In France's highlands, the flowers are tasty and the cheese is stretchy

Odile looks at me suspiciously. There is someone new in her cowshed. She takes her place at her milking station, marked by her name plate, and is soon joined by Noisette who seems indifferent to my company as she languidly chews some hay. The rest of the herd trot in to line up beside them, heads held high, while farmer Philippe Galvaing hurries them from behind.

These are Salers cows, a breed that thrives in the mountains of Cantal, one of France’s most remote departments, in the south of the historical Auvergne region, where steep, volcanic mountains have shaped local traditions. I’ve come to witness the process that goes into making the rare salers tradition cheese. Only seven producers of this particular fromage remain — each only uses milk from their own single herd of Salers cows, which graze on the abundant meadows between mid-April and mid-November. What makes it extra special, though, is that Salers cows will only yield their milk when their calf is present — so, twice-daily the farmers allow the calf to feed before attaching their own milking apparatus. The cows produce just 3,000 litres a year, a third of which is consumed by the calf.

While it’s undoubtedly hard work for Philippe and his family, the process has its benefits, as his daughter Louise explains. “Because we’re manoeuvring the calves and the cows, there is a stronger bond between us. Sometimes they’re not very friendly to start with, but the trust grows.”

Once all the cows are in position, Philippe lets the calves come into the milking shed from their adjoining enclosure. As each small calf jostles through the gate, he yells its name — the same as its mother’s — and it canters on gangly, unsure legs to the correct cow to feed. While Philippe and his son Pierre get on with the milking, Louise shows me around the dairy and explains how the cheese is made. The Galvaing family make just one wheel of salers tradition a day, albeit one 45cm thick and 48cm tall. The first step is to put the milk in a chestnut wood vat called a gerle, from which the bacteria adds a nutty dimension. But it’s the milk that brings the most flavour. The volcanic soil means the meadows have an incredible biodiversity, which filters through to the milk and then the cheese. When Louise gives me a slice in their ageing cellar, I’m astonished by the floral notes — it’s smooth but has a real tanginess.

Outside, the views of the meadows around the farm are spectacular; it’s May and everything is vivid green, the grass dotted with yellow flowers. After saying my goodbyes to the Galvaings, I drive through the pretty village of Salers, beyond which there’s another field of Salers cows, the distinct dongs of their cowbells carrying on the breeze. As the road begins to climb into the mountains, I pass a number of buron huts. These small stone cowherd dwellings are a feature of Cantal and the neighbouring departments of Aveyron and Lozère, which all share a similar history of cheesemaking, and a tradition known as transhumance dating back to the Middle Ages. This sees locals lead their cows up to the higher meadows to feed on the grass and flowers. They’d then spend the season living in buron huts and making cheese in order to preserve the milk. The leftover whey would then be used to make tomme fraîche, a fresh, soft cheese cooked with potatoes to create Cantal’s traditional dish, truffade.

With the evening light starting to fade, I follow the road into the mountains via a precipitous route called Le Puy Mary. And, as it rises and falls between the mountains, I’m struck by what a challenge this terrain must have posed those living here. When I arrive at the village of Pailherols, it’s dark. I check into my auberge (inn), Hôtel Chez Marie, and within no time, I’m tucking into a hearty meal of Saint-Flour blonde lentils and local pork, made by owner Maryline Fages and served with husband Vincent’s selection of wines from grapes grown within the area’s volcanic soil. Vincent is keen to explain just how incredible the local landscape is; and with the morning light, all is revealed. The village is surrounded by meadows filled with as many yellow dandelions and cowslips as there are blades of grass; and there are the now-familiar stone-and-slate burons here too, these days used for farm buildings. It’s a scene that must barely have changed in centuries.

Truffade versus aligot

About an hour’s drive south east of Pailherols, the spa town of Chaudes-Aigues is set in a valley where the south of the Cantal mountain range meets the Aubrac Plateau. Along the town’s long main street, several signposts direct me to the Source du Par, and I follow these to an archway that leads into a square where a stone trough collects the fast-flowing water pouring from a metal spout. The presence of steam rising from the water is a clue that this is a natural hot spring, with a temperature of 65°C. I sweep my hand underneath; it’s almost scalding. I’ve been told a second source can be found further up the hill, so I follow the lane and soon find another spout set in a wall. This one is 82°C — one of the hottest in Europe — and it pours out thousands of litres a day.

That evening, at Restaurant Sodade, I finally get to try truffade, with some bonus guidance from chef Aurélien Gransagne. “The name comes from the historic word for potatoes, ‘truffe’,” he explains. “Purists say it should just be sliced potatoes cooked in pork fat, and then the tomme fraîche. Some people add parsley, others say absolutely not; some add onion or garlic, others say absolutely not.” I order it as a side dish, accompanying a refined plate of local pork, served with creamed fennel and slender carrots. And, as I raise up a chunk of golden-hued potato with my fork, strings of cheese cling stubbornly to the rest of it in the bowl. I quickly take a bite of the soft, cheesy potato; it’s absolute heaven.

With its appealing elasticity, tomme fraîche is the crucial ingredient in truffade. It plays a similarly vital role in a speciality found over the border in the Occitanie region, in Aveyron. This dish is known as aligot. And, while it’s made with pureed rather than sliced potato, it shares many similarities with truffade, having been traditionally produced in buron huts with tomme fraîche, albeit made from the whey of laguiole cheese, which comes from the milk of Aubrac cows. Elasticity is everything for aligot, with expert chefs able to pull it out of the saucepan in ribbons more than a metre in length. In fact, ‘aligot master’ Jean-Louis Miquel, employed by the local cheese cooperative Jeune Montagne, has achieved a record of six metres.

I visit the cooperative, in the town of Laguiole. There I learn aligot’s first incarnation was as a bread-and-cheese soup served to 12th-century pilgrims on the Way of Saint James by a monastery on the Aubrac Plateau, the flatter area in the south of the Massif Central. Monks developed agriculture in the area, and when the tradition of transhumance emerged, the locals who took their cattle to higher pastures in summer made laguiole cheese in the burons. Aligot soon became their staple diet.

By 1960, however, so many people had left the land for jobs in the cities that cheesemaking and aligot production had almost disappeared. It was then a group of farmers set up the Jeune Montagne cooperative to encourage local people to stay in the area, and it’s largely thanks to their efforts that aligot regained its popularity. Today, it supports 76 dairy farms in the cheese’s official zone of production and is responsible for a renaissance of Aubrac cattle.

Aligot isn’t only found in farmhouses or rustic restaurants. It also appears on the menu at Laguiole’s fine-dining institution, Le Suquet. At the helm is chef Sébastien Bras, whose family put the Aubrac on the culinary map, first with his grandparents’ auberge restaurant Lou Mazuc in Laguiole, and then via his father Michel Bras, who relocated it to a new site outside the town and renamed it Le Suquet. Sébastien wrote his own page of the restaurant’s story in 2018, when he asked for it to be removed from the 2018 Michelin Guide, to be free of the pressure of holding a three-star rating. They obliged, but then the guide’s management changed, and two stars were re-awarded in 2019, regardless of his wishes.

“My grandmother always served aligot in her restaurant. She was very traditional, she never weighed anything, it was all done on instinct,” Sébastien explains. “When the restaurant gained its reputation for contemporary cuisine, we tried to take it off the menu but there was an outcry from the customers, so we keep it on. However, we might change it slightly, by, say, making pumpkin aligot or combining it with truffle.”

Like his father’s cuisine, Sébastien’s is modern, yet it’s also representative of the Aubrac Plateau, of the volcanic soil and its fabulous diversity of flora. “My father recognised the area has an incredible wealth of plants — and that no one had ever made the most of it, other than by grazing their Aubrac cows in the pastures.” Michel Bras went on to develop a reputation for foraging, before establishing the restaurant’s own garden. This enhanced Le Suquet’s signature dish, gargouillou — a medley of young vegetables, leaves and flowers, gathered every morning. “It’s a recipe that changes almost every day as it’s almost entirely a plant-based dish. So at the beginning of April we’ll see around 40 different plant varieties — then, every month from June, when the garden is at its peak, we have close to 80 varieties in a single plate.”

Having been shown around the restaurant’s garden by the head gardener, British expat James Gould, it’s time to take a seat and try the gargouillou. When it’s served, it looks like a piece of art on a plate. What’s more, this dish of dazzling colours yields an equally broad array of flavours, alternating between sweetness, bitterness and nuttiness, with textures from crunchy and frilly to delicate.

Cyril Attrazic is another decorated chef of the Aubrac who, like Sébastien, is from impressive culinary stock. His eponymous restaurant gained its second Michelin star in 2023, and he’s the fourth generation of his family to run a restaurant in the town of Peyre-en-Aubrac. As well as utilising the plant-based flavours provided by the Aubrac, Cyril is also passionate about the rearing of Aubrac beef. “These days, cooking is becoming more plant-based and the fashion is for vegan food,” he says. “But here, this is land for livestock — so we’re doing the opposite of the fashion and setting up our own beef farm.”

Having accepted that the French are heavy consumers of beef, Cyril and his wife’s family of breeders resolved to produce beef in what he believed was a more sustainable way. So, rather than exporting the males to Italy, they keep them for meat and fed them a Michelin-level diet of their own, including omega oils and mineral-rich cereals, as well as ensuring they get two summers in the pastures. Hearing this, I’m expecting my lunch to be heavily carnivorous — instead, it’s an astonishing celebration of everything the Aubrac has to offer; from delicate vegetables and exquisite flowers to a sublime cut of beef that I slice with an elegant Laguiole knife — another emblem of the area. The side? A bowl of aligot of course — one so stretchy it comes with scissors.

Cyril’s restaurant is in the department of Lozère, which also has its share of burons. And it’s here that I finally get to dine in one, thus trying the local cheese in its traditional setting. The route to the Buron de Born takes me through rock-strewn meadows abounding with wild daffodils. The restaurant, set beside a lake, feels remote, yet inside it’s busy with groups of friends and families, waiters spooning large dollops of velvety aligot onto their plates. I opt for the Lozère version of truffade — rétortillat — comprising layers of potato and tomme fraiche, with a touch of garlic. It’s hearty, filling and delicious — and the final piece of proof that, with its cheese, meat, vegetables and flowers, the Aubrac has everything a food-lover could ever need.