Last month our good friend Bob Albers,* who lives in Mandeville, Louisianna told us about the fabulous New Orleans Fete des Fromages and we posted the schedule, etc. for the November event (click here).
Bob volunteered at the festival and while he was there, he took a lot of pictures. When he got home, he wrote this review for us:
Fete des Fromages (a wonderful party)
By Bob Albers
Wikipedia defines a party as “a gathering of people who have been invited by a host for the purposes of socializing, conversation, recreation, or as part of a festival or other commemoration of a special occasion. A party will typically feature food and beverages, and often music and dancing or other forms of entertainment. In many Western countries, parties for teens and adults are associated with drinking alcohol such as beer, wine, or distilled spirits.”
To define a New Orleans, party all we need do is change that last part to “beer, wine AND distilled spirits.”
Many consider that a party will take place for a few hours on a single day. They don’t know what a real party is. Fete des Fromages is a REAL party. Events were scheduled over 3 days (Wednesday, Friday & Saturday). I was fortunate enough to be accepted as a volunteer at the Saturday event. As such, I arrived before the opening and took some photos of the displays before the crowds came.
Here we have some of the displays in the back courtyard.
The venue for the Fete was the Jazz Museum which is housed in the “Old U. S. Mint.” There are two large open spaces. This one is in the back courtyard which opens into a large green space.
Closer up, the gentlemen in the picture below were making macaroni & cheese by cooking the pasta in a hollowed out Parmesan wheel and stirring in hot milk to both cook the pasta and melt the Parmesan which coats the macaroni.
Here we have the quintessential New Orleans food, Gumbo, being prepared by La Petite Grocery.
It wasn’t all cheese, but this display by the St. James Cheese Factory was a good start.
What kind of party doesn’t have music? As I said earlier, I arrived before the event got started. Here we have one of the musicians warming up for a sound check.
So far, how are we doing fulfilling the Wikipedia definition of a party?
The largest display, by far, was by the Wisconsin Dairy Products Association.
A word of explanation here – in numerous places around the city, you will see “NOLA” – that’s New Orleans, Louisiana.
Here is a wonderful cheese wheel. Too bad is wasn’t big enough to ride. What it was doing was displaying many of the award winning cheeses.
Just below the wheel were samples to be had. The entry fee included all the cheese you could eat from the various displays.
Just a closer look at the samples …
High fashion was also on display. Here we have the most refreshing dress ever. It held over 2 gallons of champagne.
Such a refreshing dress requires a delicious hat sported by one of the guests.
More entertainment was provided by a street magician …
… and a strolling musician playing French music. (After all, the sponsor of this event was the French American Chamber of Commerce.)
Not surprisingly, we had a presentation of French cheeses. Here is Brie with various jams and caviar.
French goat cheese was also available for tasting.
California was well represented by Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese.
Blue goat, left and blue cow cheeses being prepared for tasting.
Some of the crowd gathering to taste the above cheeses …
The table in the foreground had crackers and breads for people to take for tasting the cheeses. Plates are also available.
This was the first hour and a half of the Saturday portion of the festival. The tent in the background of the above picture is the VIP area.
Also represented here were Vermont Creamery and Cypress Grove.
In the picture below, at the Cypress Grove booth, the lady on the right is preparing their Purple Haze – a goat cheese infused with lavender. On the left, Humboldt Fog is being coated with sugar and caramelized. The taste of this was a wonderful mix of buttermilk and fresh cream, complemented with floral notes, herbaceous overtones, and a clean citrus finish.
Fete des Fromages
See you next year, November 7, 2020!
*About Bob
Bob is a retired electronics engineer who has traveled all around the world, but now lives in Mandeville, Louisiana. He has contributed 13 articles to our blog (so far), and we have done one about him (click here). We’re very grateful to him for his contributions to our community of home cheese makers.
These are his previous articles, listed in order with the most recent at top:
Bob’s Homemade Limoncello
An Easy Way to Flip Camembert
Creole Cream Cheese Recipe #2
Calculating Weights for the Dutch Style Press
Be a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA)
Time Keeping Spreadsheet for Making Cheese
Kummelkase (Caraway Cheese)
Cream Cheese Experiment
Bob’s Homemade Curd Cutter – Part 2
Bob’s Homemade Horizontal Curd Cutter
Making a Drying Box
About Cooking Curds
Creole Cream Cheese
