ENTERING KIRKHAMSHIRE

I realized with a gulp as I checked my bank balance at Euston station after paying for my ticket to Lancaster that I had 40 pence to my name, meant to last me til Friday (mongers, I'd be willing to wager, are far more likely to know the start date of the next pay period than that of their own menstrual period).  Graham had mentioned a cheap B&B, and I was intending to pay for drinks and dinner.  A significant problem, we'll agree, was at hand. 

(Ironically, the nearest person to me at the time was none other than Richard Goddamn Branson, who was posing for a photo op near the ticket office.  I tried to avoid drowning both of us in the flood of rejection slips that spouted from the cash machine). 

Wisdom holds that the farther up England you go, the nicer people become.  Well, Martin Tkalez hails from Morden, but other than that, the theory seems to stick.  When I got to Preston, Graham told me sheepishly that the cheap B&B was full, so he'd made a reservation at a slightly posher one, down the road.  And paid for it.

Well, slap me on the bottom and call me Betsy, I do know how to wield a credit card properly and told him so in no uncertain terms, but he'd have none of it, bless.

I was on my way up north to see Martin Gott's new lambs, new cheese room and new baby, and to go shooting with Graham Kirkham, a man who, when I first met him, must have spoke for forty minutes before I understood a single word he said.  To get a feel for the Lancashire accent, imagine the offspring a Canadian park ranger, Dallas cheerleader, and Glasgow cabbie would produce after nine months spent stuck in an elevator.  Add the laugh of a rhino and the heart of an angel and you've pretty much got Graham Kirkham, sine qua non.  I called him from the train station.  "Where are you?" I said.  "I'll come and get you," he answered.  "Oh shit, wait, I've still got my smelly wellies on.  Forget it.  You come here, it's too embahrahssing!"  When I climbed into the refrigerated van, I was too excited to speak properly.  "What are we going to shoot?" I asked him.  "GIRLIE, WE'RE GOING TO SHOOT THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYTHING!" roared Kirkham.  He's way louder in person than over the phone.

In the morning I arrived just as the junket was setting (a bit of starter--bacteria that will react with the natural milk flora to raise the milk's acidity over time--had been added an hour before a carefully calculated, season-specific amount of rennet).  Mrs. Kirkham, who made the cheese for years before Graham took over, called us in for breakfast: fried eggs, fat crispy bacon, toast, and tea with milk in it so whole that the cream crumbled as it splashed into the hot water.

Mrs. Kirkham (like Mrs. Appleby), is a legend in the world of British farmhouse cheese.  She's short and feisty and I believed for ages that her name was actually Mrs. until I learned that she also answers to Ruth.  Mrs.' mother was a Lancashire cheesemaker also, and production on Lower Beesley farm--either by Mrs. or Graham--has carried on for over thirty years without a single day's respite.  Graham's dad, who still milks the cows every morning and night, was born on the farm. "Who's going to take over when your dad quits?" I asked.  "Just try and suggest the idea!" said Graham.  I decided against this.

The point of making cheese at home, for most, was to preserve unused milk before it soured and became no good for drinking.  No commercial starter would've been necessary because the milk, left long enough, curdled on its own, eventually becoming hard and tangy.  Dales cheese—that is, cheese from the Pennine hills in Yorkshire, like Wensleydale and Swaledale—was made this way; it's a style of cheesemaking mostly linked to very small-scale farms with a few crops and animals. 
Farther south, on the other hand, and later on, in places where farming was more developed and specialized (like in the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire), cheese was made on a commercial scale rather than for home use; in other words, the cheesemaker was a hired worker rather than a farmwife.  Industrial starters were developed to ensure speed and consistency.

Kirkham’s Lancashire melds together elements from both styles of cheesemaking.  Graham makes cheese in a vat rather than a kitchen sink, but each wheel of his cheese combines curd from three days of cheesemaking to make the rich, buttery taste of old-fashioned Lancashire emerge.  As the milk comes from the cows his dad looks after, he feels comfortable leaving it unpasteurised.  He uses starters, but in extremely small quantities so that the acidity can develop slowly; the flavour is more complex as a result.  He also uses traditional animal rennet for the long-lasting, complex flavor this helps the cheese achieve. 

Finally--and here's my favorite bit--he matures the cheese in a former McDonald's truck trailer.  The microclimate inside works mysteriously to ensure that he doesn't have to regulate anything at all: not temperature, not humidity, not cheese mite, nada.  It's perfect, as is.  Something karmic's at work there, and I love it. 

As he cuts the curd, Graham marks up the vat with lines that look like a skater’s tracks on a frozen pond—when this is carefully done, fats and nutrients stay preserved in the curd rather than escape with the whey (see Stilton).  The whey drains out--eventually, the calves will eat it--and we lean over the vat to dig channels into the curd, stacking and re-stacking it so that its weight releases more whey from the stacks.  This reacquainted me with an entire family of back muscles I'd forgotten existed, all of whom greeted me with piercing hellos this morning when I woke up. 

Eventually, enough whey will have drained from the curd that the stacks can be cut into brick shapes with a kitchen knife and hauled over the shoulder into a basin where they will continue to leak.  Whereas before it was crucial not to handle the curd too roughly to avoid losing what Graham calls "the goodness" to the whey, now the curd is sturdy enough to withstand us tearing apart the bricks (to release the last drops of whey), which we do three times, waiting until it knits back together, then beginning again, before Mrs. calls us to the house for lunch.

Lunch sails out of the oven in the form of a steaming Lancashire-and-onion pie, peas and carrots and potatoes and buttery asparagus tips, and warm spongy lemon pudding.  The tiled brick stove in the sitting room sends coal smoke up the five-hundred-year-old chimney. 

I've brought some shit-hot January-era Kirkham's off the NYD counter that everyone's pleased with, but Dorstone and Ardrahan don't go over so well.  (Goat's?" queries Mrs. Kirkham.  "Aaevlkjaerlkjvr!!!  No thanks.")  After lunch Mrs. and I do dishes and she tells me secrets about pastry and pudding. 

Back in the cheese room, we take yesterday's cheeses from their presses and dress them in bespoke linen bags whose strings we tie tightly as corsets.  Kirkie melts down some butter and gives me a greasy old rag to brush the outsides of the cheeses with.  He's the only Lancashire-maker in Britain to butter his cheeses (others wax, lard, or plastify), the point of butter being that it forms the ideal barrier between the cheese and the world outside of it, letting in just the right amount of air and releasing just the right amount of moisture. As a result, Graham's cheeses taste full, round and deep, rather than sharp and claggy, and their texture remains light and curdy: "floofy monstahs," he calls them.   

Graham's presently building a new milking parlor and dairy, an investment of half a million pounds that further grays his blond buzz cut with each passing day.  Every half hour the foreman would fetch him with a problem: the instructions to the milking machine were in Dutch or the concrete lintels they'd waited ten days had finally arrived, but in the wrong size.  "Feckin' hate builders," he'd come back muttering. "Fe-ckin' hate the bloody builders." 

One barrelled in excitedly.  "Fiona tells me you're from Miami!" he said.  "I spent a soccer season there in 1975, playing for the Miami Toros in the Orange Bowl."  My parents didn't get to Miami until 1981, and aside from the trim goatee of Miami Beach offshore, it was hardly more than a mosquito-infested swamp showing the first palpitations of the two decades of ill-advised property development that would follow. "There used to be a sign on the beach," he said, "No Niggers After Friday.  I lived on Biscayne Boulevard, which was as near the beach as we stand to the privet hedge on that near field.  I remember seeing Ike and Tina Turner, and a young Gloria Estefan singing in a nightclub once.  There was this West Indian woman I used to walk by every day, who sat, always, rocking on her porch in a colorful headdress, smoking a long, white clay pipe.  It was the beginning of air-conditioning..."

It figures that the only person who actually lived in Miami in 1975 met me in a cheeseroom in Lancashire.  "Is it different now?" he asked me. "How about Orlando?  Is that still around?"

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The thing I think is coolest about Kirkham's Lancashire is that each wheel combines three days' worth of curd.  Now, the following will doubtless interest no one but the five cheese nerds that read this blog (hello Lockwood), and they probably know about three-day curd already, but I'm going to explain it anyway. 

I've already mentioned that Graham adds very little starter bacteria to his milk because he wants its acidity to rise slowly, as this will improve the flavor of the cheese in the same way that a long-proving loaf of bread (sourdough or natural levain are examples) will taste more complex than one that rises using fast-action yeast.  Following tradition, wherein a family farm might not have owned enough cows to produce even one Lancashire a day and would've bound in cloth and pressed curds accumulated from several days of cheesemaking, Graham combines three days' worth of curd.  It's not a quantity issue for Graham, as Mr. Kirkham's 75 cows produce enough milk every day for about nineteen Lancashires.  But as it turns out, those early cheesemakers were onto something: the mixed levels of acidity you get when combining curd from different days lead to deeper, longer, more interesting flavors.  So Graham uses a third of that day's curd (leaving the rest in tubs for later), and mills it up with a third of yesterday's curd and a third of the day before's.  (A tactical move, I observe, that ties him even more tightly to the obligation of cheesemaking everyday.  An observation that give me goosebumps.  I'll never be a cheesemaker.)

Anyway, he mixed salt in with the thrice-milled curd (an emerging theme: NOTHING IS SIMPLE), we packed cheesecloth-lined molds with clumps of curd, and whacked them under the presses to squeeze tight overnight.  And then we went a-shooting.

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I've made cheese with Graham before, so this was an avowed pleasure visit: Graham is a gun fanatic, and I am a gun fanatic waiting to happen.  Fortunately for him and cheese enthusiasts everywhere, of late none of his cheeses are tasting "naughty" enough to slaughter and there's too long a wait-list for him to waste any decent wheels, so we propped potatoes up on rocks about sixty yards off and took potshots at them with a rifle. 

A few minutes after we'd been shooting, Graham's gold-braceleted and camouflaged friends Ken and Maggot, who'd heard the commotion, came over lugging what looked like a bazooka.  "Pay attention now, girlie," said Graham.  "This is what's called 'serious dicking around.'" Despite a silencer fatter than my neck, it made a bang a whole lot bigger than the "subsonic hollow ballistic points" we were firing. Graham told me later that Ken, whom I can only politely describe as "the scariest motherfucker I've come across in days," once chainsawed his own bathroom door down after Maggot locked him out of it. 

Graham related another priceless big-boys-with-big-toys anecdote. Apparently, Maggot has an even more massive gun, meant for the likes of buffalo, that can shoot a bullet up to eight miles away.  The boys went out shooting and Graham tied a chicken to a post for what he euphemistically termed a "ballistics test": the idea is to see into how many pieces whatever you shoot explodes.  Well, whoever fired missed the chicken, but when they walked up to untie it, the poor bastard lay feet up, stone dead, atop a runway of grass flattened by the shock wave. 

"The bullet travels at 4600 feet per second," said Graham.  "Is that supersonic?" I wondered.  "Girlie," said Graham, "It's MENTAL-SONIC!"

No, Internet: Graham Kirkham is Mental-Sonic.  The man, I am not kidding, has never turned a computer on in his life.  "But you have an email address!" I said.  "I've sent you things there!"  He shrugged and said "Maybe," and kicked a clod of soil with his boot.  Sean, Graham's prepubescent son, piloted a gigantic bulldozer over mounds of earth, scooping dirt into a dump truck.  His dad struggled in the corner of a pen with a newborn calf.  It was twilight by now.  The bazooka blasted off, a mile away maybe, and its echoes evaporated upwards, smoke rings of sound.  We went inside and tightened the cheese presses, one last time.

Comments

[Andrew]

I see! You can make it all the way up to Preston but cant spare an hour to get to Henley... well the mountain will just have to come to you (or rather a NYD tasting next week!). You do work for NYD dont you??

Great post by the way

[Denzylle]

I'm the 'Lake District girl at heart' that lives on Graham Rd., in Hackney - but my life is in three parts. Part one is Lancashire - 1952 - 1974, part two is Kendal - 1974 - 1986, and part three is London - 1986 to date.

Two of my earliest memories are cheese-related. My first is of shopping on Blackburn Market (the old one with the glass roof, pre the concrete-ization in 1963) and being taken, aged under five, to Mr Riding's cheese stall to taste slices of his Lancashire cheese before my mother bought a pound. My second is of being taken to the doctor after fainting and not eating. He asked me what I liked to eat (I wasn't anorexic; it was more like the physical and psychological shock of my first period), and I said 'CHEESE!'.

My summers as a child were spent on a farm in Great Eccleston and I remember going to talk to my Auntie Rose in the cool, cool dairy as she spun the milk in the churn. So, my summers were spent in the Fylde.

Then, after I married, my husband's territory (he worked for the NWWA - water) covered Lancaster, the Southern Lake District and the best parts of the West Yorkshire Fells (Dent and Sedbergh), and I got to know and fall in love with that block of inland along the Lune Valley.

I'm probably about twice your age, Nathalie, and have less than half your knowledge of cheese, but I still dream of opening a cheese shop like J. Mellis in my favorite part of Glasgow, or Bairstows (who used to be in Chapel Market, Islington, before they knocked down that part of the street to build the shopping mall).

So, that's why I read your blog. Thanks for it.

Maybe Mr Kirkham remembers the Riding family. They *are* remembered, altho', these days, it seems to be a cheese- related mention as an aside to family member, Joanna Riding, who is doing well in the West End in musical comedy.