Say "cheese" and smile!

"Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese - toasted, mostly."
Ben Gunn, Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)

 

 

The English have a strange way with cheese – they claim to have more than 700 different varieties and used to believe that the moon was made of cheese. English cheese has three special ingredients, unknown in a modern, civilised and technological world.  The first special ingredient is its name.  Often a single name is deemed insufficient to adequately name  a cheese and they give it it two. Double Gloucester, Red Leicester and Stinking Bishop are examples of this.  Other cheeses are so complete, that they need but one name – Cheddar for example, or Stilton.  Later we'll talk about Dorset Blue Vinny.  The second special ingredient is rennet, not a subject I really want to talk, or even think about.  Rennet is a collection of enzymes taken from the fourth stomach chamber of a young calf, and it is what turns English milk into cheese.  There are of course more civilised methods of making cheese, but this is English cheese.  The third special ingredient is naturally enough – TRADITION! Many English cheese producers will tell you that:

a.  They have been making cheese this way for more than 300 years

or

b.  We've been going it this way since the Romans left.

The reality is that the Romans left, and they left the cheese behind too.  The English have been eating the mouldy stuff ever since.  Englishmen,  and women too, have been slow to realise that the reason their cheese gets so old, is that no-one wants to eat it.

Let's look at some typical and popular English cheeses.

 

 

Cheddar

 

The most popular is probably Cheddar, an area in southwest England, noted for its caves.  In 1903 explorers found a skeleton here in Gough's Cave in Cheddar and it has been dated to about 7150 BC.  In 1996  Bryan Sykes of Oxford University  sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of Cheddar Man, with DNA extracted from one of Cheddar Man's molars. The following year he took DNA samples from twenty living residents of the village to that extracted from Cheddar Man’s molar. It produced two exact matches and one match with a single mutation.  You can imagine how little the cheese has changed.  Here's how they make it.

Rennet is added to milk to make (solid) curds and (liquid) whey.  The curds are then kneeded with salt, stacked to drain and turned at regular intervals. Strong, extra-mature Cheddar, sometimes called vintage, needs to be matured for up to 15 months. The cheese is kept at a constant temperature often requiring special facilities. Some Cheddar cheese is still matured in the caves at Wookey Hole and Cheddar Gorge.

The “modern” method of making Cheddar only dates back to the 19th century, but King Henry ll is recorded as having bought some Cheddar cheese in 1170.  Probably the Queen still has it in a cupboard somewhere and brings it out for special visitors. 

 

Gloster

Double Gloucester is another well known English cheese. Gloucester is a city in south west England and I want to tell you now that any English town name which ends in cester or chester, was originally founded by the Romans (from the Roman word ‘castra” meaning fort). Think back to what I said about tradition - you should be suspicious of this cheese already. 

Gloucester even has its own breed of pig, the Gloucester Old Spot:

But enough talk about the residents, how do they make the cheese?  The cheese is still made in the traditional shape using the traditional method and skills. After the addition of starter culture and rennet to the milk, the curds are cut and scalded at a temperature of 32-35°C with the whey for 20-30 minutes. The whey is then drained away leaving the curd which is milled and salted. The cheese is then moulded and pressed for up to 5 days and is ready for consumption at around 2 months.

Single Gloucester was sometimes known as the haymaker’s cheese; as it was matured for a short time it was ready for eating by farm labourers during the haymaking season. Double Gloucester is made in traditional wheels with a natural rind on some farms whilst in larger dairies it would be made in 20 kg blocks which make the cheese ideal for pre-packing.

Flavour levels depend on the age of the cheese. As it matures Double Gloucester becomes very hard and this may be one of the reasons why it is associated with the annual cheese rolling event at Cooper’s Hill in Gloucester. It is said that buyers of Double and Single Gloucester would often jump up And down on the cheese to assess its grade and suitability.

Cheese Rolling??  Yes, we're sorry about that.  This is where a whole bunch of people who aren't even drunk yet, roll a cheese down a hill and run after it, often injuring themselves in the process.  Nobody knows why they do it, or how long they've been doing it for.  We suspect they're all related, just like Cheddar Man.  Here's the video link:

 

Why is it “double”  Gloucester?  They don't know that either.

 

Dorset Blue Vinney

 

The third cheese we'll look at today is Dorset Blue Vinney.  It is one of a range of blue-veined cheeses, with a rich tangy taste.  Sorry, I'm being polite (too long in this bloody country).  It's a smelly cheese, full of bacteria and 'vinney' is an old English word for 'mouldy':

It’s made in the Dorset village of Sturminster Newton on the River Stour, a small town whose name means  “The new town of the church by the River River”.  Stour is actually an old Dorset word for river and the best translation for River Stour would be River River. A quick word about English rivers, they’re not very big – this is the “River Stour” and Sturminster:

 

Still what can you expect from people who live on an island.

Historically the cheese was merely a by-product of the much more lucrative butter market. Milk was of little value before the railways as it couldn't be brought to market before it went off, thus cheese and butter production was the main focus of dairy farms. Dorset butter was highly regarded in London where it fetched a premium price but making butter left the farmers with large quantities of skimmed milk which they turned into a hard, crumbly cheese. While the cheese was a common farmhouse cheese in Dorset for hundreds of years, production dried up around 1970 and the cheese became extinct. However, in the 1980s Woodbridge Farm in Dorset revived the old recipe, and it is now producing the cheese again. In his poem Praise O' Do'set, the Dorset poet William Barnes asks, "Woont ye have brown bread a-put ye, An' some vinny cheese a-cut ye?"

It is often made from unpasteurised milk. This is considered healthy by some and risky by others due to the potential for tuberculosis from infected cows passing into the milk. It has a strong taste and smell, just like most Englishmen.

How to eat? Use English way!

There is a cultural aspect to cheese, which we sometimes see at formal dinners and restaurants.  Cheese and biscuits are sometimes served as a separate course at the end of a meal in restaurants and may be served from a separate trolley brought to your table.  In restaurant you will pay £5 - £10 for a cheeseboard. For this money you will have from six to eight artisan cheeses, an even mix of hard and semi-hard, with at least one soft and one blue (more than one third blue, given how many people don't like it, is bad planning, if not bad manners). I also like this idea of ensuring variety by serving at least one goat's, ewe's and cow's milk cheese. All British cheeses too, please. This is one area where you can minimise food miles without compromising on quality. Cheeses which have no place here- Feta, halloumi, added-fruit cheeses, mozzarella, parmesan, ricotta, herbed goats' cheese, Babybel, edam, brunost, cheeses that amalgamate different cheeses in one block, most (overpowering, acrid) smoked cheeses.

The cheese biscuit's primary function is as a delivery vehicle for cheese. With their gaudy herbs and flashy seasoning, flavoured biscuits distract us from said cheese and embroil us in world of cheap sensation. Best cheese biscuits are simple. Baked crackers, water biscuits and (when you need an earthy anchor for a strong blue) oat biscuits are perfectly adequate.

In the formal dinner all will be different.  If you have never eaten in a formal English setting, here’s what happens.

Firstly everyone assembles in a room, away from the room where they will eat, and they drink sherry, a Spanish wine, made a little stronger by adding vodka during fermentation, and not drunk by Spaniards because they are a civilised people.  After a while, an old person who didn’t know that his ancestors had been given the vote, will ring a brass bell or similar instrument and announce that “Dinner is served”.  Everyone walks in sedately, as in a proper ceremony, in order of seniority.  Once at your place, stood up behind your chair, someone says grace and calls upon the god of his or her choice to ensure that the chef does not have aids, or piss in the soup.  Men then pull back the ladies’ chairs, make sure they are seated an then sit down themselves. 

The number of courses varies usually between five and a dozen.  Often soup is the first course, there could be a separate fish course, a main course, some desert and so on.  Wine is served throughout and there could be different wines for different courses.  There is certainly a separate set of cutlery for each course, and I don’t mean you get five knives the same, you get five different knives, of different length, shape and purpose.  There are steak knives, fish knives, cheese knives, small ones and long ones.  It’s the same with the forks and spoons.  You can tell that the upper classes never had to do the washing up. This is a cheese knife

 

Now where was I?  Ah yes, drinking wine.  You drink wine when you want to, because so far there are no toasts.  At the end of the last desert course, waiters will come around, and if they’re still sober, clear the table.  The port then arrives, not in bottles, but in decanters and new sets of glasses are filled with port.  They are a different size than normal wine glasses.  Port is made in a similar way to sherry, except that it is made in Portugal, and yes, before you ask, Portuguese people don’t drink it either.  Then the man an the top of the table, stands, gives a small speech and makes a toast.  We SIP the wine and sit down.  There may be other speeches and more toasts and more sipping of port.  Then someone arrives with the cheese, which is very good at masking the taste of port, and they finish the cheese and port together.  One or two people are still sober at this stage, but bladders are full.

At this point the men take “brandy and cigars”, which is the women’s cue to leave.  English women don’t smoke cigars and ladies never urinate at public events, so the English invented this course, just  so that the ladies could leave and “powder their noses”.

Say "cheese and smile !

Of course English people don’t all eat like this and they don’t eat like this every day.  I want to finish this by showing you two examples of English cooking at its most sophisticated, and they both feature cheese as their main ingredient. 

 

                                                   

Welsh Rarebit (left), or Welsh Rabbit is Britains’ best kept secret.  The other is its lesser known cousin, the Cheese Pie.  Now I know to you that one looks like burnt cheese on toast and the other is some mashed potato with cheese sprinkled on the top, but think about it.  Did you anywhere on the world, outside England, see an English Restaurant.  Even the word Restaurant is French - There’s no English word for Restaurant. But lucky enough we have a world for cheese!

 

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Часть 1 - Говорим "cheeeeeese" и улыбаемся! (русская версия)
Часть 2 - Say "cheese" and smile! (English version)