Harel, Marie (fl. 1790)

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Harel, Marie (fl. 1790)

French inventor of Camembert cheese. Flourished in 1790 in the town of Camembert, Normandy, France.

Farmer Marie Harel is credited with inventing Camembert cheese during the French Revolution, when a resistant priest, Abbé Bonvoust, took refuge at her Beaumoncel Manner in Camembert in 1790. A year later, Bonvoust gave Marie a secret recipe to improve her cheese, and she readily heeded his advice. Following her death, her widowed husband reaped a fortune from her creation. "Mme. Harel's monument, a stone shaft," writes Janet Flanner in Paris Was Yesterday, "unfortunately resembles a slice of Gruyère. There is no justice." Camembert became even more renowned in the 1890s with the invention of the circular wooden box which enabled it to be more easily transported. Marie Harel was posthumously awarded the French government's palmes académiques in 1927.

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