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) – 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
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 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