If you’ve seen the recent film of the Odyssey, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Though I don’t want to spoil it for you, cheese does feature in the scene, which comes up pretty early in the movie. Spoiler alert: Odysseus likes the cheese. Arguably, and boy do those scholars love to argue, the Odyssey was composed in the eighth century BCE, which makes this the first detailed account of cheesemaking that we know of so far.

In the film, Polyphemus’ cheeses are a pretty simple, low-tech style. The curd is hanging in bags which would result in a soft high moisture style, to be eaten fresh before it has developed much flavour. Homer’s not-so-gentle-giant runs a more sophisticated operation though. He’s out when Odysseus and his men first arrive in the cave, but they are impressed to find rows of cheeses laid out on racks to dry, and the whey stored in various containers. As a good shepherd-cheesemaker, Polyphemus knows not to waste this valuable resource, which he can use for a refreshing drink, to fatten his young sheep, and to start the next day’s cheesemaking. Whey contains the lactic bacteria which you need to sour the milk, and was used, before the advent of microbiology, as a starter culture. In another black mark on their characters, the men help themselves to some of the cheeses, and sacrifice some to the gods. Perhaps they thought this might help them to get away with this unethical behaviour, though you might wonder what value the gods placed on receiving stolen goods.

On his return, Polyphemus begins by coagulating the new milk, quite possibly with a rennet derived from fig sap, a method also mentioned in the Iliad which appears to have been widespread in ancient Greece - vegetarian cheese is nothing new. Homer doesn’t mention heating the milk, and it is plausible that the parsimonious giant relied more on rennet to lower the moisture content during the make which, veggie or not, might well have been more plentiful than firewood in the scrubby Greek landscape. You can still make a hard or semi-hard cheese without heat. I’ve seen it done by traditional makers of the Auvergnat Salers and Cantal, which look and feel a lot like gnarly Lancashires - there isn’t much firewood around in the rocky central French region of the Auvergne either. The Cyclops’ cheese moulds are made of wicker rather than clay, which couldn’t have withstood the intensive pressure of a heavy cheese press. Paul Kindstedt, to whom I owe this tyrophilic account, thinks that the cheese were pressed, if lightly, and also that the conditions in the cave - moist, but not damp, with good air circulation - would have produced firm low-moisture cheeses that could have been aged long enough to develop depth and complexity. Perhaps then Polyphemus’ cheeses were the ancestors of those delicious hard sheep’s cheeses that you find all over the Mediterranean littoral and even further inland, like Spanish Manchego, Italian Pecorino (in its aged incarnation), French Brebis, or the Greek Graviera - which admittedly might also have Alpine antecedents. Although Polyphemus is milking goats and sheep, and might have been making a mixed milk cheese, the rich creaminess of the sheep’s milk accentuated by a tang from the goats’.

If you’re wondering what sort of market Polyphemus might have been supplying, Kindstedt has some theories about that too. Ancient Greece operated a lucrative Mediterranean cheese trade, as Egyptian records from the third century BCE tell us, and judging from the twenty-five percent import tax on Greek cheese, it was a luxury product for affluent consumers. These cheeses came from the island of Chios, off the coast of Anatolia, the coast of which, along with the island itself are both given as possible places of origin for the Odyssey, and thus they might have given inspiration to Homer for his (or her) description of the Cyclops’ practice. Funnily enough I was wandering about in Chios last night, although TBH this was in that most excellent time sink, Assassins Creed Odyssey. There is an idea that by making Polyphemus a pastoral shepherd-cheesemaker, Homer was locating him out on the fringes of civilised society and emphasising his ‘primitive’ savage nature. I prefer to think that the Cyclops, as rough-hewn, and carnivorous as he is portrayed, was actually the owner manager of a super-fancy high-end cheese export business. And as much as cheesemakers are nice, they might well bite your head off if you break into their dairy and start eating their cheeses. Also, Prometheus had a divine pedigree. He was the son of Poseidon the sea-god, and through his sea-nymph mother Thoosa, the great grandson of Gaia the Earth-mother. As with the Sumerians before them, whose goddess Inanna, Queen of Heaven married Dumuzi the shepherd-cheesemaker, the Greeks knew that cheese was good enough for the gods.

This week’s recommendations:

Substack: The Londonist. All sorts of tasty nuggets of London history and lore. Lovely.

Book: One More Round - Exploring the Best of British Pubs, by Jonny Garret. Woot woot! Jonny’s got a new book out!

Game: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Come on, you know you want to.

The other week I went down to Kent, ostensibly to try some cheeses with Patrick Spinazza, a recovering chef from Australia and head of cheese, sales and strategy at Curd and Cure, wholesalers of proper good cheese and a bunch of other good stuff. As we drove past the farm gate, on hearing that I’d never visited the dairy, Patrick chucked a U - Australian for doing a U-turn - and we headed up the farm track. The first thing you see at the farm gate is a raw-milk vending machine, an aspect of modern life that I am all for, largely because it is hilarious, which felt like a good sign. Turning up out of the blue at small dairy is not always a great idea, as nice as they are, cheesemakers are are a busy lot and usually pretty understaffed, and it is well to give them a bit of warning. Steve, a solid-looking chap, was nothing but welcoming though, greeting us with a friendly grin and the strong handshake of farmers everywhere.

We had a look in their cheese room first, where the the cheeses are made. The homely smell of freshly soured milk suffused the air, and on couple of steel tables sat piles of newly made cheeses, pale white and shiny with whey. Next door is the maturing room, with its earthy aroma of developing mould, trolleys of cheeses draped in damp sheets to keep them nice and cosy. Everything is done by hand in this small family operation, including the piercing - to let the oxygen in and allow the blue to develop. Hand-piercing is a tough job, when there are hundreds of cheeses to do, hard on the wrists and the shoulders, and though Steve waved the piercing tool around with a practiced ease, he allowed that after a couple of decades, he was happy to pass job that on to his sons.

As is the way, we then went to have a look at the land, and the cows. After the long months of drought it did the heart good to see lush green pastures again, with a diverse mix of grasses, and plenty of clover, which the Reynolds value for its drought-resistance and nitrogen fixing qualities, the latter aiding carbon retention in the soil and reducing the need for bought-in fertiliser. In fact I was enjoying the sight of that healthy green grass, dotted with cow pats doing their bit for soil fertility so much, that I nearly tripped over the low wire fence. The Reynolds practice regenerative farming, minimising inputs like fertiliser, feed and water, keeping their cows out on that good grass for most of the year, and rotating the paddocks to give the pasture time to recover and grow back. As their website points out, regenerative farming is a ‘popular buzz word’ at the moment, but it’s a fuzzy concept. I was reminded of how David Clarke, whose family make farmhouse cheeses in Leicestershire, said, ‘of course Grandfather would have just called it ‘farming.’

Mindful of the drought, and the brutal economics of farming in the current international situation, I asked Steve how things were going, and was happily surprised to hear him say ‘pretty good actually.’ Clearly he is a man with a generally sunny disposition, but also, as he pointed out, their region tends to get less rainfall in general so they are more used to dealing with drought, in fact he said they struggle more when there is too much rain. I would have heard more but I was distracted by the vision of some singularly pretty cows.

The Reynolds have been producing liquid milk since the mid nineties, from a herd of Holsteins, the work-horse - as it were - of the dairy industry, famed for their high milk production. By the early noughties, the milk price was at an extreme low, and the family went for an ancient solution to the issue, to add value to their milk by making cheese. Steve took a three day course at the venerable Reaseheath college in 2007 and after a couple of years of development they began making cheese. With some understatement, Steve’s wife Karen said, ‘The hard bit is finding the right recipe and making it consistent’ - I would argue that everything is the hard bit about farming and cheesemaking - but over this short time they did just that. Their first cheese, Kentish Blue, a little like a stumpy, firmer and more intense nod to Stilton, has won a sheaf of prizes. Frank joined in 2015 and soon developed his own signature cheese, Kingcott Blue a soft mould-ripened cheese, which is a notoriously difficult style to make, tending towards bitterness.

And now for those pretty cows. As much as Holsteins are famous for the volume of their milk production, they are less so for its quality, fine for drinking, not so much for cheese. After a ‘dalliance’ with some rather bad tempered Swiss Browns, the family settled on Viking Reds, a Scandinavian breed who are sweet-tempered but also have higher levels of dairy fat and protein in their milk. Smaller, stockier and fewer in number than the previous incumbents, even so, the cheese yield went up, also there was less kicking and general obstreperousness, which no doubt has contributed to Steve’s jollity. And they are lovely to look at, some dappled white and red, some a deep ochre all over.

Like all proper good cheesemakers Steve and his family are deeply fond of their animals, so much so that when their oldest, Ethel, stopped producing milk, and was about to be taken off for that last journey to the paddock in the sky, somehow, unaccountably, no one could find her cow passport - which all animals need to travel - and she now lives in happy retirement on the farm at the venerable - for a cow - age of eighteen. The Reynolds have a portrait of her in their hallway. See? Cheesemakers are nice.

The proof of the cheese, as they say, is in the eating though. And after a cup of coffee with Steve in the kitchen and a good session of putting the world - at least the world of farming and dairying - to rights, Pat and I headed over to the Curd and Cure warehouse to eat some cheese.

We started with the Kingcott Blue, its light yellow paste and gentle blueing suggesting that this would be the milder one. The aroma was winey with a note of fresh yeast and a little dank stone from the rind, and the texture is heavily creamy, Pat described it as like peanut butter, a texture descriptor that was entirely new to me but spot on. The flavour is fresh and clean with just a hint of cow, braced with a flinty minerality, light umami developing, with gentle cowiness returning in the finish. Impressively for this style, I didn’t get even the merest trace of bitterness. I loved the Kingcott for its cleanness, gentility and balance - this would be a great cheese to start someone on their blue journey. Patrick did point out that this batch was young and that Kingcott does develop more intensity and complexity with age, so if you’re at all blue-shy, go for a younger cheese.

The Kentish Blue presented as more gnarly, floridly fissured with veins and caves of a darker blue, though with an enticing aroma of digestive biscuits, which always promises greatness in a blue. The texture was more chewy delivering a sweet biscuity flavour enlivened with just a little ammoniac sting in the nose, and an intriguing note of cherry cough sweets. All these flavours were more intense than in the Kingcott but well integrated and in balance, with an exciting blush of spicy heat in the finish. Another banging cheese, which is a technical term we mongers use.

The Reynolds are firmly committed to sustainability, which is expressed in their method. Made with raw milk there is no energy cost for pasteurisation, and they use no machinery in production, even the stirring is done by hand. By the same token their sales are eminently local, most of their cheese is sold within a fifty-mile radius of the farm and they mostly deal with farm shops and small local shops and restaurants. But that’s fine because you could make a lovely day out of it, popping down to Kent to buy some nice cheese made by nice people.

This week’s recommendations:

Substack: Carlos Yescas - Cheese judge, cheese writer and cheese tour guide (!!!) Carlos’ writing is thoughtful and thought provoking.

Book: How the World Eats, by Julian Baggini - A towering work about the entire global food system(s), concerning, sometimes upsetting, fascinating and inspiring.

Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show - ‘Conversation on something that matters’. I’m not saying this is going to cheer you up but personally I find all the craziness easier to deal with if I understand it better.

For the French, you can’t get much more authoritative than Pierre Androuet fromager extraordinaire and author of the Guide du Fromage, which was published in France in 1971, and came out in the UK just two years later. Clearly the groundwork for the Great British Cheese Renaissance of the 1980s was being laid early. Pierre’s father Henri grew up in Brittany, which is not a region famous for its cheeses (for a discussion of why see A Cheesemonger’s Tour de France, (2024) Palmer, N., available in all good bookshops etc etc). On arriving in Paris in 1900 at the age of 14 he got a job as a delivery driver for Gervais a famous fromager working out of Les Halles Market. The cheese bug bit hard and in 1910 Henri opened his first shop on the Rue D’Amsterdam, and in 1935 Pierre chucked in his architecture degree and joined his father’s business. Today there are more than ten shops in Paris and Versailles as well as two, oddly enough, in Sweden, and the name Androuet is synonymous with cheese expertise all over the world.

Androuet’s Guide, being very much of its time, opens with ‘A Letter to My Daughter’, in which he maintains ‘that no woman can be a perfect homemaker if she lacks the talenfor picking the right cheeses.’ Personally, no matter how different the times were, there’s no way I would ever be denied the pleasure of visiting a proper good cheesemonger/fromager and tasting through a bunch of their lovely cheeses. Nor would I shirk my part in the homemaking. He does allow that his daughter knows a thing or two about cheese, because ‘naturally when our family gets together…we talk about cheese. There is a lot to say.’ Indeed there is, and let’s just pause for a moment and imagine sitting around a dinner table at the Androuets talking cheese, or perhaps, though this doesn’t come to me naturally, sitting in respectful and attentive silence.

There seems, in the ‘70s, to have been some discussion on the issue, even in France. Androuet asks if his daughter will ‘decide with Talleyrand, the great connoisseur, and with Brillat-Savarin, that cheese is the foremost among desserts?’ Talleyrand, a minister under both royalist and Napoleonic regimes, is famous for decapitating Vallençay, a pyramidical goat’s cheese - and crowning Brie. Brillat-Savarin, the original gastronome - who has an indulgent triple-crème cheese named after him - was the author of a saying about cheese so graphic and misogynistic that I’m not going to repeat it here. Anyway, it’s interesting that two historical figures of the late 18th and early 19th century seem to have been in team dessert. I can’t find that quote, and - may his memory be blessed - M. Androuet never let verifiable facts get in the way of a pithy aphorism, but let’s assume that he knew what he was talking about and that that was the original French tradition. It appears though that by the time of writing, that order had been reversed. As Androuet says a couple of sentences later, ‘most people in France and just about everywhere else consider cheese an extension of the meal rather than a true dessert.’ In a later section, more firmly and in more detail, he writes, ‘Cheese should be served between the salad and the dessert. Cheeses neutralise the astringent vinegar or lemon juice in salad dressings and prepare the taste buds for the suaver sensations of dessert.’ So there you go.

Let us turn now to the great authority on British cheese, the monocled ex-army officer Patrick Rance - harbinger of the Renaissance since the mid-fifties from his shop near Henley - whose Great British Cheese Book (1982), was required reading for all younger mongers when I started out in the early noughties. I’ve tended to see Rance as a rather gruff opinionated character, and though I might be stereotyping him for his appearance and background, he does have form. Here he is on toasted cheese, ‘No amount of hotting up will rescue cheap, watery block or that abysmal white or bright pink soap which seems to have strayed from second-rate chemists on to many a so-called cheese counter’. However, in his section, ‘Selecting and arranging cheese for the table’ Rance seems less pejorative, more nuanced, so that you have to infer his position on timing. He describes the cheese as appearing ‘towards (my italics) the end of a leisurely and balanced meal…’, and notes that ‘there are some enthusiasts whose appetite is rejuvenated by the sight and smell of good cheese (who) will compulsively nibble away as long as the cheese stays on the table…’ I would say as a properly repressed English person that there is no way that I could sit there nibbling cheese, delaying dessert and running the risk of upsetting someone, and therefore that Rance leans towards the post-dessert position. Given his position in the British cheese pantheon, I think we can say that after dessert is the traditional British custom.

All this was a long time ago though, and I was curious to know what contemporary sources have to say. Emma Young author of The Cheese Wheel, is in her capacity as a teacher on the great French affinage course at Mons Formation, my CI on French cheese trends. According to Emma, ‘it’s always before dessert if it’s in a meal’ - the French are nothing if not loyal to their traditions - except for royalism of course. Hero Hirsh, author of The Curious Cheese Eater, and cheese and training manager at the Cheese Bar in London, thinks we are still a nation of post-dessert cheese consumers. Although as she points out, in their restaurants - in which you can eat an entirely cheese-themed meal on a barge, or eat yourself silly on a conveyor belt of cheese-pairing plates - ‘cheese is the starter and the main so it’s rare that we serve it after dessert!’

So, if you are a cheese nationalist, then whichever nation you’re an ist of, the way is clear for you. I however am going to attempt more of an entente cordiale: Perhaps it depends what you’re eating, after all Rance himself suggests after a curry or other highly spiced dish serving the cheese as a ‘sorbet’ to clean the palate, which implies that in this case dessert is yet to come. Maybe you have eaten so well and so deeply that after the cheese there is no need for dessert, just a square of high-cocoa chocolate with the small coffee and the digestif. You could, as I said, have the cheese as a pretty vigorous first course if the rest of the meal was fairly light. Or the cheese, if you got enough of it, with a baguette (in France) or a couple of nice sourdoughs (in Britain) could be the whole meal in itself.

This week’s recommendations:

Substack: Martin Rosberg, a Uruguayan cheesemaker, educator and all-round good egg. Lots of beautiful pics of intriguing cheeses that I can’t have…yet…

Book: Papyrus, by Irene Vallejo, a glorious book about books.

Podcast: Ill Advised, by Bill Nighy, I know, I have mentioned this before, but it is a public service to tell you that after his holidays, Bill is back! Lovely man. A balm to the soul.

Among the many fundamental stories of Hinduism, is the Samudra Manthana, or the Churning of the Ocean. It is written in the Vishnu Purana that he, Vishnu, first among equals in the Hindu pantheon, churned the oceans into milk using Mount Mandara as the pole, and Vanuki the serpent as the rope to turn it, with the devas - godlike beings - and the asuras - demiurges or demons - pulling at either end. His aim, as butter is churned from milk, was to produce amrita, the elixir of immortality, but there were other side-products, which included Kamadhenu, the cow goddess and mother of all cows, who will give her owner all that they desire. Sadly for the people of the Indian subcontinent, that doesn’t seem to have included cheese, but as for why that’s for another post…

Dairying, and of course cheesemaking has over its many-thousand year history always provided a rich vein of folklore, fairytale and myth. Perhaps because it was important, both nutritionally and economically. Also, before the onset of microbiology, people thought it was magic. Many of us in the world of cheese still do. If you believe, or even suspect that there are any deities, demiurges or mischievous fairies involved with the process then it is as well to enlist their help, or at least keep them sweet.

Cheesemaking began, arguably, in the Fertile Crescent - modern Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, some eight thousand years ago. Sadly people weren’t so much into writing things down back then, and whatever stories the ur-cheesemakers told are lost to us. Around 3000 BCE, however, the Sumerians invented writing, in the form of cuneiform, in part to keep track of all the cheese they made, and rapidly discovered that writing down stories is more fun and interesting than mere accounting. One of those first stories was about cheese, at least in part…

It came to pass one day that Inanna the Queen of Heaven, goddess of war, love and sex, decided it was time to marry. At first she decided to accept the hand of Enkimdu the Farmer, who offered to provide her with grain, bread and beer. Hearing of this decision, Dumuzi the Shepherd ran over to Inanna’s place, and, in what must be the first written account of male entitlement, and jealousy, spoke thusly:

“Why do you speak about the farmer?

Why do you speak about him?

If he gives you beer,

I will give you sweet milk.

If he gives you bread,

I will give you honey cheese.

I will give the farmer my leftover cream.

I will give the farmer my leftover milk.

Why do you speak about the farmer?

What does he have more than I do?”

Wisely, Inanna changed her mind, and decided to marry Dumuzi, though perhaps in her place I would have proposed a more polygamous arrangement, thus securing myself a supply of all the main food groups, cheese, beer and bread. Their union was the occasion of some rather fruity poetry, which you can look at here, if you’re into that sort of thing. More crucially, as part of the contract Dumuzi promised regular offerings of cheese to his (literally) divine wife. This marriage was annually reenacted in the temples of Ur, the world’s first city state, with the king taking the role of Dumuzi and one of the priestesses Inanna. This required a regular and bountiful supply of cheese for the temples, and thus the world’s first large scale cheese business was established.

This cheesy tale has a long tail (words are my tools). The competition between a farmer and a shepherd for the attention of a deity came round again with the story of Cain and Able, and can be seen as the archetype of the perennial conflict between settled farmers and transient pastoralists. Furthermore, after her death, incensed by what she felt was Dumuzi’s inadequate commitment to mourning, Inanna came for him and dragged him down to the underworld. But she eventually relented and allowed him to spend half the year back in the world of the living, an account of the beginning of the seasons which will be familiar to fans of Greek myth, though with the genders reversed. You could also argue that Inanna continued to be worshipped by the Greeks and Romans in her aspect as Aphrodite and Venus respectively, and even that Christians revere her as Mary - which implies that the mother of Christ was a fan of cheese and dairy. And quite right too.

There’s another interesting aspect to this story, which is that the farmer/cheesemaker is a man, and, from the looks of that Sumerian frieze, the employees of the first industrial dairying complex were also men. This feels odd because for most of its history, the dairy has always been the province of women. There is a mystical reason for this which is that as its providers, women have always been associated with milk - the Egyptian goddess Isis was often portrayed as the ‘giver of life’ suckling her son Horus. So it is easy to see how women would be the preferred gender to keep and practice the occult arts of cheesemaking. This belief can only have been cemented by the way that the methods tended to be handed down from mother to daughter, and that families might well have wanted to keep their proprietary knowledge secret. A great way to do that would have been to enshroud these practices in a mythical ‘feminine’ aura.

A more practical reason for the female domination of the dairy, is simply that for many if not most settled cultures, women tended to perform the tasks that are centred around the homestead, like baking bread, brewing beer, or cheesemaking. While the men…wandered off to the fields with a cheese sandwich and a jug of beer murmuring something about doing a bit of sowing. It was ever thus I’m afraid. The presence of men in the Sumerian story has two possible explanations. One is that transhumant dairying, where pastoral cheesemakers follow their flocks or herds to distant pastures and make cheese in situ, like Dumuzi, has tended to be practiced by men. The other is that whenever cheese has become a lucrative commodity, rather than a domestic product, men have tried to shoulder women out of the dairy. This happened in eighteenth century Britain, where ‘rational’ Enlightenment businessmen tried to exclude women, with varying degrees of success. It turns out that you can’t just get someone to write down a recipe, appropriate it and start knocking out top quality cheese. All those millennia of experience distilled to into the craft and art of cheesemaking were not for naught. Which is as true now as it ever was.

Next time: I’m going to come back to this topic now and again. Expect some great, if mildly disturbing stuff about the role of rennet in the Immaculate Conception, early Christian cheese heretics, the Cyclops, Celtic goddesses, fairies, and witches…

Further reading:

Milk, A Local and Global History, Deborah Valenze, a rich, scholarly work.

Cheese and Culture, Paul Kindstedt, The first chapters on the beginning of cheesemaking are essential for anyone interested in its history.

Cheese is a solid derived from a liquid by fermentation, beer is a liquid derived from a solid by fermentation. Thus they are mystically intertwined.

This profound insight, for which we have brewer, beer writer, and flaneur Pete Haydon to thank, inspired one of my favourite cheese tasting themes, The Magic of Cheese and Beer, which explores the myths and legends, gods and goddesses, fairytale and folklore around cheesemaking and brewing. (Get in touch for how to book. Small and large groups, human, faye and any other eldritch races catered for.)

A match made in Heaven, Faery, Cockaigne, or the mystical realm of your choice…

The other point of that tasting is to explore, with the help of loads of delicious cheese and beer, how magically they go together.

The sheer range of flavours you can find between different styles of beer, or even within one style, makes it a versatile partner for cheese which I suspect is largely down to its four essential ingredients - water, grain, hops and yeast - and that is before we get into the vexed question of adding other stuff. On that note, I do try not to be a grumpy old goat about new-fangled things, but I baulk at some of the more mental marshmallow, peanut-butter, toffee infused beers, same for cheese with, IDK, chilis, chocolate and gin in it. But look, you can do anything you like really, as long as no one gets hurt.

Those four ingredients give you a fair bit of complexity already, but there is more. All of these have their variants, like the eminently mineral water of north east England, the many grains - barley, wheat, rye, oats and others, all those different varieties of hops, and yeasts, all of which add their own individual characteristics. And then there is what you do with all those - how you malt and kiln your grains and when you add the hops being just two examples.

There are also some specific flavours in beer that you don’t for example tend to find in wines, many of which are over in the brown section of the flavour spectrum. I’m thinking of nuttiness, toasted grain, caramelised sugars, essentially all that Maillard reaction¹ type stuff, as well as earthiness. All of these either have their equivalents in cheese, or compliment flavours you will find in cheese.

Most beers are relatively low-acid, and acidity is not always a friend to cheese, though all those lovely sours have their place. Then there is the range of textures in beer, from the pinpoint carbonation of lager to the silky mouthfeel of a stout; and the variation in intensity from a quiet unassuming British trad bitter to a big bold barrel aged stout or a heady barley wine. There’s a lot to play with there, truly a lifetime’s worth of ‘research’, as I like to call eating lots of nice cheese and drinking lots of nice beer.

1. The chemical reaction between amino acids and sugars which produces all those lovely brown flavours.

From the theoretical to the practical…

There are five ways of thinking about matching any booze with cheese - another matter on which I have done a considerable amount of research. Those are intensity, complementary flavours, contrasting flavours, mouthfeel and terroir. Here are examples of those, illustrated with some of my favourite cheese and beer pairings.

Intensity - The fundamental principle: neither should drown out the other.

Five Points Best with Kirkham’s Lancashire

Complimentary flavours: Like with like.

Unbarred Joosy Pale with Spenwood

Contrast: One brings out the other.

The Kernel Brewery’s Damson Saison with Perroche.

Mouthfeel: Which can be contrasting, or complimentary…

Lost and grounded Keller Pils with Baron Bigod

Terroir: What grows together goes together

Mobberly Brew House Pale with Appleby’s Cheshire

I hope I have whetted your appetite for more research into the magical world of cheese and beer pairing. I’d love to hear about your favourite matches, and any other ‘research’ that you have done…

Further reading:

Miracle Brew, Pete Brown A vastly more comprehensive and knowledgeable account of the ingredients of beer, and much, much more.

The Meaning of Beer, Jonny Garrett An encyclopedic, readable and often hilarious account of the entire global history of beer - with plenty of gods, goddesses, etc…

Cheese and Culture, Paul Kindstedt The big one. A history of cheese and its contribution to Western Civilisation, such as it is…

A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles, Ned Palmer Chapter Five has stuff about witches, magic and folklore in it.

The great thing about the British dairying industry is that new cheeses appear all the time. While just keeping up can be a little bewildering, it does keep me interested. The other great thing is that having lost so much of our dairying traditions by the 1970s - stick with me here - British cheesemakers are not shy of a bit of innovation, an attitude expressed in the Great British Cheese Renaissance, which began around that time and is still flourishing today. At first the new wave cheesemakers looked to the Continent for inspiration, where ancient dairying traditions were still preserved, and their cheeses tended to be homages, if you will, to the fromages of France, formaggios of Italy and quesos of Spain. Among the cheese fraternity these styles are known as Renaissance cheeses. As their confidence grew, British cheesemakers began developing completely new styles of cheese, a movement which I like to refer to as postmodern cheese for its place in the historical sequence, and attitude of playful experimentation. Cheshire producer Claire Burt’s new cheese, Bidlea Blue, which appeared on the British cheese board last year is a postmodern cheese par excellence.

Claire’s background set her up well for a position in the vanguard of the postmodern cheese movement. She originally worked at the cutting edge of modern dairy technology as a product development manager for Dairygold Food Ingredients, and began making cheese at home in her kitchen in 2009. She won a gold medal for her new cheese at the International Cheese and Dairy Awards in 2010, and promptly set up Burt’s Cheese that year. In 2024 Claire came first in the Stilton category at Affineur of the Year - an annual efflorescence of cheese geekery - and last year won again, this time the Rising Star award, whose prize, stretching the definition, was a free place on the notoriously demanding affinage course run by Mons, the eminent French fromager-affineur.

As to postmodern cheese in its broader sense, you can read my article about that in the new print edition of Pellicle, a hitherto online magazine which is coming out in hard copy this November. This is tremendously exciting because the writing - about beer and other cool stuff - is some of the best around, but also the aesthetic is glorious, and I can’t wait to hold an actual physical copy in my hands. But now back to that cheese…

Paradoxically, Bidlea is firmly rooted in British cheese tradition, in that its starting point is a Cheshire recipe - a cheese with a good solid four hundred years of history behind it. Claire and her head cheesemaker Tom, having inoculated their milk with Penicillium Roqueforti, begin the make as you would for a semi-hard cheese like Cheshire, cutting the curd, stirring and heating it in the vat, allowing it to reform into a solid mass and then milling it into shards, mixing in salt and pouring the curd into moulds. Here they diverge from tradition by leaving the new cheeses to drain under their own weight rather than putting the moulds in a press as you would for Cheshire. This creates an open texture that allows the blueing to develop more thoroughly throughout the paste. After turning out the cheeses are left for a week or so to develop their own flavour before being pierced, letting oxygen in to allow the growth of the blue. This also is a departure from traditional Cheshire which - even if the odd accidental blue cheese was treasured by the connoisseur - was not deliberately blued either by the addition of mould, or by piercing. Some days after that, when the blue has begun to take hold, the cheeses are wrapped in vine leaves which have been soaked in cider. Leaf-wrapping is not canonical in British cheesemaking, although it is beginning to take hold, given here a native twist with the cider. Claire and Tom use Gwatkins, from a family run cidery in Herefordshire, where Tom is originally from.

The result is an intriguing and moreish cheese. The dark tea-coloured leaves give a beautiful appearance and make a strong contrast to its pale ivory paste, shot through with indigo and sky blue mould in lines and pockets. The aroma is fruity and astringent with a tang of ammonia, while the buttery texture retains just a bit of Cheshire’s moist crumble. The flavour is rich and savoury, sweetness is balanced with minerality and a wisp of tannin from the leaves, ending with just a hint of spicy heat. I would definitely try this with a medium or sweet cider - Gwatkins being the obvious choice, as sweetness works nicely with the salty and savoury flavours of a blue. Or, you could lean into that minerality, and in the spirit of terroir, try a classic British pale ale, whose ‘bitter snap’ originally came from the hefty dose of calcium sulphate in the water in North West England, and perhaps gives the cheeses of that region their mineral character. However you have it, this is an excellent introduction to the wonderful world of postmodern cheese.

Substack: Me, My Pigs and I, by Helen Freeman. Helen was a pig farmer and currently works for Farms Not Factories. Her Substack collates agricultural and policy reports, advocates for regenerative farming, and publishes a monthly community newsletter about farming. An all round good egg.

Book: The Curious Cheese Eater, by Hero Hirsh. Full disclosure, Hero is a pal, but this book really is a cracker. Everything the curious cheese novice, or hardened tyrophile could possible need.

Podcast: Radiolab, a very cool podcast about science. In particular this mental episode about a thousand year old Anglo-Saxon remedy that seems to work against antibiotic-resistant bacteria!

Some cheeses are born extreme, like Cabrales, made up in the high pastures of the Picos de Europa mountains in Northern Spain. It’s made from cows’ milk with some goat and sheeps’ in the mix, and while the Oxford Companion to cheese ascribes its piquancy to the goaty note, with the sheep adding sweetness, I would argue that volatile short chain fatty acids in sheep’s milk, released by the action of the blue mould, can also add an eye-watering heat to a cheese. The cheeses are matured for up to two months in the mountain caves, whose cool moist conditions and natural ventilation through fissures in the rock are perfect for the comprehensive development of the blue. Cabrales is riddled with it, so much so that the paste around the veining has a blueish tinge, presenting a daunting appearance even to the hardcore extreme cheeser. The texture is moist, crumbly, a little grainy, and the flavour is sweet and malty, often with an estery fruity note. Then the heat comes, spicy, sinus-clearing, with the paradoxically numbing effect of Szechuan pepper.

The fun thing about extreme cheeses is that they will stand up to spirits, and the locals pair Cabrales with the local firewater Orujo, distilled from the skins, seeds and stalks left over from wine making. Depending where you’ve been, you might recognise this as Marc, Grappa or Rakia, and your first sight of it was probably someone’s uncle walking toward you determinedly, brandishing an unmarked bottle in which a clear liquid swirls with an ominous heft. Back home, if I feel I’ve been lacking stimulation I might have some on toast melted over anchovies and accompanied by an aggressively smokey Isla whisky.

Some cheeses achieve extremity, and one example is Brie Noir, in that even a fully mature conventional Brie with intense flavours of steamed cabbage, pepper and a hint of the barnyard, still stays within fairly normal parameters. Not so for Brie Noir, which is aged until it becomes rock hard and shrunken, the paste a deep caramel brown - ‘Noir’ seems to be more for dramatic effect. This is a local specialty of Brie country, in Isle de France just east of Paris and you are unlikely to have come across it if you haven’t been there. It might be a thing that only its compatriots could love, and then more by the older generations who were acclimated to it in their childhoods. One Brie producer told me that they really only make the Noir for the older Briards, who would be cross if they didn’t. I understood this viscerally - or perhaps nasally - when we went into the Noir store. He warned me not to breathe too deeply, and as the door opened a wave of eye-stinging nose burning ammonia blew over me; apparently it is not uncommon for the unwary affineur to be rendered briefly unconscious by the atmosphere. I felt then that this was a really niche product, and that I wouldn’t want to annoy anyone hardy enough to eat it for their breakfast - some Briards like to soften a chunk in their coffee to get the morning going with a bang. When I left the farm with a generous portion of their luscious pillowy Brie de Meaux, I was also carrying under one arm, as a gift pressed on to me by the cheesemaker, an entire wheel of Brie Noir. I was a bit shy of it, although given its hardness and sharp edges I thought that I could always use it as a throwing cheese to bring down some of the local fauna for my dinner instead.

My first experience with the Noir was not overwhelmingly positive. I didn’t really know what to do with the stuff, so being quite impulsive, I just hacked off a decent chunk and bit down on it. This was by far the toughest cheese I’d ever bitten into - it would do as a chew toy for a pit bull - and it took a while to get through. The flavour was mostly ammonia with a musty edge and burnt my mouth so intensely and for so long after I’d finished it that I worried I’d done my tastebuds permanent damage.

It turns out though that not all Noirs are created equal. The first producer I’d visited picked their lowest quality cheeses from any given batch to age on, and apart from a bit of brushing, pretty much left them to get on by themselves. Jean-Michel Dongé, third-generation maker of one of the world’s finest Bries, selects ten of his best wheels from each batch and his affineurs look after them with the love and care they give all the Dongé cheeses. The paste of their Brie Noir is still supple, a deep gold colour rather than brown, looking much more inviting. Also, it turns out that just cramming a chunk into your mouth is not the way to eat this cheese; the Dongés recommend shaving it into a salad or over pasta. With that in mind I let a sliver of theirs dissolve on my tongue. There was no burn, no potentially career-ending taste bud damage, the ammonia was present as a hint of spice, enlivening flavours of caramel and hazelnut. This was a delicious, complex cheese, that aside from its singular age barely merited the description ‘extreme.’

Some cheeses have extremity thrust upon them through the exigencies of circumstance. In 2005 a Quebecois cheesemaker sank some barrels of cheese fifty metres deep in the dark waters of the Saguenay fjord, having heard that cheese ripens faster at high pressures. Tragically he lost the barrels and, unless I have any rich subscribers who wish to fund a cheese treasure hunt, we will never know what that tastes like. In 2012 a Wisconsin cheesemaker found a forty-year old block of Cheddar in the back of his store but he’d sold it all before I could fly out and try some. Apparently it was ‘crunchy and sharp’, a paltry description which makes one weep for the lack of trained cheese writers. In 2016 a group of divers found a tin of cheese on a 340 year-old Swedish shipwreck, which expedition leader Lars Einarsson described more helpfully as ‘…like a mixture of yeast and Roquefort, a sort of really ripe, unpasteurised cheese…’ They were too scared to try it in case they died, to which I say, ‘where’s your spirit of adventure? Prep an ICU bed and get me a knife and some crackers.’

I have tasted a four year old Cheddar which came out of a Parmesan store in the north Italian town of Bra, near Turin. Just for calibration, proper clothbound Cheddar is usually ready at around twelve months, might get to eighteen and in very rare cases, two years. The Cheddar was Pitchfork, a traditional cloth-bound style made in Somerset by Todd and Maughan Trethowan, whose traditional Caerphilly was responsible for my conversion to cheesemongering. Todd and Maugs are not afraid of pushing the envelope when it comes to cheese, and in fact in all aspects of their lives. In 2019 when the brothers came over for the biannual international cheese festival they dropped one of their Cheddars off at the Cravero maturing house; the plan being to come back for the next festival in 2021 with a cheese that they had aged back home and compare the two. Giorgio Cravero would apply all the skill and craft of someone whose family have aged cheese for a hundred and seventy one years; Todd and Maugs were going to use their native cunning, ie stick theirs on a shelf in their barn and wing it. Then, if you will recall, something happened such that they didn’t make it to the 2021 festival, which was a quiet affair, and the cheeses sat in silent majesty until everyone got back together in 2023 for the next Bra Cheese.

Todd freely submits that their one was ‘vile, it turned to brown sludge,’ but that Giorgio’s, lovingly shepherded through the years with all the craft and skill he could muster was ‘parmesanesque.’ It was indeed, and I tasted it when I was hanging out at their stall on the last day of the festival - sweet, with boozy fermented fruit flavours and a tingling heat like pop-rocks coated in powdered Scotch Bonnet, and I ate as much as I could before they sold it all to some very avid Italians - a nation of natural extreme cheesers.

So there you have it. Extreme cheesing. Vastly less dangerous than base jumping, cheaper, tastier, and in my view much more fun. Give it a go.

This week’s recommendations:

Substack: Up There The Last - Traditional production methods, plenty of transhumance, lovely man.

Book: The Discovery of France, by Graham Robb, one of the inspirations for my Cheesemonger’s Tour de France.

Poem: The Assault of Angels, by Michael Roberts.This be the verse.

I suspect that our lack of an affinage culture is not because we are less civilised than the French but that our traditional cheeses require less intervention during maturation. Most of them are hard, or semi-hard, and so their lower moisture content makes them less changeable over time; and instead of developing a rind, mature more from the action of bacteria on the fats and proteins in the body of the cheese. Still, the British affineur has plenty of responsibility for their charges. The first tenet of affinage is simple: don’t ruin the cheeses. This starts with keeping them in the correct conditions, broadly speaking, a temperature of around ten to twelve centigrade and humidity of up to ninety percent, which is pretty much what you’d find in a cellar or cave, hence the cave-matured cheeses of Wookey Hole and Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, the home of Cheddar. Not everyone has access to either and most Cheddars are matured in barns on their home farms. It’s quite something to see thousands of wheels of Cheddar with their dappled rinds tending to grey as they mature, sitting on their shelves in serried ranks like dreadnought battleships steaming out of the mist at Jutland. The sight always makes me a bit weepy - I tend to get emotional in the presence of large amounts of cheese.

Nothing is simple with proper cheese, which changes from batch to batch along with the weather, the feed and even the moods of the animals and cheesemakers. The affineur has to be on top of their game at all times, tasting the cheeses as they mature and deciding which batches can carry on as they are, which are a bit shy and might need a bit more warmth to get going, or which are getting carried away and need to slow down a bit. This stands for all cheeses, including the less volatile harder ones. Also even clothbound hard cheeses need to be turned and rubbed, which, aside from lots of washing, is the main occupation of the affineur. We turn cheeses so that every surface gets an even exposure to the air, and to make sure that when they are young and softer that they maintain their shape, and also so that they don’t get sticky bottoms. For Cheddars and other clothbound cheeses, we rub them to control the mould growing over the cloth so that it doesn’t keep in too much moisture. This mould does play a part in ageing these kinds of cheeses, adding a note of cool damp stone reminiscent of a country church. Cheddars weigh around twenty-four kilos each, and turning them is quite a business They are oddly fragile, at least on their edges which if dropped can crack and let in unwanted microbes or even the dreaded cheese mite, a pesky arachnid with a taste for cheese. I have spent an inordinate amount of my working life carrying heavy things, and I can tell you that carrying heavy, fragile and very expensive things - a whole Cheddar might be worth up to a thousand pounds - is very demanding indeed. Not dropping one, when you are tired out after turning loads of them requires every bit of the cheesemonger’s will.

Softer cheeses, with their higher moisture content, are more volatile and changeable, requiring more intervention on their journey to maturity, and their transformation thus feels more magical. Mould-ripened cheeses like Brie or its English cousin Baron Bigod arrive in the cellar rindless, firm like feta with a pale cream colour, and a simple fresh flavour of soured milk. The first job is to lay them out on racks, well spaced so that the air can flow around them. Within a day or so they begin to develop a misty penumbra made up of minute filaments of mould on their top sides which the affineur pats down before turning the cheese. This patting knits those filaments together creating the velvety covering of mould which will break down the fats and proteins in the paste softening the texture and developing complex flavours - those notes of mushrooms, steamed cabbage and pepper that we expect from this family. This requires a gentle touch so as not to damage the rind, and as always, constant attention. If the rind develops to quickly the outside of the paste can become too liquid while the centre remains firm, or become too thick creating a distracting texture as you bite into the cheese.

Washed-rinds, like the French Epoisses, or the amusingly named Stinking Bishop arrive in the same state but are instead washed in a brine solution. The salty water discourages mould growth and favours the development of the Brevi Bacterium Linens bacteria, B. Linens to its friends. This helpful little microorganism creates orange-pink rinds and a funky intimate aroma, also softening their texture and lowering acidity. This again requires skill and attention, the brine must be of the right concentration for the cheeses, and you need to get the washing regime right - usually more frequent in younger cheeses, tailing off as they age. The transformation into rumpled-rinded multi-coloured cheeses with oozing centres and complex flavours is marvellous to behold, no less so now than it was the first time I saw it, and it feels equally marvellous to have had some part in the process. After my first few goes at washing cheese, drunk with power, I wanted to wash all the cheeses in the business just to see what would happen - at which Bill laughed, ‘yeah that happens to everyone the first time they wash some cheese.’ Turning hundreds of cheeses every day might seem tedious but the work is meditative, calming, even spiritually fulfilling. At the end of a long day I would stand in the cellar for a moment, thinking about all my microbial colleagues doing their work and feel a sense of love for them.

Affinage is intellectually demanding, and requires a certain mental agility. You can’t just follow a set of fixed instructions for every cheese, as I found out one morning in the cellar when I got in early and began laying out the new delivery of Wigmores on the racks - a delicate floral mould-ripened cheese from Berkshire which goes from hilariously bouncy in its youth to deliciously liquid when it matures.

‘Gee, what are you doing?’ said Bill when he arrived - he used to say that to me a lot.

‘What we did last week Bill, why?’

‘Touch them again, see, they’re quite moist, we should put them in the cold room under the fan for a bit to dry out more.’

Having felt that I was beginning to get the hang of things, I expressed my frustration at not just having a fixed schedule, even just for one type of cheese, at which Bill dropped one of his classic nuggets,

‘If you don’t play with your cheese, it will play with you.’

I think he meant that you need to adopt an inquisitive, flexible and even playful attitude to looking after your cheeses or they will go funny on you. As a recovering jazz musician, this attitude felt familiar to me. In the same way that I tried to explore a tune not just play it the same way every time, so the affineur responds to each batch of cheese with a fresh and open mind. On that note, as it were, I have another musical analogy for affinage, which is that its practitioners are like mixing engineers, in that if a band took their tune to three different studios, they might end up with three quite different tracks. In the same way different affineurs have their own house style, and might get quite different outcomes with the same cheese.

When I described the difference between mould-ripened and washed-rind, I was actually being a little simplistic. Really for soft cheeses, you generally want to see a vibrantly multicultural population of different microbes at work on their surfaces; some bacteria on the mould ripened, some moulds on the washed-rinds, and maybe a few yeasts here and there on both. Recently, cheese scientists have discovered that the various microbes do more than simply contribute their characteristic flavours to the mix, in fact the dynamic interaction between them as the cheeses ripen is much more important for the end result. To take just one example, Geotrichum, the wrinkly yeast-like mould, which contributes cabbagey and mustard-like flavours to the cheese, also ameliorates the bitterness which the snowy white Penicillium Candidum mould can contribute to the flavour. It’s a sign of human inquisitiveness and ingenuity that cheesemakers and affineurs have been fostering these symbiotic interactions between microbes centuries, if not millennia before microbiologists were able to give an account of the underlying processes. That affinage sits in the intersection between craft and science is nothing new to its practitioners. As eminent affineur Hubert Mons - first of his name - who opened the business in 1950s, said, his work was seventy percent empirical knowledge, gained from experience, and thirty percent understanding the underlying process. Hubert’s son Laurent, who now teaches Mons’ famous affinage course, says that these days that ratio is more like sixty/forty in the other direction, but this is still a pretty strong showing for craft knowledge, given the advances in microbiology over the last half-century.

Having mastered the essentials, like not ruining the cheese, and growing a mould or bacterial rind on the softer ones, affineurs have been known to indulge in more florid displays of artistry. Washing in various sorts of booze has a long history; the monastic cheesemakers of Belgium washed theirs in beer and some still do. There is some argument about what this does other than encourage the fulsome B. Linens, but I like to think that different beers might leave traces of their flavour, that alcohol might affect how the various microbes interact with each other, and unpasteurised beers might still contain some active yeasts which might transfer to the rinds. The Burgundian Epoisses is washed in the fiery grape spirit Marc de Bourgogne, and there is a theory that this acted as a sort of anti-microbial defence. If so then clearly the local strains of B. Linens must developed an immunity because boy is that a funky cheese.

I’m not sure if wrapping cheese in leaves counts as affinage or making, but the practice can certainly add to its character. The Provençal goat’s cheeses Banon and Mistralou are wrapped in chestnut leaves, which seem to impart a tannic nutty note; Cornish Yarg’s nettles impede mould growth leaving the cheese zesty and fresh; Rogue River Blue’s brandy-soaked vine leaves add an unsurprisingly boozy fruitiness to the powerful blue flavour. All these cheeses also look very beautiful, which only adds to the experience.

If there is one very hard-won benefit of almost losing all of our traditional cheese craft in the UK, it is that we might be more adventurous in our making and affinage than our Continental counterparts, whose traditions have been much better preserved. Nowhere is this better-expressed than at the affineur of the year awards that I talked about recently, with their beetroot powders, and smoked meads, hay, and hops, and various forms of smoking. This year Laurent Mons and his fellow teacher Emma Young announced the start of the same competition in France, in which he freely submitted that they might struggle to get French affineurs, more steeped in their tradition, to take such creative risks.

I don’t know if this all sounds a bit complicated and challenging, most worthwhile things are. The great thing about appreciating the craft, science and art of affinage, is that after you have admired the appearance, and paid a quiet, respectful homage to all the work that has gone into the cheese, you get to eat it. This is arguably a more visceral way of experiencing art than merely looking at it or listening to it. I am going to stop talking now and go and do just that.

Thank you to Jane Quicke of Quicke’s Cheddar for a succinct yet comprehensive answer about ripening Cheddar.

This week’s recommendations:

Substack: Emily Nunn’s Department of Salad, Use Your Cheese As You Please. Nuff said.

Book: Girly Drinks, by Margaret O’Meara Someone told me about this at a tasting this week, and it sounds fantastic - the forgotten history of women and booze. I am going to read it with my cheese.

Podcast: Jam Tomorrow, by Ros Taylor, About post-war British history and how our lives changed. If you listen to the one about the Poll Tax riot you might hear a familiar voice…

Affinage is the craft and science of ripening cheese, thus someone who practices it is an affineur. It’s telling that we use the French word, which underlines the relative levels of respect that cheese enjoys in both countries. Happily something that the Academy through its excellent courses and events like this is doing its best to change. At its most basic level this work consists of just not messing a cheese up, by keeping it in the right conditions. Hard and blue cheeses needs are quite simple, mostly just regular turning and rubbing. Soft cheeses take a bit more care and attention to form their rinds, either by patting and rubbing the moulds or washing in brine to develop a bacterial covering. This in itself is satisfying and creative work, but affinage can be a more floridly creative process, turning the original cheese into something quite different.

For the awards, competitors could select one or all of four cheeses covering a range of styles, each with their own challenges: Whitelake Cheese’s Rachel, a semi-hard goat’s cheese, Quicke’s Cheddar, Trethowan’s Gorwydd Caerphilly, Cropwell Bishop Stilton and the Brie-style Baron Bigod. Young cheeses of the same batch were sent out to the competitors to ensure that they were on a level playing field. The judges pick a winning affineur for each cheese, and then one overall winner, who takes home the coveted trophy, a wooden cheese with a cheese iron sticking out at at triumphantly jaunty angle. Those judges were an august panel of international cheese experts, big cheeses if you will, including such luminaries as the eminent French affineur Laurent Mons; Josh Windsor, director of the caves at Murrays, the venerable New York cheese shop; Patricia Michelson founder and owner of La Fromagerie; Perry Wakeman, three-times winner of Affineur of the Year; and cheesemakers Sarah Furno (Cashel Blue) and Tim Jones (Lincolnshire Poacher.)

The cheeses are laid out for judging in the crypt, an appropriately cellary place for an affinage competition, which one would expect to be nice and cool, though once you cram a couple of hundred excitable cheese fanciers in turns out to be quite warm. Tradition dictates that the event opens with the ceremonial Cutting of the Cheese, after which the judges get on with the judging and the rest of us pop back upstairs to drink delicious Blanc de Blanc from Flint Wines, eat loads of cheese and chat with all our cheesy mates, or as us freelance cheesemongers like to say, ‘work.’

Alongside the main event is the People’s Choice awards, voted on by the general public, or as general and public as you get at an event like this. I’m not sure what to make of this, but there was almost no crossover between the cheeses the ‘public’ chose and the picks from the professional judges. Now here are those results:

People’s Choice

Quickes Cheddar: South West Cheese Shop, washed in smoked mead. Washing in booze is a well established method, the smoked element more innovative. The mead added just a gentle hint of smoke to the cheese, which had kept its moist texture and sweet earthy flavour, showing that Rob and his colleagues had honoured the first principle of affinage: ‘don’t ruin the cheese.’

Gorwydd: No. 2 Pound Street, matured in hay, which I think is originally an Italian practice. Sweet with a hint of the farm and old books. ‘Not too wacky,’ is how my friend and colleague Tani from the Guild of Fine Food described it, which is a higher accolade than you might think.

Rachel: Neal’s Yard Dairy, (Islington Branch), washed in brine and rubbed in beetroot powder. Again the First Principle was honoured, and the cheese had the gentle nutty flavour and giving moist texture you would expect of a Rachel, no mean feat for a shop without an actual maturing cellar. The cheese was striking, beautiful and like no other cheese I’ve ever seen, which is saying something.

Cropwell Bishop Stilton: Chiswick Cheese Market, oak smoked and ale washed. When I was a Younger Monger, full of the zeal of the newly converted, I would have deplored this, but that would have been incorrect. The smoke was skilfully subtle, with a yeasty edge to the cheeses’ signature umami note which might have been thanks to the ale.

Baron Bigod: Paxton and Whitfields, rubbed in three types of pepper. Somehow this brought out an umami note which I don’t normally associate with mould-ripened cheese, like a steak with pepper sauce. Skilful affinage left a firm centre whose acidity contrasted nicely with the creamy breakdown.

People’s Choice Overall Winner: South West Cheese Shop. Nice one Rob!

And now for the big ones…

TLDR, The Courtyard Dairy, one of Britain’s most beloved cheese shops, smashed it this year.

Quickes: Courtyard Dairy, Alpine style. Simon and his colleagues took an experimental approach to all their cheeses. Rather than seeking outcomes, they were asking questions, an approach that captures the quintessential spirit of the affineur. For this one it was, ‘how much does affinage affect flavour’, i.e., what happens when you mature a Cheddar like a Comté, and the answer is ‘a lot’. Sweet, with hazelnuts and tropical fruits, just like an adolescent Comté. Nice.

Gorwydd: No. 2 Pound Street, hay aged.

Rachel: No. 2 Pound Street, washed in mead, rubbed in bee pollen. Sweet and earthy with flowers and fresh hay. I liked the mix of innovation and respect for the character of the cheese with this one.

Cropwell Bishop: Courtyard Dairy, cloth bound. This is kind of like an in joke for British cheese people in that most of our traditional cheeses are bound in cloth, except for Stilton. Super, super creamy with bags of spicy umami.

Baron Bigod: Courtyard Dairy, anatto wash. This natural vegetable dye is conventionally used only for colouring, but given that it does have some aroma and is quite alkaline, the team wanted to see what a thorough wash would do to the character of the cheese. It was musky with fungal notes and the paste creamy with a firmer fresh centre. Also they looked beautiful, sorry I was too excited to take a picture…

Annnnd the winner, and this year’s Affineur of the Year is The Courtyard Dairy! Congratulations you lovely mongers you! As their very just rewards, Simon and James are going to spend an all expenses paid week in the cellars of Murray’s in New York City, sponsored by Murray’s themselves.

This year also saw the debut of a new prize, Rising Star, sponsored by the great French fromager-affineur Mons, to celebrate and foster new talent. This year’s thoroughly deserving winner was Claire Burt, maker of the startlingly pretty Burt’s Blue, for her apple and maplewood smoked blue. Congratulations Claire! Claire’s prize is the famously demanding Mons affinage course, at their caves near Roanne on the Loire.

The whole place was absolutely heaving with top quality cheese, as well as its makers, affineurs and mongers, and as such was a palace of joy for me. It was exciting seeing how successful both the traditional and the more experimental approaches to affinage can be, from bee pollen and beetroot powder to minimal intervention in the the perfect conditions for a particular cheese. Also it’s nice to be reminded, as if I needed to be, how lovely cheese people are.

And now for a couple more lovely cheeses:

This week’s recommendations:

Substack: Normal London Bloke - You know how things are a bit shit and terrifying right now? This bloke makes you chuckle about it all. I like him.

Book: Time’s Anvil, Richard Morris. A lovely, lyrical, thought provoking meditation on British history and archaeology, time, human culture and how short the Long Past really is.

Podcast: In Our Time - I was a bit sad to see Melvin go, but Misha Glenny is doing a cracking job.

Huge thanks to everyone at the Academy of Cheese for all that you do in the Great Cause, also Tani Dawn-Hiscox and Katy Fenwick for actually listening to people while I swanned around eating cheese and haplessly burbling.

Cheeses are like tunes. You know when you suddenly think ‘I haven’t listened to Rose Rouge by St Germain for ages!’ Then you listen to it again and remember what an absolute banger it is? It’s the same with cheese. The other day I was at the Trethowan Brothers’ stall at Borough Market buying some Gorwydd Caerphilly, when I saw in their chiller cabinet, the distinctive shape of a Flower Marie - a perfect white cube seemingly cut from the centre of a cumulonimbus cloud, and remembered how long it was since I had tasted one.

Both cheeses carry a considerable emotional weight for me. Gorwydd was the cheese that made me into a monger, twenty-five years ago when I began selling it at Borough with its maker Todd Trethowan. It’s still one of my favourite cheeses, and the first one that I give to my guests on my Cheesemonger’s Tours. Flower Marie was one of the first cheeses I looked after in the cellar at Neal’s Yard Dairy when I began to learn the craft of affinage. Mould-ripened cheeses like this are particularly exciting to handle when you’re a Younger Monger. They arrive in the cellar rindless and firm, and over the days a mist of mould filaments appears on their surface, which by gentle patting and turning on the part of the affineur is transformed into the velvety rind of the finished cheese. To the recent initiate into the Mysteries, this feels like magic.

There’s a lot more history to Flower Marie than just my personal one. This is a quintessential representative of the British Cheese Renaissance, a movement which began in the late 1970s in response to the threatened extinction of traditional cheesemaking in the British Isles. Having lost so much of our indigenous dairying knowledge, the new cheesemakers of the Renaissance went to the Continent for inspiration, where cheesemaking traditions had been better preserved. The name speaks to this cultural exchange, referencing a Corsican soft sheep called Fleur de Maquis. ‘Marie’ celebrates a hero of the Renaissance, the late Ann-Marie Dyas, a champion of proper cheese, who opened The Fine Cheese Company in Bath in 1995. The recipe was developed by another Renaissance hero, monger, affineur and cheesemaker James Aldridge, who is also sadly no longer with us, though he is remembered in the annual James Aldridge Memorial award for best raw milk cheese. In the early nineties, with the generosity of spirit characteristic of cheese people, Aldridge gave the recipe to two more stalwarts of the Renaissance, Sussex cheesemakers Kevin and Alison Blunt, and helped them to develop the cheese. Their dairy Golden Cross Cheese is still going strong, and this is only one of their consistently excellent cheeses.

The pure white of the rind and its smooth texture like a virgin snowfield is the first thing I notice about a Flower Marie. I usually look for a range of colours and textures on a mould-ripened cheese, showing a multicultural population of different moulds, yeasts and bacteria which confer complexity and depth to the flavour. On a Flower Marie, the white mould Penicillium Candidum, né Camemberti, is dominant, keeping the flavour quite simple though no less profound. Also distinctive, even unique, is the texture of this cheese which I struggle to describe. Creamy yet firm, a bit like marzipan or like a firm sort of foam, just as I imagine it would be like to bite into one of those cumulonimbus clouds. The flavour is clean, mineral, the salt just present, finishing on a light burst of white flowers tempered with citrusy acidity. At each bite I wondered, ‘why don’t I eat this more often,’ although perhaps such a joyful experience shouldn’t be blunted with too much repetition.

As to what to drink with a Flower Marie, even after years of committed research into the matter of pairing cheese and booze, I am at a loss. Definitely something very delicate, so as not to overwhelm its unassuming simplicity. Maybe something with bubbles, but soft moussy ones, nothing too spiky. Anyone have any ideas?

This week’s recommendations:

Substack: Modern British - Exploring the often bemusing attitude of the British to food and eating.

Book: How the World Eats - Julian Baggini. With the breadth of view of a philosopher, which he is, Baggini tackles the daunting and overwhelming topic of the global web of food production and distribution. Impressively readable and not without hope.

Podcast: The Food Programme - This is like tunes and cheese, one of those things that I keep coming back to and thinking, ‘why don’t I listen to this all the time?’

The caves of Roquefort have an inspirational power to them. Surrounded by cobwebbed walls and black oak shelves shining with the patina of centuries’ worth of rich sheepy whey, it is easy to feel a communion with the generations of cheesemakers and affineurs who have worked here before you, and a sense that somehow you should find a way to honour their work and their devotion to the craft. This was clearly the case for soon-to-be-ex vet John Bailey, because it was down in one of these caves, perhaps while fortifying himself with a bit of the eponymous and notoriously characterful cheese that he thought, ‘this is something I could do.’

In 2017 John and his wife Heather Benbow sold their vet business and bought Wakebridge Manor Farm in the valley of the river Amber in Derbyshire, with the intention of starting a sheep’s cheese business. If you’ll remember, there was some stuff going on then that made it harder to get grants for this sort of thing, then a few years later, that Other Thing happened which seriously delayed the import of all their cheesemaking equipment from the Netherlands. So it was not until 2023 that the first cheeses were ready to take to market. Nevertheless, they persisted; cheesemakers - even proto-cheesemakers - are nothing if not resilient, and resourceful.

Along the way John and Heather had recruited Daniel Mason, partner of their daughter Victoria, to help make the cheese. Like almost everyone I know in the world of cheese, Dan’s journey into it has been non-linear, yet not irrelevant. Coming out of a degree in environmental science he began volunteering with a view to work as a ranger but he had already begun home-brewing. This interest took over more and more until he began touting himself around breweries instead, and finally got a job at Castle Rock Brewery in Nottingham. Now at this point, if Dan had turned up at my dairy I’d have hired him like a shot already with that background, but there is more. It turns out that he had been fascinated by cheese since childhood, and was a keen hobbyist cheesemaker at home, using as his guide the American book The Cheesemaker’s Apprentice, but, I suspect, doing a fair bit of seat-of-the-pants cheesemaking and developing his instincts.

Like all the great cheesemakers Dan has a sort of off-hand humility about the process. Allowing that his background in brewing has informed his cheesemaking, he says that they are similar processes, and that for both crafts you are working with ‘raw materials that are unpredictable,’ so that a major part of the process is ‘problem solving.’ Dan sees two main forces in cheesemaking: the changes in the milk affected by the weather, the lactation period of the sheep or even their mood; and the microbial processes at work during fermentation - neither of which the cheesemaker has full control of. All you can do is it ‘steer the milk in the way you want it to go.’ I reckon Dan’s a natural helmsman because the cheese is excellent.

Most of the hard sheep’s cheeses in the British Isles are based on Continental styles, like Italian Pecorino, Spanish Manchego, or French/Basque Brebis. With its cloth binding and soft crumbly texture, Wakebridge feels more indigenous to me, and I was curious to know if the cheese was based on an old recipe. I was particularly excited about this because the territorial cheese of Derbyshire was one of the styles that was rendered completely extinct by the early 1900s, largely due to the advent of the railways, and the development of the easier and less risky liquid milk industry. I’ve always wanted someone to resurrect Derbyshire cheese.

Dan says that the starting point for the cheese was wanting something ‘simple, that would show off the milk,’ and would not ‘divide people,’ in the way that say the often eye-wateringly powerful Roquefort can. The cloth binding, unique to British style cheeses, is something that he had always done with his cheeses at home ‘because that worked the best’ and makes the cheeses easier to transport. The recipe is broadly based on traditional British methods, using a British starter culture for example, and one of the results is that brittle crumbly texture, rather than the more elastic one characteristic of Continental hard cheeses. Dairy consultant Richard Newell helped in the early development of the recipe to make the cheese more ‘commercial’, which I read as ‘suiting the British cheese palate’.

Even if there was no intention to replicate an old Derby cheese, these eminently practical choices seem to me to be the same sort that Dan’s dairying forebears would have made - and though they are tantalisingly few, there are glimpses of a lost history of cheesemaking on the farm. I like to think that they would have liked Wakebridge and recognised it as something that could have come from their land, their flocks and their dairies. That the cheese is sheep’s milk locates it right back in the medieval tradition of cheesemaking, before British makers shifted to cows.

As for the cheese itself, Wakebridge has the light ivory colour of sheep’s milk, with the pretty imprint of the cloth on its rind. The aroma reminds me of buttered popcorn and while many hard sheep’s cheeses have a tropical fruit flavour, this one tastes of coconut - a thing I have never found in a cheese before - with a hint of caramelised milk that gives me a homely memory of the sadly extinct 1970s Caramac made from condensed milk and sugar. Perhaps we can bring that back too.

I’ve been enjoying Wakebridge with Unbarred Brewery’s Joosy Pale, whose tropical hoppy notes combine with the coconut note in the cheese to give a cheesy beery version of a piña colada. You can try them too if you come on one of my Cheesemonger’s Tours, in which we finish up at the lovely Blue Maid in Borough High Street for a cheese, beer and history tasting.

At the moment I’m amazed that anyone would think of starting up a new business, what with how tough things are at the moment; I’m constantly amazed that anyone would want to get into cheesemaking, given what hard graft it is, though I submit that it can be very rewarding; I’m verging on flabbergasted that Dan and the rest of the family have managed to produce such an excellent cheese in such a short time. Cheesemakers are amazing.

This week’s recommendations:

Substack: A Private Chef - Will Cooper: chef, beekeeper, cheesemaker, all his food looks lovely…stop it Will! You’re making the rest of us look bad!

Book: Field Work, by Bella Bathurst - A moving, beautifully written and sometimes heart-breaking exploration of farming life in contemporary Britain. This is a must-read if you work in food, but really I feel that everyone who lives in a city should read it.

Podcast: Farming Today - In the spirit of reminding us all where our food comes from…or doesn’t but should…

The awards were started in 2020 during That Thing, in response to a crisis in the British Cheese world, which was that with lockdown and in particular the closing of the restaurants, cheese sales had dropped off a cliff. Also, you can’t furlough cows, sheep and goats, they keep on producing milk, which needs to be made into cheese, and the makers’ stores were full to bursting. One cheesemaker I know reckoned he was about a week away from going bust. Something had to be done, and a campaign, Save the Cheese, was launched, to which the Virtual Awards made a great contribution. The British public did their duty - i.e., bought shedloads of proper good cheese, and within weeks, things were looking much better. For cheese at least. Founder Sarah de Wit decided to keep up the good work, and the Awards are now in their sixth year.

Judging cheese is not just a thinly-veiled excuse to eat lots of cheese - as if I needed one - this is serious business. Winning an award can be a great for a cheesemaker’s public profile, and their sales of course. In a wider sense competitions like this one, along with - deep breath - the Artisan Cheese Awards, the British Cheese Awards, the International Cheese and Dairy Awards, the Global Cheese Awards, and the World Cheese Awards, keep cheese in the public eye, which is where it needs to be, and then in the mouth and tum obvs. Just as importantly, the various awards provide a chance for makers to get feedback about their cheeses from a group of experts, which can be as valuable for the experienced producer as the newcomer. All of us can do with a polish now and then can’t we - otherwise it would be boring. For us cheese people awards are a great opportunity to hang out with our fellow mongers and makers, which for freelancers like me is particularly great, no longer working in a shop, I don’t get to see as much of my cheesy people as I would like, and as I have said many a time, cheese people are nice. What makes the Virtual Cheese Awards special is their virtuality, which makes them accessible and sustainable, and means that organisationally challenged mongers like me don’t miss out…

Judging is a challenge - after all you want to do your best for all the cheesemakers, and give each cheese a fair go. You have to taste mindfully, paying attention to appearance, aroma, texture, mouthfeel and flavour. We try not to use subjective judgements, like ‘I like this’ and strive to be as clear and objective as possible. Here my more florid descriptions are inappropriate, and in fact useless. There is no point in saying that this cheese is like drinking from a cool mountain spring on a hot day, we just need to know if the salting is correct, if the flavours are complex but in balance, if there is a decent length of finish, if the texture is creamy, but not claggy. You have to resort to simile to describe flavours, but these need to be communicable - if I tell you this blue tastes of digestive biscuits, marmite and bubble gum I think you’ll get what I’m saying. If I say this reminds me of going for a walk in the Hindu Kush, or my granddad’s aftershave, probably not.

This year’s judging was particularly challenging because I had just one category - blues - and there were twenty-one cheeses in it. Even I was somewhat jaded by the end. Luckily there was a very high standard among the entries, a lot of the cheeses were complex and balanced, and restrained - I am a big fan of restraint in cheese. Even more luckily I was partnered with one of my favourite judges, cheesemongers and indeed people, the excellent Ruth Raskin who is among other things, head of cheese care at the Fine Cheese Company. We seem to have a very similar taste in cheese so that judging with Ruth is always easy. We nearly always give the same marks and similar notes. Also, as you can imagine Ruth knows a thing or two about the microbial processes behind ripening cheese, and I always learn something when we work together. This time, it was more that I had my attention drawn to the way that if the blue mould isn’t getting enough space to grow. Without enough oxygen it can die off, going brownish and getting a tired musty flavour. That and a lovely new word for the lighter shade of blue - kingfisher - which I am going to treasure. As to who won, you’ll have to wait till the 17th of June to find out when you can see the live final.

As for the holiday, we were in Wells in Somerset. This remarkably pretty and friendly place seems to have stayed below the radar for now, perhaps due to its rather underwhelming billing as Britain’s smallest city. The cathedral is built in among a series of wells, and in the fifteenth century then Bishop of Bath and Wells, Thomas Bekynton set up a system that fed water from these to a fountain in the market square, and to conduits that run down all the larger streets. The soothing and cooling sound of running water is everywhere, and feels like a blessing. The cathedral itself contains many wonders, the most famous being the striking scissor arches added in the fourteenth century to prevent the tower from collapsing. The Jesse Window is one of the finest surviving examples of medieval stained glass in Europe, the ancient mechanical clock is a thing of wonder, and these are only some of the Cathedral’s attractions. The cathedral choir is justifiably famous, and going along to Evensong was a movingly beautiful experience - my order of service was soaked in tears of wonder and joy. This open inclusive cathedral welcomes people of all faiths and none at the services, so don’t be shy about going along. Also, you have to see the gardens around the wells. We had a great meal at Root, second of a trio opened by Josh Eggleton and Luke Hasell - the others are in Bristol and Bath. The ethos is ‘more veg, less meat’, the emphasis is on shared plates with an ever-changing local menu - the Old Winchester cheese croquettes with brown sauce were life-changing - and the service is quietly competent and friendly. Nice wine list too. We stayed in a lovely Airbnb near the centre of town (everything’s near the centre of town…) called the Hidey Hole which was smashing decorated with wit and whimsy, there is a SMEG oven, sharp knives, a courtyard to sit in, and crucially its old stone walls make it nice and cool. Go to Wells people. You heard it here first.

And then it was time for the cheese rolling. Which was on the May bank holiday, Monday the 25th, on Coopers Hill near Gloucester. I have always been bemused by this, after all it’s easy enough to go and buy some cheese without risking life-changing injuries. The first mention of the sport - if that is the word - is in an entry in the Worcester Journal for 1836, which describes the Coopers Hill Wake, a kind of fair, and among other attractions like the sackrace, wrestling and bobbing for oranges, announces that ‘two cheeses are to be run for’. It is generally believed to be much older than this, and my money’s on a pre-Christian rite celebrating Spring and the beginning of the year’s cheesemaking - in the old days the cheese season was restricted to Spring and Summer. In recent years it has become hugely popular, and my first inkling of the scale of this was that the police had closed off the road that leads to the bottom of the hill, and my taxi driver had to drop me a good mile or so away.

This was non-optimal as it turned out to be the hottest day in May ever, at a not at all balmy 35 degrees. I thought I’d take the scenic route, by footpath rather than road, which turned out to be a big mistake as this followed the fields and was distinctly lacking in shade. This bit felt a lot like going to an illegal rave in the 1990s, in that I was part of an impromptu group of people slogging up the hill, generally wondering if we were on the right track as there are no signs. The whole thing is completely unofficial - a rarity in compliant Britain - presumably because no one in the council wants to take any responsibility for the all but inevitable broken bones and other injuries. At the same time, it would clearly be impossible to stop the thing. There seemed quite a lot of people walking up with and behind me, but I really began to understand the scale when I heard a strange sound emanating from beyond the tree-line, which I gradually recognised as the baying of a huge crowd.

As I came reluctantly out of the shade of the trees I realised I was at the foot of Cooper’s Hill, not, as I had been hoping, at the summit. The other thing I noticed was the dense crowd pouring through the gate and onto the slopes of the hill, easily as packed as a rush-hour tube, with more and more people pressing in all the time. Because I am not insane and have an aversion to be being trapped in massive crowd on top of a hill in 35 degree heat with limited water and no toilets, I immediately abandoned the mission, and found a shady spot to sit down in, drink water and call Hunter, expecting to watch the whole thing on his monitor later. As it happened, his cameraman Nate was set up in a field a little way from the foot of the actual hill, with a view - if you had a telephoto lens - of the action. So I wandered over there and watched a couple of the - excuse the term - heats.

You’ve no doubt seen it, so I will spare you the descriptions of the headlong flight of the cheese bouncing over the tussocks and the tumbling flail of limbs and bodies in pursuit. There is one thing that video will never do justice to, which is the brutal, near vertical steepness of the slope, reaffirming my absolute commitment to never ever doing this. The races themselves last just seconds, and really what I found most fascinating was the number and enthusiasm of the spectators. Every now and again the whole area would ring to the chant of ‘cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese…’ from thousands of throats, and people really did come from all over. Hunter met an American woman whose husband was competing, the couple had come over on their honeymoon to do this; the men’s downhill was won by a German runner and the women’s by a woman from the Basque country - an excellent training ground.

A couple of races was enough for me, and on hearing that Hunter and Nate were staying for the full two hours, I decided to slope off before I succumbed to heat stroke. An hour or so later after a very lucky bus, I found myself in a shady alley outside a pub in Gloucester - the Drunken Duck if you ever happen to be that way - with a pint of teeth achingly cold lager and a smug self-satisfied demeanour.

On balance, I am glad I went along, it really is quite a spectacle, more, for me about the crowd in a way. It’s great to see that there are still rumbustious, un-regulated, pagan events here in Britain, and heartwarming to see so much enthusiasm around cheese, or at least the pursuit of it. Cheese people are nice, if occasionally a bit mental…

This week’s recommendations:

Substack: Martin’s Substack Sheer cheese porn. Martin Rossberg is a Danish-Uruguayan cheesemaker and all round lovely guy who I met at Cheese Berlin in 2025. Mostly pictorial, this is a record of his experiments in natural cheesemaking, largely based on European recipes. I want to go there.

Book: Karla’s Choice, Nick Harkaway. I don’t know about you but I’ve been jonesing for some proper Cold War vintage Le Carré recently. Boy could he swing a pen. Set after Spy Who Came In From the Cold and before TInker Tailor, this does the business. Harkaway is Le Carré’s son, a great writer himself, and in this one has done his old man proud.

Podcast: Origin Story - Two of the smartest guys in the room, Ian Dunt and Dorian Linskey host this, and every episode is great; informative, urgent, often darkly funny. This episode, part one of a pair on climate change denial feels really apposite given the weather.

The thing you need to know about the Robertsons, and their associated clans, the Wicksteeds, Calverts, Cooks, Wilsons, Sweeneys, Jamsons and Pestells, as well as an impressive collection of old family friends, is that there are an awful lot of them. The night before our wedding I had to get my wife Imogen to draw me a diagram so that I could greet the whole family appropriately, which took a few sheets of A4. To be perfectly honest with you I still haven’t got the whole lot down yet after fourteen years.

Imogen and I took on the catering, which unsurprisingly involved a generous offering of cheese - it’s quite the responsibility selecting the cheese for your father in law’s wake. We wanted to pick styles of cheese that Mark really loved, to celebrate his background as a proud Northeasterner and to buy as locally as possible. Thankfully there are plenty of outstanding cheeses that fit these directives, and the only problem was narrowing down the selection.

Before we get to the cheeses, because I want you to know that we really did send Mark off in style, let me also tell you that we had fifty rounds of sandwiches from local Darlington caterers Catering in Style, cut into triangles of course; an inordinate number of little pork pies - Mark did love a pork pie - quiches and sausages from Darlington butcher Taylors; and a tall pyramid of Kiplings apple pies, Mark’s dessert of choice. And now for those cheeses:

Wensleydale was an obvious choice - Yorkshire’s national cheese, loved with a fierce pride by all Northeasteners. For Mark’s immediate family this also stood as a reminder of the traditional Boxing Day lunch at the CB Inn in Arkengarthdale, high up in the Yorkshire Dales, a place of outstanding, awe-inspiring beauty; and for me personally, the time when I was researching A Cheesemonger’s History, when Mark drove us to the oddly homely ruins of Jervaulx, Wensleydale’s monastic birthplace, and the little town of Hawes at the top of Wensleydale itself, where this cheese flourished for so many centuries.

Just as importantly, Wensleydale is delicious, especially in its traditional pre-war farmhouse version which is epitomised in Yoredale, made by the Spence family in Caperby. It’s surprisingly creamy - if you are used to the modern crumbly version - complex, earthy, with notes of green herbs, and eminently sessionable. Out of all three, Yoredale disappeared the fastest - a testament to its approachable excellence as much as to people’s loyalty to a regional treasure.

I wanted to have a Cheddar for its more heartening qualities, but Cheddar’s home is down in the South-West, and so we chose Doddington from Northumberland. Mark’s father’s family were from Alnmouth, a port on the Northumbrian coast.

Doddington made by the inimitable Maggie Maxwell on her family’s farm near Wooler, began life as an un-dyed version of Red Leicester, and retains that satisfyingly chewy texture, it also has the savoury heart-warming bite of Cheddar, and the sweet caramel note of Gouda - the last a legacy of visits from Dutch agricultural students. This sort of promiscuous multiculturalism is a characteristic of modern British cheese, the hard-won fringe benefit of losing so much of our traditional local cheesemaking cultures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Mark was a big fan of blue cheese, in particular the firmer more toothsome British styles like Stilton. Keeping with the local(ish) remit, we went for Darling Blue, another of Maggie’s cheeses. This one is named for the Northumbrian lighthouse keeper’s daughter Grace Darling who in 1838 at the age of 23 saved victims of a shipwreck and became a national if reluctant heroine. Mark was a keen dinghy sailor, and like anyone who has gone down to the sea in ships, or little boats, had a healthy respect for its dangers, and knew Grace’s story well.

Another good reason to choose Darling Blue is that it is an absolute cracker, with plenty of umami from the blue, a moist yet crumbly texture with a bit of refreshing acidity and a lovely biscuity note on the rind. Overall the flavour is quite gentle for a blue cheese, which can be a little intimidating for some palates, and as such this was hugely popular with everyone.

Darlington is blessed with a great cheese shop, Darlington Cheese and Wine, and it is one that I have a big soft spot for. I used to sell Neal’s Yard’s cheeses to its original owner, Terry Farr who opened for business in 1999. Terry put in a good word for me when I started going out with Imogen, and her parents went to see if he knew anything about this random cheesemonger who had blown into their lives. It’s now run by Caroline and Dean Elliot who have been doing a fantastic job, so fantastic indeed that even in these difficult times, they have moved to larger premises in Skinnergate, one of Darlo’s main shopping streets. You can now get a plate of cheese and a glass of wine, ad enjoy both on their comfy sofa, and I believe there are plans to open a dedicated tasting space upstairs. I asked them to put a whole Darling Blue aside for me, and when I went to pick it up was told in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t paying a penny for it. Cheesemongers are nice.

This week’s recommendations:

Substack: The Day My Cobbled Together Kitchen Went Viral, from the lovely Debora Robertson (no relation…I presume…) and her Substack Lickedspoon. If this doesn’t drive you mad with envy you are dead inside.

Book: Staring at the Sun, by Irving Yalom. Given this week’s subject. This has been a great comfort to me when thinking about ageing and mortality, my own or anyone close to me. A compassionate, thoughtful and eminently readable book.

Podcast: Staph Retreat, on Radiolab podcast. Antibiotic resistance started wayyyyy sooner than we thought, but fear not, an Anglo-Saxon remedy might be coming to the rescue…

Thank you again to Darlington Cheese and wine, Maggie Maxwell and Neal’s Yard Dairy for all the lovely cheese.

Beenleigh Blue

Made by Ben and Laura Harris in Devon.

Pasteurised sheep’s milk, vegetarian rennet.

The moist, fudgy texture of Beenleigh feels just right at this time of year, and delivers a startlingly sweet flavour with notes of tutti-frutti ice cream and pistachio barfi - an Indian fudge that my mum used to keep me quiet on art gallery visits in the 1970s. Most of the time this is a very delicate cheese - I seem to prefer more delicate flavours in hot weather - and I often use it to entice the blue-shy. Now and again you will get a much stronger batch so it is always worth trying before you buy. I’ve always thought that Beenleigh would make a great basis for an ice cream, perhaps enjoyed with a glass of Amontillado. If someone wants to give this a go, I’ll pop round with the sherry.

Cashel Blue

Made by the Grubb family and their team in County Tipperary, Ireland.

Pasteurised cows’ milk, vegetarian rennet.

Buttery. So buttery, with a gentle maltiness like a digestive biscuit, which is funny because a swipe of creamy Cashel on a digestive would make a lovely comforting snack at any time of year. The blue is well distributed throughout the cheese - a sign of skilful cheese making - and has a lighter shade, like a pair of stonewashed jeans, rather than the deeper indigo shade which usually suggests a more intense flavour. That creamy texture while still luxurious, feels lighter than the more fondanty mouthfeel of a Stilton or a Roquefort, which also makes Cashel a good bet for a summery cheese. I do love a dark beer like Porter or Stout with blue cheese, and I suspect a dark mild, lighter but still showing those chocolate and coffee notes, might make an enjoyable match with this lovely cheese.

1924

Made at Fromagerie de Laqueuille in the Auvergne, France.

Pasteurised cow and sheep’s milk, animal rennet.

I don’t know if this is just my romantic cheesemonger’s soul, but I get an element of minerality in this cheese, which I like to think comes from the soil of this once tumultuously volcanic region, one of my favourite places in France. Another sweet biscuity cheese with some umami, but still well-balanced and approachable - I think the addition of cows’ milk softens the piquancy that often characterises sheep’s milk blues. Eating Roquefort for example can produce a sensation in the nasal passages like that you get after being properly dumped by a big wave at the beach, a feeling I call ‘extreme cheesing’, and which can be pretty enlivening. The two cheeses are related in a way. Roquefort got its PDO in 1925 - the first cheese to attain this honour - which stipulated that the cheese be made from just sheeps’ milk. Before this moment it was traditional to make it from whatever milk you had to hand. The mixed milk 1924 references this pre-PDO style, possibly the most passive-aggressive named cheese in the world.

This week’s recommendations:

Substack: Pretty Girls Eat Guts (just for that title really): Cathedral, Champagne, Ham, Glitter which took me back to Reims, debunked some food and drink myths (I love a good debunk) and, crucially, contains mention of Roquefort ice cream! Come on guys! Where is my Beenleigh ice cream, hmm?

Book: Gastrophysics, the New Science of Eating, by Charles Spence. At last I now understand why washed-rinds smell more challenging than they taste. No I’m not going to tell you. Read the book.

Podcast: The British Food History Podcast with Neil Buttery (good name…) in particular the episode on the Cheese Manuscript obvs.

You see, age doesn’t necessarily make something better, unless you are referring to freelance cheesemongers of course, who are just about entering their prime in their fifties. What we really ought to be looking for rather than really ancient cheese, is cheese at its optimal age - à point, as my French colleagues would say - and this depends on the style.

If we take a fresh cheese for example, like Neal’s Yard Creamery’s Perroche, or Cote Hill White then we’re talking days, perhaps a week max. The whole point of these cheeses is to have them before a rind has begun to develop, enjoying their delicacy, simplicity and refreshing acidity. Just the thing as the weather gets warmer, especially with a glass of cold crispy rosé, moisture beading the outside of the glass

This is not, absolutely not, to say that you should throw this sort of cheese away after a week, this is much more a best-before than a use-by sort of deal. But I would probably turn my leftover fresh cheese into a garlicky dip, or stir it into a bowl of pasta with some smoked salmon and dill rather than serve it on a cheeseboard.

For those cheeses which are supposed to develop a rind, for example mould-ripened, or ‘bloomy rinded’ cheeses like the French Brie or Camembert, Fen Farm Dairy’s Baron Bigod, or the unfailingly lovely Julie Cheyney’s unfailingly delicious St. Jude, the life-cycle is measured in weeks or months rather than days. The various friendly microorganisms, moulds, yeasts and the odd opportunistic bacterium break down the fats and convert them into aromatic compounds, giving those peppery, cruciferous notes much sought after by the soft cheese lover. Ripeness is in the eye, or on the palate of the beholder, and these cheeses have quite different characteristics at varying stages in their maturation. Perhaps ‘perfectly ripe’ for you is when the paste is completely broken down, uniformly creamy all the way through, and all those notes I mentioned are quite pronounced if still balanced. There is a French style of affinage (the craft of ripening cheese for which the British are not civilised enough yet to have a name) which deliberately leaves a striped of firmer cheese through the centre, whose bright acidity contrasts pleasingly with the richer layer of ‘breakdown’ underneath the rind. The French rather poetically call this strip l’âme du fromage, or ‘the soul of the cheese’. Which is nice. Some people, whose palates are perhaps a little more jaded, might want to wait until the last moments of a mould-ripened cheese, when the paste is fully liquid, the rind gives off a pronounced nose-burning ammoniac tang and sulphur and hot mustard dominate the flavour profile. Each to their own.

Big blues - and I mean big in size not necessarily in flavour like Stilton and its cousins - really come in to their own at between two to four months of age, when the paste develops the creamy texture of fondant icing and the blue mould has again broken down the fats, this time from the inside. This mould, Penicillium Roqueforti (because the French are totally on it with bagging cheese-related terminology) tends to release flavours in the umami spectrum like marmite, as well as fruity or even solvent-like notes which often remind me of 1970s tutti-frutti ice cream. One reason why Stilton and friends are so popular at Christmas might be that late season milk from around August to September tends to be particularly rich, and richness is what we want for our Christmas fare. Just to keep you on your toes though, the Stilton adjacent Sparkenhoe Blue made by Will Clark on his family’s farm in Leicestershire is firmer and with a clean acidity still works well in the Spring and Summer. I had some this week and it was cracking.

Now for the hard cheeses, which are what people are really talking about when they ask for our oldest one. The whole point of these is that the optimal amount of moisture has been removed during their production, with acidity steadily (in good cheesemaking) increasing over maturation, so that they can be aged for longer and develop a profound complexity without falling prey to so called spoilage bacteria which might cause unwanted flavours. Still, the optimum age depends on the type, the house style of the affineur, and your taste.

Take proper Cheddar, by which I mean Cheddar made on a farm, in twenty-four kilo cylinders wrapped in cloth and lard. This can be ready after a year of aging, when it has begun to express the characteristic profile of this noble and well-loved cheese: grass, fresh hay, brothy umami, with the moist cool stone of an old country church. Many Cheddars can be taken up to eighteen months when they will develop a pronounced bite on top of those flavours, now and again some batches can go up to two years. But, and this is one of the things I love about cheese, you can’t just assume that all the Cheddars from one producer can reach that advanced age. The good cheesemonger will use their experience and their palate to select those rare cheeses who will take that amount of ageing.

And then there is Lincolnshire Poacher, love child of Cheddar and Gruyère, for which the curd, in the good alpine style, is heated to a higher temperature than that for Cheddar, and, instead of the more permeable cloth/lard combination is coated in the polymer Blanose, a sort of modern equivalent to wax. With its low moisture and less permeable coating, Poacher can easily make two years, when it develops the texture of Parmesan, the sweet nuttiness of Gruyère and the authoritative bite of a really well aged Cheddar. The Poacher 50, so called for the even higher temperature make, might go up to three or four years, and is really quite something.

Comté comes in a variety of ages. In French shops, or fromagers marchands, you will see a broad age range of Comtés in the counter from six, through eighteen to twenty-four, to over thirty months. Personally I find the six a touch jejeune and thirty can be little overblown, while the eighteen to twenty-four hits the spot, showing dried fruits, toasted hazelnuts, hay and bags of umami. I say that but a few weeks ago my friends at Mons Cheesemongers made me try a thirty-plus month Comté (I know, it’s a hard life) and it was utterly glorious, rich, intense, bitey but still well-balanced. These things must be assessed on a case by case basis.

I felt the same about Parmesan, and I will pretty much always get the two rather than the three year - which is the usual age range. This was until I saw a picture of Andy Swinscoe owner of The Courtyard Dairy cracking open a seven year old wheel this week, and immediately ordered some, because if Andy says it’s good then it is. Also he knows a thing or two about looking after cheese.

Every now and again there is an outlier, usually the result of an accident. I am not, for example, all that big a fan of improper Cheddar, i.e. that which comes from the factory in square blocks and spends its short life wrapped in plastic, inside which nothing much can be going on. However, in 2012 Milwaukee cheesemaker Ed Zahn found a forty pound block of plastic-wrapped Cheddar - about twenty or so kilos - in the back of his cold store. It had been on the missing list since it was made in the 1970s. Cheesemonger Ken McNulty sold this Rip Van Winkle of the cheese world in his shop, the Wisconsin Cheese Mart, rationing his customers to 100 gram pieces, and only selling it to people in person. My wife caught me on the way out of the door, suitcase in hand so I didn’t get to try it - which is one of my life’s great tragedies. Zahn said it was crunchy on the outside and ‘overwhelmingly sharp’ on the inside (NPR Morning Edition, August 31, 2012) while McNulty described the cheese as ‘barely edible’ (Mike Sula, Chicago Reader, October 8, 2012), but then he was probably trying to keep it for himself.

This week’s recommendations:

Substack: Grain to Glass - Why Does Cheap Beer Give You a Worse Hangover? Hooray! I am not just a delicate flower, cheap booze IS worse for me.

Book: The Meaning of Beer, Jonny Garrett. The entire history of beer, engaging, funny, so informative. If he starts writing about cheese I’m done for.

Podcast: No Such Thing as a Fish I discovered this last year and, completist that I am, I began listening at Episode One, have listened to twelve years worth since then and am almost caught up. They speak about cheese a lot and often don’t get it wrong.

This was no great hardship given my fondness for cheese and talking. Also I was blessed with the presence of a lovely audience with finely tuned palates and a similar enthusiasm for cheese and words; the assistance of Charley - one of the house’s spectacularly competent staff; and the expertise of Lisa the chef, who provided the accompaniments. And this is the crucial bit, because the topic of this piece isn’t actually what a smashing time I had last week, but is instead the mindful selection of accompaniments for cheese.

Let us start at nine o’clock on the plate with those apricots. Notice that Lisa chose the darker, drier and more intensely flavoured ones, which are usually available in any good Turkish shop - Malatya province in Eastern Anatolia being a centre of excellence for the sun-dried apricot. I have a couple of theories for matching these. One is by contrast, choosing a fairly young goats’ cheese whose still-pronounced acidity will bring out the rich fruity flavour of the apricot - in this case a young Dorstone, moussy, fresh and bright, but well-developed enough to stand up to the concentrated flavour of a dried fruit. Another would be to find complimentary flavours, for example in the thirty-month Comté which I brought along (it was a significant birthday). Apricot, along with some other amenable notes like walnuts and nutmeg, are common flavours in that mighty cheese. A glass of Palo Curtado sherry would have really topped that combo off, but we had to be content with a peachy Viognier or a well-rounded vintage Pol Roger. One makes do…

Moving in a clockwise direction, we come to the fruitcake, whose presence I greeted with a cry of joy and fellow-feeling. Cheese and fruitcake is a northeastern tradition, and one I was sadly unaware of until I married into a Durham family. Up there the Christmas cheeseboard is incomplete without Wensleydale and Christmas cake, although I feel strongly that this pairing is for life not just for Christmas, and can be enjoyed all year round - the milky tang of the cheese, the dark dense fruitiness of the cake, the moist crumble of both. Which in our case we had not got, but that was fine because we did have Simon and Tim Jones’ special reserve cheese, the Poacher 50. Aged for up to four years, the fudgey crunch of Parmesan and the sharp bite of proper Cheddar were mellowed if not entirely tamed by the fruitcake. Were you to head west from Durham by the way, you would eventually be offered Lancashire with apple-pie, for as the Lancastrian saying goes, ‘a pie without cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze’.

Almost hidden by that jauntily placed sprig of rosemary is a fresh fig, one of my favourite fruits to pair with cheese. Fig and goats’ cheese is a no-brainer, and if you were really going for it, a dab of honey too. One could even grill the whole thing for a showy yet simple starter.

As for the grapes, judicious choice is crucial, and Lisa did not let us down. Notice that there are two types. Firstly the tight, plump red grapes, their acidity cutting through the creamier soft cheeses. I forget their actually type though, because I was so taken with those pretty Muscats, their misty dusting of grey reminding us of the Pinot Gris grape - an all-time great wine for matching with cheese. Their sweetness and slight blowsiness was lovely with the harder cheeses, and even stood up to the 1924, a mixed-milk blue based on pre-1925 Roquefort, hence the passive aggressive name.

At six o’clock is the damson paste, another favourite of mine. This is traditional British condiment which performs a similar role to the Spanish membrillo or quince paste, in that it can be used to moisten well-aged and somewhat mouth-drying cheeses like Manchego or in this case, the Poacher. The darker fruit is of course more intense than quince though I find that damson also works with light fresh cheeses like Dorstone or milder traditional British styles like Caerphilly.

And then in the final position, the pièce de résistance, some candied walnuts which Lisa had made herself specially for the occasion. Sweet, crunchy, nutty, these went with everything, ticking boxes for complimentary, contrasting and textural approaches to pairing. Even so, Stichelton’s name led all the rest. Stilton and walnuts is a well-established match, and Stichelton, being made to a traditional Stilton recipe, performs the same role admirably. One imagines an Edwardian squire sitting at this very table enjoying this very combination with a glass of vintage port. In the absence of the old vintage p. we had a sweet yet light-hearted South African dessert wine made from late-harvested botrytised Sauvignon Blanc. Needs must and all that.

There is a more austere approach to matching cheese, which is to just bring one thing. I am a big fan of England Preserves’ Red Onion Marmalade for this. The long-caramelised onions provide stickiness and sweetness over a base of umami, thus covering pretty much all your cheese pairing needs. The R.O.M. has never failed me. Or you could go properly old school and bring out the Branston Pickle, the ultimate nostalgia pairing for those of us of the Boomer/Long Gen X cohort. The pickle’s deep brown flavours, reminiscent of HP and Daddies sauces, are redolent of that brownest of decades, the Seventies. The rich sweetness of dried figs and prunes and the contrasting malt-vinegar tang, are perfect in a sandwich with a proper Cheddar, or indeed any hard or semi-hard British cows’ cheese, accompanied with a well-steeped cup of orange-hued builders tea.

This week’s recommendations:

Substack: Food Relics, in particular this wonderful post EDIBLE EPISTEMOLOGIES// Cheese Cellar as Archive, from last year but a stone banger nonetheless.

Book: The Last Retreat by Marina Palmer. Full disclosure: Marina Palmer is the pen-name of Imogen Robertson, who, fairly low down her list of notable achievements, is married to me. But never mind that, this a fantastic book with a driving plot, great characters and a timely theme (scary millionaire tech bro wants to take over the world). Also, it’s quite fitting: “After surviving a raid in Ukraine, war photographer Tash Carter is in desperate need of recuperation. She accepts a job teaching photography at Belford Abbey, a luxurious estate where the super-rich come to switch off and be renewed.” See? Please pre-order this now so that Imogen can take me back to Coombe End.

Podcast: This American Life, In the Shadow of the City. I’m not going to tell you anything about this. Come to it fresh.

Cheeses from Neal’s Yard Dairy and Mons Cheesemongers, Diermersdal Noble Late Harvest Sauvignon Blanc 2024 from Laithwaites Wines. Utter joy from Laura, Ade and all the staff at Coombe End.

You may wonder why you should expend any of your limited time or mental energy on this issue, after all it’s only cheese. Well, for one thing someone put a lot of time, and care, and craft into making your cheese. By the same token, someone else put a similar amount of effort into ripening it, or at least keeping it in perfect condition until they sold it to you. It is proper that we honour such devotion by not messing the cheese up at the final stage. Also, as you’ll see, cutting cheese properly ensures that everyone’s piece is of equal and optimal quality, and we want to be nice and fair, don’t we. Finally, given that in a godless universe life is essentially meaningless, I’ve always found that a great way to stave off the bleak terror of the existential void is to do things properly. This works for even the simplest, seemingly menial tasks like mopping the stage before curtain up (which I have done a lot), washing cheese racks (also a lot), or cutting cheese (SO much cheese cutting). Ok then? Here goes:

The vast majority of cheeses are round, and the most common shape you are going to come across is a section of that round, i.e. a pie slice. Now here is the key thing about that shape: don’t cut off the nose. You will see why in the following diagram. If someone starts by cutting of the nose, which they may want to do to secure themselves a piece that is all cheese and no rind, and everyone follows suit, then the poor person on the end - in this case the snebbee is your innocent undeserving Uncle Ned - gets a bit that is mostly rind. What you do is to keep on cutting pie slices, from nose to rind, as you will see in the second diagram.

Ok, got that? Don’t cut off the nose. Simple. Except, sometimes, cut off the nose. What? I never said cheese wasn’t complicated. You may have a very long narrow pie slice, as is often the case with Brie or its noble British cousin Baron Bigod. Any further pie slices cut from that shape will be unwieldy - too long and narrow. Instead, make a bold cut at at a right angle across the nose - fear not, the rind is on the top and bottom of this cheese and you will still get your lovely bit of breakdown. If this is very broad you may want to cut it again down the middle. Then afterwards cut pie slices from the foreshortened piece. The complex becomes simple; this is the whey. (Sorry.)

The general principle behind all cheese cutting is that everyone gets an equitable distribution of rind and cheese, and good old Uncle Ned is not disappointed. For any round cheese, like a Camembert or its tasty British cousin Tunworth, half and then quarter that round so that you get a nice prominent nose which is then easy and clear to cut from to make your equal pie slices. Obviously if you have a dinky little St. Jude - a fudgey moreish British take on St Marcellin - just cut it in half. Or shove the whole thing in your mouth at once. I won’t judge you.

Some cheeses do come in more awkward shapes, like the pyramidical Valençay, that eminently mineral goat’s milk from the Loire or the Scottish Blackmount, creamy and peppery in its fully aged state. Just relax and think about it for a bit. It’s basically the same sort of thing - just have a look at the cheese and see how you would divide it into those equitable portions. Again, halving it first can be helpful. I like to make that first cut across the diagonal, the two corners make accuracy easier.

Then we come to the vexing issue of the very thin pie-slice, of a hard or blue cheese, where it would be impractical to cut more thin slices of the main piece. This also works for long flat pieces, like slices of Comté. There is a fancy French way to do this which involves various diagonals at different angles and is characteristically elegant. I have a more gordian, even brutal solution. Lay the piece down flat, and if one long edge has rind, cut that off - not too far in to be wasteful, but far enough in to take out any darker-coloured more rindy flavoured cheese. If you are dealing with Comté or any similar mountain-style cheese cut the rind off both sides of course. Then just cut slices off from one side, like this:

In terms of specialised knives, I always used to say that you don’t really need them, and this is broadly true. A decent sharp kitchen knife will do for most cheeses, though ideally for blues and softs something with a narrow blade is good because it doesn’t catch on the soft-textured cheese so much - you could use a boning knife. However, it is well to use the proper tool for the job. Boska make excellent cheese knives and other cutting tools (reaching out for sponsorship…) and the well equipped cheese fancier would find their life improved with one for soft and one for blues as the very least.

Now, having said all that, when serving a large amount of cheese at some sort of celebration, I like presenting whole large pieces and encouraging the guests to have at it. Yes, you end up with cheese that have been hacked at and butchered, but there is something joyful in the raw primal enjoyment of Proper Good Cheese. And that is the most important thing - to enjoy yourself, and your cheese.

This week’s recommendations are all mates of mine, but they’re still really good. Objectively.

Substack: Vittles - the whole thing. Some of the best, most up to date and wide-ranging food-writing you will find in this or any other country. Feel the benefit.

Book: The Cheese Wheel - How to Choose and Pair Cheese Like An Expert, by the inestimable Emma Young, while we’re on the subject of doing cheese right. I use it all the time.

Podcast: The Delicious Legacy by Thomas Ntinas. Exploring the foodways, dishes, and recipes of ancient Greece and Rome, and so much more. He has some great guests on, and I come on now and again too.

This week’s post isn’t about cheese, but about writing. Although given that cheese is the only subject that I can summon enough gumption to write about, you could argue that this is tangentially about that topic. Also, I’m going to start recommending a Substack article or newsletter, a book and a podcast each week; not always cheese- or even food-related. This is almost entirely self-serving - a way to get me to read and listen to more stuff.

As a writer, it is not unusual for your non-writerly friends, or ‘civilians’ as I sometimes refer to them, to proffer advice about how to optimise your career. This is more frequently given around the beginning of your literary journey, or at any moment when they - bless them - feel that you are not getting the recognition and riches that you so richly - words are indeed my tools - deserve. Apparently appearing on Saturday Kitchen - some sort of television program in which celebrities go and cook things with a famous chef and drink wine with a famous wine person - will catapult me to stardom. Writing a regular column for a national paper is also mooted - and if any editors happen to be reading, I am, as these young people say, totally here for that. But by far the most common piece of advice is ‘you should go on Radio Four Ned! Like the Food Program or something!’ And it is for this reason that I refer to this behaviour as ‘Radio Fouring.’

The thing about these bits of advice is that while they are well-meaning, they display a sort of innocence about how this sort of thing works and the actual benefits, financial or otherwise, of appearing on national TV or radio. This can be a little frustrating, such that at my most impatient - and I am not proud of this - I might theatrically slap my forehead and cry, ‘of course, what an idiot I’ve been. I’ll just ring up my agent now and get him to sort that out.’ The sad facts being that it’s not that easy to get on one of these shows, they are not that well paid - if at all, an appearance is not a guarantee of stardom, and any increase in book sales tends to be more of a bump than a nice hockey-stick shaped upward trajectory.

Nevertheless, the advice is nothing but well meaning, and my wife Imogen Robertson, who has written at least fifteen books and is no stranger to this sort of thing can be pretty acerbic about any bad tempered muttering on my part. ‘Oh stop being so mean you grumpy old goat’ being the classic response.

It was then, with great glee, that, on my way back from hosting A Cheesemonger’s Tour of London (group bookings, radio and TV appearances catered to) for a very lovely couple yesterday, that I saw an email on my phone which began:

‘Dear Ned Palmer,

I hope this email finds you well.

My name is Jane Garvey, and I’m reaching out about a potential author interview for BBC Radio 4’s Book and Author Interview series, broadcast from Broadcasting House in London…’

A considerable portion of this glee was down to the fact that yes, I really do want to be on Radio Four, have done since I was twelve, and have been practicing my special Author Being Interviewed Voice since A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles was published (available in all good bookshops, author available for TV, radio and print interviews on request). But another considerable portion of my joy was in doing a bit to Imogen that opened with, ’you know how I’ve always said that if lots of people believe something that it is probably a good idea’, and then showing her the phone in expectation of an eye-roll so massive it would bring on a mild stroke. I have no idea why winding up the love of my life brings me such pleasure, but here we are.

Sadly in place of the eye-roll I was so looking forward to, was just a quiet, sympathetic, ‘oh honey’, because this was clearly a scam. In my defence by the way, this was yesterday not today (I am writing this on the first of April). Also, I did really, really want this. But the rest of the email, when you look at it properly, is nothing but AI slop. I won’t bore you with it, but you can see how it’s been lifted from blurbs and quotes about A Cheesemonger’s Tour de France (available in all etc etc…). In any case, interviewers like Jane Garvey don’t write to you, that is a production assistant’s job, and the email address - bbcradio4andauthorintetview@gmail.com - was clearly nonsense - I am sure Ms. Garvey has her own BBC email, and can actually spell. I’ve no idea what the actual scam was, but then these things are becoming increasingly baroque.

I was, to be blisteringly honest, somewhat downcast for a bit. But thankfully I can still scrape a crust or two together from a frankly very enjoyable portfolio career hosting tastings and tours (visit WWW.CheeseTastingCo.uk for details), writing articles and books (commissioning editors can contact me on Ned@CheeseTastingCo.UK), and after dinner speaking (see previous email).

As to any future incidences of Radio Fouring, if you feel so moved, they will henceforth be greeted not with muttering but an eye-roll, which is only fair.

This week’s recommendations:

Substack: Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. How to counter the enshittification of Google Search.

Book: Spoiled by Anne Mendelson. On the chilling history of the liquid milk industry, mind-blowing, often upsetting. Absolutely necessary if you work in our industry, but you might never drink milk again…

Podcast: Ill Advised by Bill Nighy - A balm to the soul.

When I was a younger monger, full of the zeal of the newly converted, I didn’t hold with flavoured cheese. I thought if you’d made good cheese why would you mess about with it? And if it isn’t good cheese then why would I eat it? As for smoked cheese, well that was anathema.

To be fair to my younger more fanatical self there are some abominations out there. A few years ago I saw something quite terrible on a supermarket shelf, a Cheddar - in the loosest possible sense - with white chocolate, milk chocolate, lemon zest and gin. I was limbering up to give it a good slagging off when my wife whipped my soapbox from under me by saying, ‘have you tried it? You can’t knock it if you haven’t tried it.’ So I bought some, feeling a little bit of my cheesemonger’s soul shrivel up and blow away.

It was gratifyingly horrible though. Firstly there was the appearance, a pallid cream paste flecked with white, brown and yellow, looking a lot like cavity wall insulation. The texture was wet and pappy, not so much melting in the mouth as falling limply apart, and the flavour reminded me of being sick and getting that sweet, sicky burning sensation in the back of my throat. This was the fever dream of a product development team gone rogue.

I have mellowed as I’ve aged, and have become a bit more accepting of this sort of thing. Especially after I discovered, when I was researching A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles, that the Romans were not averse to a bit of flavouring. First century (CE) writer Columella mentions cheeses flavoured with pine kernels, thyme, and even cheeses smoked over apple wood. So that’s ok then. As long as the flavouring are chosen judiciously, and with restraint, to compliment or contrast the flavours of the cheese, which is itself well made, then I’m willing to give it a go. And I’m a slut for anything with truffles. Here are a couple of my favourites:

Lingot St. Nicholas - sheep’s milk from Provence

The shape of this cheese, like a little gold ingot inspired its name, and it is indeed golden. Sheep’s milk is always very rich, and this from the southern French Lacaune breed - also used to make Roquefort - is particularly so. The flavour, creamy, mineral, with a vegetal note from the mould rind, is perfectly set off by the drop of thyme olive oil that its monastic maker Père Gabriel adds judiciously to the vat. He has a light touch with the flavouring, such that you might think that the herby note so redolent of Provence was simply the memory of being there.

Smoked Cretan Graviera with Thyme

Graviera was inspired by Alpine Gruyère, and originally produced in the Agrafa mountains of Thessaly. This one comes from Crete, and is made by Manousos Tsitsiridis to an old family recipe with sheep and goat’s milk from local farms. This semi-soft cheese is a tribute to Tsitsiridis’ skills - it’s difficult to make firmer goats cheeses without them becoming hard and dry, and the addition of rich creamy sheep’s milk contributes to a chewy yet moist texture. Sprigs of thyme appear sparsely throughout the cheese which is smoked over local botanicals - sage, thyme, holly oak, acorns and cypress. I am sure all this herbage is very good for you, especially if taken with a little retsina.

You can get Lingot St. Nicolas from Mons Uk, and the smoked Graviera from Maltby and Greek, who also sell a subtle and delicious retsina.

Goats are mystical creatures. You only have to look into their strange eyes to think ‘here is a creature that knows a thing or two about the Other World.’ The Sumerians of ancient Iraq knew goats to be wise, cunning and clever, saying of them that ‘although it has never gone there, the goat knows the wasteland’. They were also known for their vigorous libidos, which is where I imagine the expression ‘horny’ comes from. Enki, the Sumerian god of productivity, was also in charge of wisdom, craftsmanship and magic - qualities that were symbolised by statues of him with a pronounced goaty aspect. It was known that any evil or bad luck could be transferred to a goat, either by killing it rather gruesomely or - much better - by giving it a bit of a cuddle, performing a brief ritual and then letting it wander off into the wilderness. Hence ‘scapegoating’.

Goats have been associated with evil at times. Some European folk tales describe the Devil turning up at witches’ sabbaths in the guise of a goat, and since then he is often presented with a markedly goaty appearance. But this may well be mere Christian propaganda, an attempt to smear the reputation of the goaty Greek god Pan by giving him a demonic aspect. There are also some accounts of witches riding goats to the sabbath, perhaps when their brooms had broken down.

Goats don’t appear to have been common as witches’ familiars, which I did find surprising given their eldritch reputation. But maybe actual witches and cunning women had too much respect for the animals to enter in to such blatantly transactional relationships with them. Anyway, trying to get a goat to do something it’s not interested in, or to answer a direct question is a fool’s errand. I remember the late Mary Holbrook - ‘Godmother of British Goat’s Cheese’ - laughing when I asked if she controlled her goats’ feed to affect the quality of of their milk. ‘You try and get a goat to eat something it doesn’t want to’, she said, but then also told me how a sick goat will cross a field or two to find a specific plant to self-medicate. Perhaps we could learn a thing or two about plant lore by following the goats around.

It’s certainly true that throughout history our feelings about goats have been ambivalent, as the Provençal legend of the Cabro D’Or, or the Golden Goat tells us. This golden-horned animal is reclusive, but beware the treasure hunter or wandering archaeologist, for the Cabro D’Oro is a jealous guardian of the region’s ancient treasures - Roman, Saracen or Templar. Get too close to a hoard and the Golden Goat will enchant you with a butt of its horns and lead you, stupefied, to the edge of a precipice, where, if you are lucky, you will come to your senses before falling to your death. A paysan lucky enough to find one of its golden hairs should keep it in a bag around their neck to ensure good luck and prosperity, but this blessing is only conferred on the finder, and must be buried with them. Anyone tempted to keep their parent’s golden hair will come to no good.

On the whole, goats seem to be pretty benevolent. Indeed they have been celebrated for their contribution to animal health and welfare - perhaps using their knowledge of plant medicines, or their connection with the spirit world. Or just because they are wise and clever.

During a British outbreak of the cattle disease rinderpest in the 1860s, herds in Wales and Ireland seemed to have been unaffected because, it was thought, they always kept a couple of goats in with their cattle to ward off disease. Even as late as 1973, Farmers Weekly reported that some farmers believed that goats kept foot and mouth away from their cattle. This was attributed to their powerful smell, which was thought to keep disease at bay, which sounds like the discredited miasmatic theory, but it does make me wonder if the goats were sharing a selective immunity with their bovine companions. If anyone else has any theories on that, then please do write in and share them with me.

The good influence of goats on animals is still widely acknowledged, though this is more attributed to their intelligence and wisdom than anything supernatural. All over Europe it is common, wherever there are sheep out on pasture, to see a few goats hanging out too. This is because, there’s no nice way to say this, sheep are pretty thick, and the cannier goats usually manage to keep them out of trouble, and, with their discerning palate, lead them to the best pasture

Goats are well known for their positive effect on mental health - it was common to keep a few in livery stables as they cheered the horses up, and, being level headed animals would lead the horses out in the event of a fire. I can vouch for this. Whenever my wife or I are feeling a bit low we go and visit the goats at the nearby Surrey Docks Farm, who are always pleased to see us. Admittedly we do bring oats and woolly jumpers, but we’ve never gone away un-soothed. If you are lucky enough to live near some, do give this a go next time you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed. If not you could always eat some delicious goats’ cheese. Very good for the mind, the body and the soul.

Surrey Docks Farm has a fundraiser on at the moment. Here is the link if you feel like donating. They are a force for good, and so are their goats.

Much of the material for this article comes from the fantastic folklorist, writer and podcaster Dr. Icy Sedgwick. Give her a listen!