My kids and I spent the summer of 2007 staying with relatives in their home in a tiny village in the Savoy region of France. The village was about 10 households and a dairy. There were more cows than people. It was the small, sweet, healthy, clean dairy you described. But even so, every single French person we spoke to, as soon as they knew we lived in a village with a diary, said, "You know you must boil the milk right? Never drink the milk until you have boiled it." Everyone. Including the dairy farmer and all the other villagers. Stores sold thick glass discs that you put in the bottom of your milk-boiling pot so that you'd know it had boiled enough because you'd hear the disc jiggling in the pot.
My kids and I spent the summer of 2007 staying with relatives in their home in a tiny village in the Savoy region of France. The village was about 10 households and a dairy. There were more cows than people. It was the small, sweet, healthy, clean dairy you described. But even so, every single French person we spoke to, as soon as they knew we lived in a village with a diary, said, "You know you must boil the milk right? Never drink the milk until you have boiled it." Everyone. Including the dairy farmer and all the other villagers. Stores sold thick glass discs that you put in the bottom of your milk-boiling pot so that you'd know it had boiled enough because you'd hear the disc jiggling in the pot.