For eight centuries, villages around the Abbaye de Bellelay, 8km north of Tavannes between Moutier and St Imier, have produced a strong, nutty-flavoured cheese now known as monks’ cheese. In 1792 revolutionary troops marched in, obliging the monks at the abbey to abandon the cylindrical cheese maturing in their cellars.
Troopers, so the story goes, dubbed the cheese Tête de Moine (Monk’s Head), perhaps after the curious way tradition demands it be sliced. Shavings are scraped off the top in a circular motion to create a rosette, done since the 1980s with a nifty handled device called a girolle .
Tête de Moine is no longer made at the abbey (now a psychiatric hospital) but the semi-hard AOC-protected cheese is found all over the Jura.
