European monastic orders have a long cheese-making tradition, probably a response to prohibitions against meat consumption. Their efforts over the centuries have produced some of the cheese world's tastiest denizens, such as Chimay, Abbaye de Belloc, Munster, Pont-l'Eveque and Abbaye de Citeaux.
Commercially successful convent cheeses are less common. In fact, I don't know of any, although I have fond memories of meeting the "cheese nun," Sister Noella Marcellino, who makes washed-rind cheese at a Benedictine abbey in Connecticut and was the subject of a PBS documentary.
At one time, the Trappist nuns at the Abbaye de la Coudre in northwest France made a washed-rind cheese called Trappe de la Coudre. But, the sisters stopped making cheese more than a decade ago when they became too old for the physical demands, and they didn't transmit their know-how to successors.
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