Blue twine reported missing: the tomme-wrapping contest teeters in Saint-Romarin

Without spool No. 52, it’s impossible to make the regulation “double giroflée” knot, the market’s intangible heritage since 1974.
A farmer blames the greengrocer’s cat; rumor points to an escape toward the andouillette workshop. The afternoon is shaping up to be highly strung.

Saint-Romarin (Haute-Racine) — At exactly 7:02 a.m., the spool of blue twine of a hallowed gauge (2 mm, shade “Saône azure”) vanished from the copper hook of the stall “Aux Doux Caillés.” At noon the “Ficello’Day” will start, the event that each year crowns the finest wrapping of a 1.2 kg tomme, tied in 45 seconds and sealed with an approved “double giroflée.” Without No. 52, no contest: green twine is reserved for goat cheeses, red for winter raclettes, and natural linen is “expressly prohibited because too pretentious,” stipulates the rulebook.

First clues: a cow biscuit-tin lid (makeshift lock) opened “with suspicious delicacy,” and, on the counter, three tabby hairs caught in a torn blue strand. All eyes turn to Mistigri, the greengrocer’s cat, already known for a rillettes-ribbon incident in 2021. “I counted it last night: 183 turns left, I wrote down 182 to avoid temptation, and this morning, nothing,” swears Mado Pérussin, stock keeper with the Committee of Volunteer Twiners.

The disappearance triggers a cascade of improbable improvisations. The butcher offers his white “special sausage” twine (rejected for a persistent garlic smell), the beekeeper declines to lend her waxed thread (“it gums up the tommes”), and the pottery club puts forward a dyed raffia… which snaps in the “wrist-pull” test. Twenty-three competitors warm up by miming loops in thin air, while Émile, a former sheaf-binder, tries to hurriedly braid a three-ply twine from binder twine strands dyed blue with methylene blue: “Figure three hours if nobody sneezes.”

Suddenly, a lead: two schoolkids are seen behind the hay bales, in full demonstration of a “cheese yo-yo” with a blue cylindrical object. “If they’ve tied even a single simple knot in there, I’ll hang up my ladle till doomsday,” fumes cheesemaker Jean-Guy Faverolle, calm in appearance only. The jury grants itself a 17-minute reprieve “time to untangle the matter,” promising that, whatever happens, “the spirit of the double giroflée will survive, even without No. 52—though preferably with it.”