Abbey

Abbey : nf. An abbey is a religious establishment where monks live in community. From the Middle Ages some monasteries or abbeys engaged in the manufacture of food products from the harvests of their crops or the breeding of their herds, on the one hand to feed the populations who depended on their establishment but also to maintain materially the buildings and the monks who stayed there. It is for the sake of preserving their milk products that the monks were at the origin of the manufacture of many cheeses, most of which still exist.
There are many cheese-producing abbeys in France and Belgium, but there are also some in other European countries (Germany, Italy, etc.).
In France, the tradition continued, even after the Revolution of 1789. Among the Trappists, the abbey of Port-du-Salut, in Mayenne, founded in 1812, creates and then markets the cheese of “Port-du-Salut”, which was very successful in the 1850s. Its recipe was then transmitted to the founders of new monasteries from the same order (as far as the United States of America and Canada), thus founding the family of so-called “Trappist” cheeses.
The mark having been registered since 1870, the manufacturers wishing to imitate this product had to create, in the years 1950, the Saint-Paulin mark.
In the 20th century, agricultural activities, costly in terms of material and requiring an increasingly scarce monastic workforce, were considerably reduced. Some monasteries have kept the responsibility for their production but subcontract it to lay organizations, that is to say dairy companies outside the monastery.
During these vital changes for the communities, each monastery has chosen, according to its possibilities, the most suitable solution.
The Abbey of Port-du-Salut, overwhelmed by the regular expansion of its cheese factory, decided to sell its factory and its brand to the SAFR (Société Anonyme des Fermiers Reunis, currently part of the Bel group), in 1959.
The Abbaye de Bricquebec sold the recipe and the Providence brand to the Valognes cooperative dairy (Valco).
Today, there are only a dozen abbeys dairies left. These transform, all together, each year around 10 million liters of milk to produce 1000 tonnes of cheese. Abbey cheeses are mostly Trappist-type cheeses with the exception of those from the Cîteaux, Tamié and Chambarand abbeys, which are of the reblochon, and sheep's cheese for the Benedictine abbey of Bellocq.