Cheddar Gorge: A Book of English Cheeses

That the book is charmingly illustrated by E. H. Shepard, more especially known as the illustrator for Winnie-the-Pooh, ‘is in itself a signpost to pleasure’. It has been said that this book gave him material for some of his very best work. He also toured the countryside in search of local colour, returning with more information and anecdotes to add to the store already collected.

This captivating book is a treasure trove of wonderful and amusing anecdotes, including the tale of the monstrous cheese big enough to hold a thirteen-year-old inside, the Stilton that purred like a cat and the fact that early cheesemakers randomly hid gold coins inside wheels of cheese as a sales tool. And there’s the famous cheesemaker in Manchester who used to select which Cheshire to sell based on where the mice had been nibbling ‘as they were the best judges of a good cheese’. Some Cheddars in the seventeenth century were the Birkin bags of their day – so prized that they were bespoken by members of the court, long before they were even made. It also covers the specific impact that the invention of the bicycle had on the decline of Cheddar production, as labourers returned home for their meatloaf lunch rather than hole up on a roadside with a hunk of bread and cheese.

The contributors recommend appropriate accompaniments in food and wine, although it must be noted that of course ‘bad cheese asks butter to eat with it; good cheese asks none’. The book also sets out the recipe for the ultimate cheese on toast (here (#ulink_e3ec427f-1d61-538d-99d2-2d45dac2cb52)) – so exciting, so radical, and so secret that it had to be created behind a screen when in company, with sham extra ingredients set on the table to befuddle any enquiring minds, so that the recipe couldn’t be guessed or stolen and shared more widely.

When the book was first published, British cheeses were facing similar challenges to today’s cheese market – threats posed by ‘soulless’ mass production and standardisation, as well as the impact of cheaper grazing on the quality of the final product. The small, the quiet, the local and traditional were being absorbed into the machine in pursuit of ‘the rage for cheapness’, and resulting in Cheddar that tasted of ‘mild soap’. The subsequent renaissance of English cheese-producing can in part be attributed to this intriguing book’s original publication, and the resultant public light it shed on many threatened British cheese-making traditions.

At the time, English cheese was ‘without honour in its own country and amongst its own kin. Consequently, it is without honour abroad. If we don’t celebrate it both at home and abroad it will cease to be. The world will be the poorer. Our entertainment to visitors will be feebler … supply will only come from demand, and there will be no demand unless the public is stirred from its present apathy and brought to realise the mechanical monotony of its present diet.’ Now, cheese is bought by over 98 per cent of British households, and we consume around 700,000 tonnes of it a year at home, in restaurants and in processed food. Excluding fromage frais and cottage cheese, this is equivalent to about 10kg per person per year, or 27g per person per day.

We are truly a nation of cheese enthusiasts, now more than ever. There was no British cheese export market at the time of the original publication of Cheddar Gorge – other than some Cheshire cheese. Fast forward eighty years, and the value of British cheese exports in 2017 has soared to £615 million, up 23 per cent on the previous year, according to HMRC data. There are in fact now more than 900 different kinds of cheese produced in the UK, outnumbering those produced in France. It’s extraordinary to think that in 1937 ‘our great local cheeses [were] dying. Literature by preserving the memory and giving the praise of good things, ends by becoming their saviour.’

This fascinating book will certainly whet the appetite for British cheese, for that is ultimately what matters most, as, after all, ‘the only way to learn about cheese is to eat it.’

I

Introduction (#u5d38835c-6011-57fa-a8a5-dbb92ab6029f)

By Sir John Squire

This book arose out of a correspondence in The Times at the end of 1935 and the beginning of 1936. M. Th. Rousseau, a French connoisseur, wrote to complain that when he visited England he could not get Stilton – the waiters said it was out of season. Many people wrote to explain that perhaps it was out of season, and that in most decent London restaurants Stilton, when in condition, could be obtained, if only after pressure. But the correspondence did attract attention to the neglect of English cheese generally, and to the gradual attrition of English cheeses by foreign invasion and native indifference and ignorance.

Now, no citizen of the world would wish to decry foreign cheeses, or foreign food either. As I write these lines I have just come back from a holiday in the mountains above Lake Como (staying with Italian friends, spaghetti, cheese and wine). In order to get to my destination I had to go to Como, which has silks and a lovely Cathedral, and wait for two hours in an out-of-doors café within sight of the pier. Lunch, as it was noon, was indicated, and I sat down, after two years’ absence from the Continent, metaphorically tucking a napkin into my neck below a non-existent beard, and looking forward to a really Italian table d’hôte, with all the dishes lingering on mind and tongue, with languishing vowels.

What did I find? Apparently they had become resigned to the coarser kind of German, American and English visitors, who haven’t the sense to adapt their food to climate or surroundings. ‘Coelum non animam mutant’:1 (#litres_trial_promo) the sky may change but the set rules and regulations about filling the stomach do not.

The first course, as it were hors d’œuvres, consisted of eggs and bacon; and that at lunch-time, under a baking noon and an Italian sky, with blue lake and mountains all around. The second was ‘Mixed Grill’; and there was a great deal to follow. The mixed grill contained liver, bacon, kidneys and sausages, and was accompanied by thick fingers of fried potatoes. Fat women and young men were eating them all around me, terrified, apparently, lest they should shrivel. I ordered an omelette and a bottle of white Italian wine, and tried to keep my eyes off all those gluttons. Just as I was finishing with cheese, a tall thin Englishman and a flat-chested wife, wiping their brows, came and sat down at the next table to me; they looked at the menu and the beads multiplied on their brows. I couldn’t help speaking. I said: ‘Excuse me, sir, but I expect you find the lunch too much for you.’

‘I should think I do, in this climate,’ he replied.

‘If I may say so,’ I went on, ‘you’d better follow my example and have an omelette, with perhaps a little fruit to follow.’ He grunted assent and did so.

But he wasn’t really a citizen of the world. No sooner had he stopped grumbling about these foreigners supplying us with hot sausages at an Italian August lunch (and the supply simply must have responded to a demand) than he began complaining about the surroundings. A little rusty tram clattered by. ‘Look at that tram,’ he exclaimed to his dutiful wife, ‘absolutely filthy. I consider it a disgrace to a place like this.’ The word ‘insular’ rose, unspoken, to my lips.

And the word ‘insular’ cuts both ways. Most English people, living on this island, away from the Continent and full of compromises, will regard foreigners as strange beasts. Walking in Devonshire the other day, and talking in a country ale-house with a landlord who kept cows and poultry, I heard him sum up the world situation in these terms: ‘Zur, there bain’t no country but this.’ I had heard the sentiment often enough before; it spreads like a rash whenever them vurriners appear to be fighting one another all about nothing. But the insularity works another way, too; them vurriners are as marvellous as they are mischievous and unaccountable and incomprehensible. They can make, in their absurd way, music, art and cheese as we cannot. The result is that Miss Smith and Miss Jones, admirable ballet-dancers, have to appear in the Russian ballet as Smithova and Jonesova; that Mr. Robinson, the great tenor, appears as Signor Robinello; and that English cheese is without honour in its own country and amongst its own kin. Consequently it is without honour abroad. If we don’t celebrate it both at home and abroad, it will cease to be. The world will be the poorer. Our entertainment to visitors will be feebler. Couldn’t one give one’s French friends a better welcome were one able to say, ‘Come down to Dorset with me and we’ll taste the local cheese!’ Do they really want to go to Dorchester to be given a choice of Gorgonzola or Camembert?

There are few parts of England which do not remember cheeses extinct or nearly extinct. Not all of them, I dare say, deserve resuscitation; the evidence suggests, for instance, that the man who ate Suffolk cheese might just as well have been eating old motor tyres. But it was possible a century ago to travel throughout England and sample local cheeses everywhere. Today most of them are unobtainable unless in small quantities from eclectic merchants. Even in first-class chop-houses the only English cheeses on offer will be Stilton, Cheddar or Cheshire; in most places only Cheddar and Cheshire, more likely than not American. Gorgonzola (often, even before sanctions, made in Denmark) is more familiar to many English people than any English cheese; and such a notable cheese as Double Gloucester is known to few but epicures.

‘Might just as well have been eating old motor tyres.’

No sensible person would wish to exclude or decry foreign cheeses. It would be a calamity were no more Camembert, Brie or Bel Paese to land on these shores: Dutch cheese is a change and Parmesan is a necessary of life. But it is ridiculous that we should neglect our own fine cheeses to such an extent that a foreigner can visit these shores (Europe in fact knows as little of our cheese as it does of our landscape-painting) without discovering that we possess any, let alone thinking of importing some to his own country. Taste can only be improved and cheese-makers heartened if those who care for England, Cheese and Farming, indulge in vigorous propaganda. Supply will only come from demand, and there will be no demand unless the public is stirred from its present apathy and brought to realise the mechanical monotony of its present diet.

The causes of our present lack of pride in home produce and interest in the subtleties of the palate may be left to others to trace. Puritanism and Utilitarianism I dare say may be partly responsible; each despising art and taste. The neglect of cheese, at any rate, is no new thing: it is forty years since Mrs. Roundell, in one of the finest, amplest and best written Cookery Books ever published, said sorrowfully: ‘Some persons, however, still have the courage to enjoy cheese.’ Unless more acquire this well-rewarded courage it is likely that all our English cheeses will die out and that we shall end with a few European cheeses for the intelligent minority (for cheese in France and Italy will not die) and for the others mere generic soapy, tasteless stuff, white or red, called cheese, imported from across the Atlantic. The appetite may grow by what it feeds on: it may also diminish: another generation and our population may positively dislike the strong ripe cheeses of our fathers.

‘Can’t we even talk about the cheese?’

Of the chapters in this book all except two deal exclusively with English cheeses; those two are occupied with Scotch Dunlop and with Irish cheeses as a salute to neighbouring kingdoms. Many cheeses might have been added – such as Double Cottenham (made now only in a few farmhouses), the cheeses of Derby and Lancashire, and the various cream cheeses. But the book had to have limits.

The references to Canadian and other American cheeses are intended only to apply to the bulk of that which we import from North America; it is a scandal that names like Cheddar and Cheshire should be allowed to apply to the stuff. I have heard of, though never tasted, several American cheeses said to be individual and good, such as Rowland, Wisconsin, Redskin, Golden Buck and O.K.A., said to be made by Trappist Fathers. If these be good and will travel, by all means let us try some; there cannot be too many good cheeses within our reach. But at present it is English cheese that is most in need of trumpeting, just as it is the Roast Beef of Old England and not the Roast Lamb of New Zealand – which latter, by the way, some tuneful New Zealander ought by now to have gratefully celebrated in song.

(May I add, as a postscript, that I must not be held responsible for those of my colleagues who have called a Welsh Rabbit a ‘rarebit’ – a vile modern refinement.)

II

Stilton (#u5d38835c-6011-57fa-a8a5-dbb92ab6029f)

By Sir John Squire

Hotspur, in Shakespeare, exasperated by the timid, tedious, superstitious Glendower, exclaims of him:

I had rather live

With cheese and garlick in a windmill, far,

Than feed on cates and have him talk to me

In any summer house in Christendom.

Here, the hero, unlike Horace who was happy to write

Me pascunt olivae

Me cichorea levesque malvae1 (#litres_trial_promo)

appears to regard the Simple Life as merely the less unpleasant of two gross evils: though as concerns the one matter of garlic Horace would certainly agree with him, as is indicated in the third Epode where he laments ‘quid hoc veneni saevit in praecordiis’2 (#litres_trial_promo) and prays that Maecenas, who had given it to him, should suffer the worst of fates if the offence were repeated. Mr. Belloc, perhaps, would more thoroughly accept what Hotspur contemned: he possesses a windmill and he has written notably about cheese and the eating of raw onions.

‘Lived in the wilderness twenty years together without any other meat?’

It is possible that one could live on that diet; Mr. Burdett in his Little Book of Cheese quotes the old Doctor Thomas Muffett:

Was not that a great cheese, think you, wherewith Zoroaster lived in the wilderness twenty years together without any other Meat?

and calculates that the cheese, to last, must have weighed a ton and a half. Remembering the widow’s cruse of the other Prophet, it may be that Zoroaster had technical resources which obviated the necessity of so great a bulk. But supposing a man were to wish to live on cheese alone, and that it were possible, there is no cheese in the world so nourishing and so little likely to pall as Stilton. Everybody who has ever entertained a Stilton must remember the sigh of sorrow which goes up when the last of it has been eaten or has become inedibly dry.

It is the King of Cheeses, if all the qualities of cheese are taken into account: that a cheese should be not only a ‘thing in itself’3 (#litres_trial_promo) (to use the phrase of German philosophers who thought that green cheese was what the moon was made of) and as the perfect rounding off of a meal – the sunset of it, caseus et praeterea nihil4 (#litres_trial_promo) – but as, at need, a meal in itself. There are excellent cheeses which can agreeably be daubed on the remains of a roll at the end of luncheon, without adding noticeably to the amount consumed; and some of them are hardly distinguishable from the butter with which they are usually taken. But the best of the creamy and semi-liquid kinds need accessories, can only be eaten in small quantities, and cannot be conceived of as staples of life. One cannot imagine Zoroaster, whatever his magic antidotes against time and clime, spending twenty years of solitude in the unmitigated company of a mound of ‘Cream’ or of Camembert – before a day was out he would have been thinking more of the Camembert’s crust or even the other’s silver paper as something approximating to solid food than he would have thought of the softness within. On the other hand there are solid, leathery or rubbery cheeses which are undoubtedly edible in quantities on occasion but which are either so tame or so peculiar that they would become rapidly wearisome. And, again, there are sturdy cheeses so pungent and even stinging that a little of them taken ‘neat’ must go a long way. Ripe Stilton, as an unaccompanied iron ration, would excel them all. And, as the conclusion of a meal, it should always be regarded as a full-sized course in itself, and not as a trimming; and thought should be taken beforehand accordingly. To begin a meal with hors d’œuvres which is going to end with Stilton is not to whet but to waste the appetite – olives I don’t count.

When Stilton began it is evident no man knows. The process of making it was doubtless a gradual growth. A recent correspondence in The Times showed an almost acrimonious difference of opinion as to where the credit of its invention lies. Had it not been for the fact that the French have recently erected a statue to Madame Harel, the inventress of Camembert, people would hardly have expected a precise name and date; many writers consoled themselves with the reflection that they know where and when and by whom it was first put upon the general market. In the eighteenth century it is reputed to have been made at Quenby Hall, in Leicestershire, and to have been known there as Lady Beaumont’s cheese, or, as some say, Mrs. Ashby’s; and, after, the Quenby housekeeper is said to have married a farmer at Dalby, whence, via a daughter, Mrs. Paulet, it reached Stilton, where it was sold at the Bell by Cooper Thornhill, Mrs. Paulet’s kinsman. This is the generally accepted story and it is certain that from the late eighteenth century onwards it was customarily sold outside the Bell to coach-passengers and others going along the Great North Road. No more suitable market-place (though it be not its birthplace) could have been devised for it than the village of Stilton and the Bell Inn. Even the ‘fumum et opes strepitumque’5 (#litres_trial_promo) of the Great North Road today has not destroyed the peace of that wide old village street with its long stone Tudor inn with the great hanging gold sign of the Bell; and the local market, which presumably was killed by the temporary desertion of the roads during the railway era, might well be revived now. But the theory that, in the words of Mr. Osbert Burdett, ‘it was first sold in the last decade of the eighteenth century by its inventor’s (Mrs. Paulet) kinsman’ can be killed by a couplet. Both the cheese and the name for it go back at least two generations farther. In Pope’s Imitations of Horace appear these lines in the course of a reference to Prior’s story of the town mouse and the country mouse:

Cheese, such as men in Suffolk make,

But wish’d it Stilton for his sake.

This takes Stilton, so-named, back to George II.’s days; not only that, but it holds it up as the ne plus ultra of cheeses as contrasted to the lumpish stuff from Suffolk. And further, since Pope referred to it, who seldom moved from Twickenham and the south, it is at least probable that Stilton was at that time on sale in London, and well known there. Research might well produce earlier allusions. If readers will produce such they will be incorporated in later editions.6 (#litres_trial_promo) Mrs. Paulet, however, would not have got her reputation for nothing; and she deserves her statue for having put Stilton ‘on the map’ as nobody before her seems to have done.

The ‘Bell’ at Stilton.

Stilton holds its own. Cheddar and Cheshire are in difficulties, though they may struggle back. When those of us who are now in middle life were young these were the stock English cheeses in all English households and inns. If you stopped, on a summer walk, for luncheon at the Cross Keys or the Mariner’s Rest you had a pint of bitter, English Cheddar (probably) or Cheshire (possibly) and newish bread with inviting crust: today you are usually fobbed off with so-called Cheddar, like mild soap, from across the Atlantic, or so-called Cheshire, like clay coloured with marigolds, also from across the Atlantic. The rage for cheapness is one cause. The scandalous lack of protection for English commodity-names (why should a thing be sold as Cheddar when it isn’t?) is another. The invention of the bicycle is another; when one was young the ordinary labourer had his meal of bread and good cheese and good beer or cider out of a stone jar under the hedge, whereas today he rides back to his cottage and is given by his wife salmon or corned beef out of a tin. Stilton, however, was rather a luxury; the rich like it; it is just possible that there would be a row if bogus Stilton were put upon the market after the fashion of bogus Gorgonzola; and in any event no plausible substitute for it, inferior or otherwise, has been invented. The sales of Stilton in recent years have increased; and if, as seems likely, more attention in the near future is devoted to food and drink (middle-class Puritanism with its gross feeding and its hatred of refinement being on the wane) they are likely to increase.

‘Had his meal of bread and good cheese and good beer … under the hedge.’