It cost us an hour and a half to reach the maire's first châlet, where we were to lunch on such food as the old woman who managed it might have on hand; that is to say, possibly bread, and, beyond that, milk only, in some shape or other. The forms under which milk can be taught to appear are manifold. A young Swiss student, who in the madness of his passion for beetle-hunting had spent fifteen days in a small châlet at Anzeindaz, sleeping each night on the hay,[67] gave me, some time since, a list of the various foods on which he lived and grew fat. The following is the _carte_, as he arranged it:-- Viandes. Vins. Du séret. Du lait de vache.[68] Du caillé. Du lait froid. Du beurre. Du lait de chèvre. Du fromage gras. Petit lait. Du fromage mi-gras. De la crême. Du fromage maigre. Du lait de beurre.[69] Tome de vache. Petit lait de chèvre. Tome de chèvre. _Pour les Cochons_. Du lait gâté. Cuite. Some of the solids and fluids in the earlier part of this _carte_ we felt tolerably sure of finding at the maire's châlet, and accordingly any amount of cream and _séret_ proved to be forthcoming. The maire asserted that _cérac_ was the true name of this recommendable article of food, _céré_ being the patois for the original word. Others had told us that the real word was _serré_, meaning _compressed_ curds; but the French writers who treat learnedly of cheese-making in the _Annales de Chimie_ adopt the form _sérets_; and in the _Annales Scientifiques de l'Auvergne_ I find both _seret_ and _serai_, from the Latin _serum_. There was also bread, which arrived when we were sitting down to our meal: it had been baked in a huge ring, for convenience of carriage, and was brought up from the low-lands on a stick across a boy's shoulder. When the old woman thought it safe to expose a greater dainty to our attacks, at a later period of the meal, she brought out a pot of _caillé_, a delightful luxury which prevails in the form of nuggets of various size floating in sour whey. Owing to a general want of table apparatus, we placed the pot of caillé on a broken wall, and speared the nuggets with our pocket-knives.