Culinary Anthropologist

Bells de jour

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Smabondancecows0001.jpgToday we went to the valley of Abondance, here in the Haute-Savoie, where they make the delicious gruyere-style Abondance cheese.  We walked up to one of the high alpine pastures where farmers graze their cows in summer, to let them eat the lush green grass that gets covered in snow in winter.  Finding a farmhouse, we sat down to tuck into their cheese, just as the cows came home after their day’s grass-eating work in the fields, the bells round their necks ringing.

This is what they sounded like.

Click here to listen.

And as a special treat, we even have a couple of video clips of them walking home ringing their bells:

Video 1 (quite big, about 12Mb)

Video 2 (smaller, about 5Mb)

Click here for more audio samples.

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