The Noble Lambs of Roquefort

Curious…

“The noble lambs of Roquefort”? Reading about Roquefort cheese on the GourmetSleuth’s website, I was abruptly whisked back over 40 years, remembering vividly that it’s the cheese produced by “the noble lambs of Roquefort.” Mum discovered that deliriously silly phrase in Réalités, a fancy colour magazine of the late 1960s or early 1970s which was the English-language edition of a French magazine. I think the year’s sub was a present from a well-off friend living in Switzerland. The articles and the wonderful photos accompanying them gave us a lot of pleasure, but the noble lambs gave us the only laugh.

    Once seen, never forgotten? Well, yes. Added to which, it comes over like a very bad translation into English of some flowery French phrase, and the GourmetSleuth’s definition of Roquefort’s not much better—translated by a computer?

Roquefort is considered as the “King of cheeses”. It has a tingly pungent taste and ranks among blue cheeses. Only the milk of specially bred sheep is used and is ripened in limestone caverns. It has the cylinder-shape with sticky, pale ivory, natural rind. Ripe Roquefort is creamy, thick and white on the inside and have a thin, burnt-orange skin. The ripening of the cheeses is in the natural, damp aired caves found under the village of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon.

(GourmetSleuth.com)

Noble Lambs?

Have another look at Alfred Morris’s sheep. Noble? Tom Sutcliffe claims in “When sheep are just— sheep” (ArtUK, 12 Oct 2018) that “…Alfred Morris’s sheep are crowd-scene sheep. … And they have a job, which is to monetise otherwise unfarmable land by turning it into meat and wool. But if they are representative of anything it is of their own local, familiar sheepiness. Which is, I think, the most winning thing about this particular genre of paintings. They exist for viewers who just can’t get enough of sheep, viewers who can probably see sheep at any time they want just by looking out of a window, but hanker after a practical way of getting sheep indoors so they don’t have to. This kind of viewer doesn’t want to think about Virgilian eclogues, or reflect on human waywardness, or brag about their prize-winning New Leicester. And these pictures are here for them. What are these sheep doing? They’re being sheep and that’s it.”

https://artuk.org/discover/stories/when-sheep-are-just-sheep

    I disagree entirely. Had the man ever left London? These are NOBLE sheep—yes, like the noble lambs of Roquefort! Painted for a Victorian audience, they are typical of the way their contemporaries, not rural with views of sheep from their windows, but increasingly urbanised, liked to view their domestic animals: they had to be charming (dogs, puppies, cats, kittens, chicks, ducklings), or quaint (ducks, hens, piglets) or noble (more dogs, horses, sheep, Highland cattle, prize beasts, deer) or romantic (Highland cattle and deer again). Look at the way they're holding their heads: they're not all head-down eating grass, which is what sheep do most of the time. They're holding their heads up; some are giving you a profile worthy of a Roman emperor; some are staring you down, chin well up. I grew up in a sheep-producing country and I’ve spent a holiday on a hill sheep farm, and I can tell you that off the canvas sheep don’t do that except on the rare occasions when something has caught their attention.

More Noble Lambs? Silly, But Just Sheep?

The photos below are from: Richard Lydekker (1849-1915). The Sheep and Its Cousins; With 61 Illustrations. London, G. Allen & Company Ltd, 1912.

    Lydekker was an eminent English 19th-century naturalist who wrote many works on aspects of natural history, including some substantial volumes which became standard reference items in their time. Many of his works were on the birds and animals of the modern world, but he was also a palaeontologist, cataloguing the fossil mammals, reptiles and birds of the Natural History Museum in a massive 10-volume work (1891). He was also an important figure in early biogeography, the study of the geographical distribution of plants and animals. In 1895 he delineated the biogeographical boundary through Indonesia, known as Lydekker's Line, that separates the two biogeographical areas of Wallacea on the west and Australia-New Guinea on the east. His works are often profusely illustrated, some by himself, some by eminent zoological and ornithological artists of the time. These photos of some very odd sheep do not represent the best of his work!

The photographer has managed to attract their attention (except for the posed stuffed head, natch.)

    I wouldn’t say they look noble, though. Silly, possibly, especially those poor four-horned ones on the lower right. They’re probably Jacob sheep, which are piebald and usually multi-horned. They’re an old traditional English breed. (“Jacob sheep”, Wikipedia.)

    Well, the cheese-producing ewes may be noble or silly, but I’d agree that Roquefort is the king of cheeses. I had it in France and it wasn’t “tingly” and it was only “pungent” if you automatically assume all blue cheese is pungent. It was meltingly creamy and slightly sweet, a dream of a cheese. On the other side of the world it’s horrendously expensive and comes in horrible little sealed plastic packets which make it weep. Not worth the money, alas.