A Cheesemonger's Compendium of British & Irish Cheese

Introduction

Welcome to the Cheesemonger’s Compendium ! I hope you will find this a helpful aid to buying and enjoying some of the wonderful cheeses of Britain and Ireland. I am Ned Palmer, author of A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles and for the last twenty years I have made my living looking after, selling and talking about cheese. As part of my job I’ve worked in cellars, on retail counters, hosted cheese tastings and travelled around the British Isles visiting farms and meeting cheesemakers. It is the most fun it is possible to have.

There are probably more than 1,500 individual cheeses in Britain and Ireland – a remarkable statistic, given that many of our traditional farmhouse cheeses were on the verge of extinction in the post-war years. That was a part of the story I told in the Cheesemonger’s History. Here, my focus is very much on the cheeses themselves: how they taste, how they are made, and the often eccentric and colourful characters behind them – the cheesemakers and the affineurs (the mongers who turn and tend them to their perfect, matured state).

My own love affair with British cheese began on a chilly morning in December 2000 at Borough Market. I was there to help my friend Todd Trethowan sell his traditional farmhouse Caerphilly, and of course the first thing I needed to do was to try some. It was not only the best cheese I’d ever had, but one of the most delicious and fascinating foods I’d ever eaten, delicate yet complex with a whole suite of flavours and textures. I won’t describe them all here as you can look up the entry for Trethowan’s Gorwydd Caerphilly to find out more. Tasting this cheese was a bit of a revelation for me – I’d never realised cheese could reach these heights of deliciousness and complexity. Also over the weeks that I worked on the stall with Todd I discovered how much there was to learn about cheese and cheesemaking, even through the medium of a single cheese, as with each delivery from his farm the cheeses looked and tasted different. I began to ask Todd questions, and a lot of them, so that before long he politely suggested that he might help me get a job at the famous cheese shop Neal’s Yard Dairy, if I promised to stop bothering him.

Neal’s Yard, or The Dairy as its alumni call it, specialises in farmhouse and artisan cheese from Great Britain and Ireland. The shop opened in the yard itself in London’s Covent Garden in 1979 and at first sold yoghurt, ice-cream and fresh cheese that were all made on the premises. At that stage they didn’t sell any other kinds of cheese, and given that Monty Python’s office was in the same yard, it’s tempting to think that the Dairy was the inspiration for the famous cheese sketch, except that the episode first aired in 1972, seven years before the shop opened. Then a fall in ice-cream and fresh cheese sales during the first winter persuaded Randolph Hodgson and Jane Scotter, the managers and later owners of the Dairy, that getting some more wintery cheeses in might be a good idea.

At first they sold the usual suspects: Cheddar, Stilton and Cheshire. Delivered by a wholesaler, these were all but anonymous, with no detail on who actually made the cheese, or where. The chance arrival of some farmhouse Caerphilly called Devon Garland, sent on spec by its maker, suggested that there might be more interesting cheeses and stories out there, and Randolph began scouring Britain and Ireland, visiting farms and dairies, and tracking down cheeses. By the time I arrived at the Dairy, more than twenty years later, there were more than fifty cheeses on the counter. For a young monger it was as if a new world had opened up before me. I hope, if you are not already a massive fan of British and Irish cheese, that reading this book will have a similar effect on you.

When I talk about the traditions of cheesemaking in these islands, you will notice that I only talk about British rather than British and Irish traditions. The reason for this is that, tragically, the vibrant culture of cheesemaking in Ireland was completely wiped out during the English conquest and colonisation of Ireland. Mere hints at what Irish cheese might have been like remain in some Irish words, for example, tanag, thought to be a hard skimmed milk cheese, and faiscre grotha, meaning ‘pressed curd’, which probably describes small cheeses pressed in moulds. But what with the climate and the lush grass, it was inevitable that cheesemaking would continue, and by the early twentieth century there was a flourishing Irish cheese industry. The cheeses were based on British styles and were at first known by their original names, as Irish Stilton or Irish Cheddar, but as success followed success – in 1936 Irish cheesemakers sold more than two and a half million pounds of cheese – these became known in their own right, named after the dairies that produced them, Ardagh, Galtee, Whitethorn to name but three.

Traditional British and Irish cheeses, however, had gone into decline in the post-war years, as factory farming and supermarkets squeezed out the old farmhouse producers. And then in the late 1970s came a Cheese Renaissance. This was in part a movement to save and to celebrate the last remaining traditional cheeses in Great Britain. At the same time, because so much traditional cheesemaking culture had been lost, people looked to Europe for inspiration and many of the cheeses of this renaissance are based on the traditional cheeses of France, Italy, Spain and Holland. Ireland, and more specifically County Cork, was one of the founts of this renaissance, where from around 1978 cheesemakers like Veronica Steele, Giana Ferguson and Jeffa Gill made washed-rind cheeses inspired by those of northern France. Not only did they make cheese, these were some of the founder members of CAIS, the Association of Irish Farmhouse Cheesemakers, which would itself be the inspiration for the British Specialist Cheesemakers Association, the SCA, set up in 1989. These days farmhouse and artisan cheese is flourishing in Ireland, and you will find many excellent examples in this book.

It’s hard to know exactly how many different cheeses there are today in Britain and Ireland. New ones appear all the time, while sometimes cheesemakers retire, and if no one decides to take on the recipe, so does their cheese. Also, and I say this as a recovering philosopher, how do you count cheeses? Is Cheddar one cheese, or are Keen’s, Hafod, St Andrews and Derg each a cheese unto themselves? I would say, conservatively, that there might be close to fifteen hundred British and Irish cheeses if you do count them all separately. Clearly I couldn’t include them all in this compact volume. But the cheeses you will find in this book include all of my favourites, all of the best examples of their type, and some that are particularly interesting for one reason or another. Some of these I’ve known for years, even decades, and some I discovered for the first time writing this compendium.

You won’t find any flavoured cheeses in here, that is to say the only ingredients will be milk, starter and ripening cultures, rennet and salt, and occasionally wood ash. This is not because I am a fanatical cheese purist – I grew out of that last year when I discovered that the Romans enjoyed smoked and flavoured cheeses – but because when I am tasting cheese mindfully I want to taste the unflavoured cheese itself as an expression of the land it came from and the character of its maker.

The cheeses I have chosen are (nearly all) made by small scale producers using traditional methods. I describe these on the whole as either farmhouse or artisan cheeses, terms that need a bit of unpacking. By ‘farmhouse’, I mean cheeses that are made on the farm where the milk is produced, and these tend to be traditional styles like Cheddar, Red Leicester and Lancashire. A particular example might be Montgomery’s Cheddar, made by the same family on their farm for over a century. I use ‘artisan’ to mean cheeses that are made with bought in milk and often not to traditional – or at least indigenous – recipes, although the methods are still traditional and the scale of production small. Mario Olianas’ Yorkshire Pecorino, made in Leeds with local Yorkshire milk and Sardinian starter cultures, is an excellent example of the latter.

Of course there is some fuzziness in these categories: Coolea is made in Cork with the farm’s own milk but to a Dutch recipe, and I am happy to call that farmhouse cheese. All Stilton is now made in creameries with bought-in milk rather than on farms, and has been since the 1930s, so by my definition it would be an artisan cheese, although it feels more like a farmhouse one to me, since it has been around for at least three hundred years and for most of that time was made on farms.

You will find both raw milk and pasteurised cheeses in this book. Raw, or unpasteurised, cheese is often prized because the individual character of the farm that produces it is expressed by the unique population of microflora in the milk, which would be killed by pasteurisation. The variation that so fascinated me in my early encounters with Gorwydd Caerphilly has a lot to do with how raw milk can change from day to day as these microflora change. However many excellent cheeses are made with pasteurised milk, including Coolea and Stilton, and both still show some variation across the seasons as the cows’ diet and the weather change. I honestly find it difficult to imagine that either of them could be any more wonderful than they are.

The Cheesemonger’s Compendium is divided into six colour-coded sections, each one representing what I call a family of cheese, Fresh, Mould-ripened, Blue, Washed-rind, Semi-soft and Hard. Such categorisations are open to dispute, of course, but that’s cheesemongers for you. Within families, I also recognise particular styles, for example in the Hard family you will find the styles Cheddar, Red Leicester and Double Gloucester, and within the Blue family, Stilton and the Stilton styles, Stichelton, Young Buck and Sparkenhoe Blue.

At the end of the book, I’ve included some notes on how to buy cheese, and how to store it, how to taste cheese mindfully, how to put together a cheeseboard and some ideas for matching cheese with drinks. If you have any cheese left over after all that, you will also find some ideas for cooking with cheese or turning it into spreads and dips.

You can find a list of British and Irish cheesemongers on my website, www.cheesetastingco.uk and many of these shops sell online. And if you’re a cheesemaker, or enthusiast, I am always keen to hear about new cheeses, makers and mongers and indeed any musings or insights you may have about cheese. You can find me on Twitter at @CheeseTastingCo.

This book is dedicated to the cheesemakers.

Fresh cheeses

Ballyhubbock Sheep’s Halloumi

Clerkland Crowdie

Cote Hill White

Kedar Mozzarella

Pant Ys Gawn

Perroche

Yorkshire Fettle

Fresh cheeses

It seems right to open this Compendium with fresh cheeses, as the method for making them is the basis of production for all cheese – all the thousands of individual varieties, with their myriad differences of flavour, texture and appearance. Fresh cheese is the ur-cheese, dating back 9,000 years to the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, and its creation required little more than a couple of bowls, a cloth or colander to drain curd, and a spoon to ladle it. Fresh cheese is also what you should try first on a cheeseboard, so as to be able to appreciate its delicate flavour. Once your palate has become acclimatised to the bold beefiness of a Cheddar or the piquancy of a Stilton, fresh cheeses can seem a little bland.

Let us see how it comes about. First, of course, you get your milk. To make really great cheese, you need high quality milk, and for that you need healthy happy animals. The best way to keep ruminant animals healthy and happy is to feed them their natural diet, which in the summer means the varied grasses and herbs of old pastures and, in the winter, hay and silage. Stressed animals do not give good milk, so it is as well to be nice to your livestock, particularly at milking time. And it means that merely by eating really good cheese you are encouraging sustainability and a concern for animal welfare, which is nice.

So now that you have this excellent milk, the first thing is to increase its acidity, or pickle it, rendering your milk inhospitable to any opportunistic spoilage bacteria. The most common way to do this is to add a dose of lactophilic bacteria to the milk. These helpful microorganisms consume the lactose so abundant in milk and convert it to lactic acid. Because this begins the process of cheesemaking, these bacteria are known as starter culture. (This is also, by the way, why the lactose intolerant can consume any variety of cheese that begins with this step – there is little or no remaining lactose in the cheese, as it is either converted or washed out with the whey.)

Next comes the drying step, which in cheesemaking means to coagulate your milk, separating the liquid whey from the solid curd. Actually, acidity has already begun this process and you could drain your acidified curd and be left with a very simple form of cheese (Indian Paneer, for example, is made by adding lemon juice rather than starter culture). To achieve a more through separation of liquid and solid, cheesemakers add rennet, an enzyme that encourages the milk protein casein to knit together in a matrix that captures the other solids in milk – the fats and minerals – separating them from the whey.

Rennet can be derived from the stomach of a calf or other ruminant animal, or it can have a vegetable origin, traditionally the sap of certain plants (the ancient Greeks and Romans used figs and some contemporary cheesemakers still use the cardoon thistle). Modern vegetarian rennet is derived from certain fungi or genetically modified E. coli bacteria.

The next step is to remove the whey, which for fresh cheeses is done by ladling the curds into moulds whose pierced bottoms let the liquid run out and also give shape to the cheeses. Once the cheeses have firmed up they are removed from the moulds and salted. The salt removes more moisture, adds a further protection against unwanted bacteria, and makes the cheese taste nice. Salt is clever.

Now that you know how to make cheese, let’s talk about flavour. Intensity and complexity are largely the result of ageing; the starter bacteria die off relatively quickly and their cells break open to release enzymes that go to work developing flavour and texture. These are joined by a host of microbes – moulds, bacteria and yeasts – who all play their part in developing flavour. Fresh cheeses are eaten young when this motley yet well-disposed crew have not had much time to do their thing and so their flavours tend to be simple and more delicate. This is not to say that younger cheeses are bland or boring, it’s just that more work is required of your palate.

Expect acidity in a soft cheese, an appropriately refreshing acidity but not the tingling bite of an aged Cheddar. Intertwined with and brought out by the acidity, there is a milky note, but not the mouth-filling creaminess of a ripe Camembert. There might be hints at other flavours, goatiness, a hint of almonds,