Monastic: cheese and tradition
Abbey and monastery cheeses: Trappist, Benedictine and Cistercian dairies, and their washed rinds.
Monasteries have made cheese for more than a thousand years. Monks and nuns needed food for the many meatless days of their rule, kept herds on their lands, and had the time and discipline that slow ripening asks for. Many washed-rind cheeses of France and Belgium began in abbeys, among them Maroilles, Munster and Port-Salut, and the Trappist tradition carried abbey cheese to Chimay, Mont des Cats, Oka in Canada and beyond.
Benedictines and Cistercians
The Rule of Saint Benedict, written in the sixth century, asks monks to work with their hands and to abstain from the meat of four-footed animals, except the sick. Benedictine and later Cistercian abbeys farmed their lands, and cheese turned summer milk into food that kept and goods that could be sold. Maroilles is said to have been invented by a monk of the Abbey of Maroilles in the tenth century, Munster takes its name from the monasteries of the Munster valley in Alsace, and Tête de Moine, monk's head, comes from the abbey of Bellelay in the Swiss Jura.
The Trappists
The Trappists, Cistercians of the Strict Observance, took their name from La Trappe Abbey in Normandy. The monks of the abbey of Port-du-Salut at Entrammes, in Mayenne, began making cheese in the nineteenth century, and their Port-Salut became so popular that they later sold the name to a commercial dairy. The method spread to other Trappist houses: Oka in Quebec, made from the 1890s, Chimay in Belgium, and the cheese of the Abbey of Mont des Cats in French Flanders, still sold under the abbey's name.
Monastic dairies today
Some abbeys still make cheese themselves; others license their recipe to nearby dairies and sell the cheese in the abbey shop beside beer, honey and bread. Abbey cheeses tend to be washed-rind or semi-soft: supple, savoury and mild in flavour despite their smell. In the Himalaya, monasteries have traditionally received butter and cheese as offerings from herding families rather than making cheese themselves, and the butter goes into lamps, tea and offering cakes.
Worth knowing
- Maroilles: Said to date from a tenth-century abbey
- Munster: Named for the monasteries of an Alsace valley
- Port Salut: Trappist cheese of Port-du-Salut abbey
- Tête de Moine: Monk's head, from Bellelay Abbey, shaved into rosettes
- Oka: Trappist cheese of Quebec
- Chimay: Belgian Trappist cheese
- Mont des Cats: Trappist cheese of French Flanders
- Saint-Paulin: Semi-soft cheese in the Port-Salut tradition
Sources and further reading
Original text by the EveryCheese desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Customs are described as tradition, not as advice. If we have something wrong, tell us.
Monastic on EveryCheese
The cheeses written up so far, best known first.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Monterey Jack: Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 3.0, source