, all the way to the papal conclave in Avignon in the fourteenth century, where it was served to cardinals from across medieval Europe. A tiny Alpine valley in the French Alps sending its cheese to the highest ranks of medieval society — and this is where the story of Abondance cheese begins.
At the heart of the Abondance story is the landscape itself — the Abondance Valley in Haute-Savoie, near the Swiss border, with its dramatic Alpine peaks, wooden chalets and flower-rich mountain pastures. And at the centre of it all is the Abondance cow — the beautiful chestnut and white breed perfectly adapted to life on steep Alpine slopes, producing milk rich in protein and fat that gives the cheese its distinctive fruity, nutty, hazelnut character. Without the Abondance cow there is no Abondance cheese. She is, as we say in this episode, the diva of the valley. And she knows it.
This is a semi-hard, raw cow’s milk cheese with a rustic appearance and a remarkably refined flavour — fruity, aromatic, buttery, with a gentle hazelnut quality that sets it apart from its better-known Alpine neighbours Comté and Beaufort. It looks like a cheese that belongs on a mountain. It tastes like a cheese that belongs at a royal table. Which, as it turns out, it once did. The AOC protection it received in 1990 — and AOP under the European system — ensures that everything from the grazing altitude of the cows to the distinctive concave shape of the wheel is tightly regulated, preserving a tradition that stretches back to the Middle Ages.
Abondance cheese is one of the great overlooked cheeses of France — and this video is the full story of where it came from, why it matters and why it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the most celebrated Alpine cheeses in the world. From the monks of the Abbaye d’Abondance to the cardinals of Avignon, from the flower-rich summer pastures of the French Alps to the cheese counters of Paris — this is Abondance. And it is absolutely worth your attention.
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