Short Stories about British Cheese

Funny thing, fame.  Hard to know when or where it’ll hit, what haphazard celestial logic plucks the chosen ones from the chaff.  Some people seek it out, bartering sex, principles or money for column inches…and then there are those whose notoriety suddenly materializes, fashions itself without their permission: lightning strikes them twice, or doctors remove a tumor the size of a microwave from their backside, or they unexpectedly birth octuplets.  Or they make a famous cheese.

Charles Martell, I think we’d agree, is rather unlikely a choice for infamy.  A zoologist turned cattle truck driver turned farmer, he became passionate about a local, ancient breed of cow known as the Old Gloucester, brownish-black, white-striped animals suited beautifully to both milk and meat, but especially cheesemaking (high casein content, small fat globules).  Only 68 were left by 1973, when Martell revived the Gloucester Cattle Society, defunct for over fifty years.  Today, thanks to the good work of Martell and fellow enthusiasts (and boy are cattle people enthusiasts), 719 Old Gloucester cows graze contentedly in pastures from East Anglia to Cornwall.

Martell then turned to fruit.  Over the past half-century, three-quarters of the orchards in the area had vanished, and with them a number of local varieties: pears like the whimsically named Ford’s Green Huffcap, Water Lugg and Stony Ways; Leathercoat apples; Gloucestershire plums.  What a badass, this man: he initiated and established the National Collection of Perry Pears with 126 trees and 59 varieties; set up the Gloucestershire Apple Collection, which has over 98 varieties of apples and distributes cuttings to people who want to plant some in their gardens; and wrote a book illustrating 160 varieties of Gloucestershire apples that describes their shape and color, where they can be found, republishes long-forgotten drawings and photographs; and cites the first time they appear in literature (the Leather-Coats, for instance, in Shakespeare's Henry IV).

Single and Double Gloucester

The county of Gloucestershire was, and to some extent remains, the quintessence of the British pastoral ideal (remember my experience here?)  Its pastures were ideal for grazing cattle, and a thriving dairy culture evolved.  Cheese--the longest-lasting way to preserve milk--allowed farmers to literally sell the fat of the land, and many began making Double & Single Gloucester. 

Double Gloucester, made with whole milk, would've kept for longer and been worth more at market, so it was saved for that purpose.  Single Gloucester, on the other hand, was cheese made from the milk that remained after skimming the cream to churn into butter.  It doesn't last as long, and was less prized anyway: in essence, it's the eighteenth-century equivalent of the fish soup chefs make for their staff's lunch with all the remnants of uneaten salmon and trout off diners' plates. 

What I'll call cheese symbiosis--an arrangement created by dint of a reluctance to waste--can be seen in cheesemaking cultures all over the world: Parmigiano formaggiai make ricotta from centrifuged whey; the Greek have their Myzithra, and so on.  Because they deal with product that sometimes must sit for a year before it turns a profit, cash-flow is often a problem cheesemakers face.  That's why, as demand by Welsh miners for Caerphilly outstripped supply, the Somerset cheddar-makers found it advantaeous to add Caerphilly to their repertoire (cheddar takes a year or two to mature; Caerphilly, a month or two); that's how Comte-makers came to produce Morbier (Comte takes many months; Morbier, few).  Even today, most the cheesemakers we buy from produce a selection of cheeses; some to sell young and some to mature and sell more expensively, later.

Few farmhouse cheesemakers, however, survived the triple-whammy of the Industrial Revolution, World War I and especially World War II, during which the Ministry of Food and the Milk Marketing Board (which held the monopoly on milk purchasing from 1939 to the 1980s) centralized cheese production, sending all the milk to a few big factories, in order to optimize the country's resources.  By the early 1970s, hardly any farmhouse cheesemakers had survived the economic massacre, and the cheese had fared worse: in one fell swoop, Single and Double Gloucester--and most of the other traditional British cheeses--became the plasticky slabs more rubbery than recognizable as cheese, mass-produced in blocks, wrapped in plastic and sold in supermarkets even today.  It had been lobotomized. 

Martell arrived on Laurel Farm and began breeding Old Gloucesters in 1970.  Seven years later, he was made redundant at the cattle-trucking job and decided, suddenly unemployed, to try his hand at cheesemaking with their milk.  Ironically, the whole impetus behind the products for which he's now famous was to publicise the cow-regeneration mission, his real calling  ("The cows are the only thing," he's been quoted as saying.  "Without them there would be nothing.") 

What he didn't realize was that across the country, other people--the first of the non-farmers to keep a few goats, cows or sheep in the garden--were also staring perplexedly at the indimidating surplus of milk buckets filling their kitchen and thinking "What he hell to do with this?"  Martell, along with people like Robin Congden in Devon (Ticklemore, Beenleigh and Harbourne Blue), goat sage Mary Holbrook (Tymsboro, Cardo, Old Ford) in Somerset, and Veronica Steele (Milleens) in Cork, would come to be seen as one of the pillars of the British farmhouse cheese revolution
fomented during the late '70s.

Stinking Bishop

Unlike Single and Double Gloucester, Stinking Bishop is a wholly modern cheese.  Invented by Martell to resemble a Mont d'Or, the wheels are wrapped in a birch belt to keep their golden bellies from spilling out.  Their rinds are washed in perry, a pear liquor made by Martell from one of the rare varieties of pear in the orchard: the Stinking Bishop, which commemorates somewhat less than tactfully the Farmer Bishop who first bred it.  The name frightens people, but it's actually one of the milder washed-rinds, with a bark worse than its bite (literally).  When we have it, it's generally the runniest cheese on the counter, and we have to spoon it onto waxed paper. 

The pressures of popularity on Martell's operation grew such that for some years now he's begun to mix Friesian milk in with the Old Gloucesters' and pasteurises the lot, so I haven't even tasted The Real Thing.  Its memory, however, evokes in Dairy old-timers some intensely nostalgic frissons.

Sometime last year, the producers of immensely popular British Claymation film Wallace & Gromit approached Martell to see if they could use the name of the cheese in the sequel, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Wensleydale

History always leads by example, and Hollywood sure knows how to pick 'em. 

Here's a story about another traditional British cheese: Wensleydale.  Trust me, everything will come full circle at the end.  I do love round endings.

Originally, back when French Cistercian monks from Roquefort who'd settled in the dales (valleys) of North Yorkshire were making it, they would've used ewe's milk (Crockhamdale attempts to emulate this).  Once the cow colonized British dairy farming in the 1300s, however, it carried on using cow's milk.  Farmhouses dotted around the dales of Swale and Wensley made the cheese seasonally, using cow rennet or, if they were short of vells, black snails (I've never heard of this elsewhere, but Patrick Rance said so, and he's always right).

Despite the fact that we always couch the rhetoric of tradition-conservation in the fallacy that things always tasted better back then, the quality of the cheese wasn't always very consistent.  Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a cheese merchant named Edward Chapman decided to take control by buying the milk from the cheesemaking farmers and making the cheese himself; the descendant of Edward Chapman's fledgling entreprise is Hawes Creamery, NYD's current Wensleydale producer.  Farmers found it easier just to sell him the milk, and as the industrial population of the English North expanded, creameries like Hawes became large and streamlined enough to continue producing cheese through the two world wars.  They provided stability for the farmers as a regular milk customer, particular appreciated before the Milk Marketing Board was created in 1933. 

Hawes--now owned by DairyCrest, the privatized arm of the now-defunct MMB that buys 2.4 billion liters of British milk a year from over 1,600 farmers--is a massive cheese factory, and almost everything their conveyor belts spit out is waxed, young, and bland.  Some years ago, Randolph, who'd gradually become an important customer, in reputation if not numbers, offered to pay more for a traditionally cloth-wrapped Wensleydale.

When it arrived, mold, sporadic blueing and all, he placed it on the counter alongside the regular Wensleydale: it outsold the modern Wensleydale 6 to 1.  He later prodded Hawes to try animal rather than microbial rennet, and Wensleydale sales rocketed again.  Recently, extra-large rounds, forty pounds heavy and slightly less tightly pressed, have been spotted on the counter; Corrie, at dawn after a particularly robust night out, proclaimed that if I were an NYD cheese, I'd be Big Wensleydale.  What can I say?  Its flavours are milky and clean and lovely and long; I took it as a compliment.

It will likely be years before we ever taste an unpasteurized batch, but Randolph is remarkably persuasive...

Hawes--or Dairycrest, I should say--is obviously a way bigger producer than we're used to working with.  But because they support their local community by, well, employing everyone in the neighborhood, and are willing to work with Neal's Yard Dairy to improve the flavor of the cheese, we  happily sell it. 

(The other reason, of course, that I'm happy to sell Hawes Wensleydale is that farmhouse Wensleydale producers are still, uh, scarce, to put it mildly.  Encouragingly, however, Red Leicester hadn't been made on a farm since the fifties, either, but rock stars Jo and David Clarke are doing something about it.)

After DairyCrest bought the Hawes Creamery in 1992, they decided to close Hawes down and transfer production of Wensleydale cheese to Lancashire, the rival county.  The ex-managers of Hawes fought against the decision and, against all odds, persuaded DairyCrest to reopen the factory.  However, sales had fallen so low that production was at risk of being suspended anyway.  And then: serendipity.

Animator Nick Park (also of Chicken Run) decided to clay-mate an absent-minded, cheese-loving inventor named Wallace and his faithful, silent dog, Gromit (who now, the Internet informs me, has a prototype Mars explorer robot named after him).  Wallace loves all cheese, but particularly Wensleydale, whose name caught Park's fancy....and today Hawes employs half again as many people as worked for them in 1993. 

Right, so Charles Martell's operation is about one hundredth the size of Hawes'.  But despite the fact that Stinking Bishop's cameo in the Wallace and Gromit sequel is limited to its name on a little placard near the end, it inspired among Britons a mad, obsessive rush for the cheese.  Some deli managers and chefs we sell to practically wept on the phone.  I recall about one in every three customers this Christmas asking desperately for Stinking Bishop and leaving disappointed despite the fact that the other washed-rinds were tasting far better.  If we did, for some reason, receive a few wheels, they flew off the counter long before they ever got runny and sweet.  It was sad all around. 

In another twist of fate, an electrical fire around the time of the movie's release gutted Nick Park's archive warehouse, and most of the models for Wallace and Gromit burned to the ground.  Tragic, of course--but, as comedian Jimmy Carr put it, the event "caused an estimated five million pounds worth of publicity."  Which resulted in an estimated five billion orders for the elusive Stinking Bishop. 

Our head cheese maturer, Bill, was invited to the movie's UK premiere, as a guest of the Wensleydale people.  At one point one of my housemates brought the video home, and I watched it with interest, but I fell asleep near the end and missed the goddamn Stinking Bishop. 

You didn't know there was this much drama to the history of British cheese?  Yeah, I thought it was just a lump of soured milk and salt I'd have figured out after six weeks.  Eighteen months later, I'm still trying to untangle chains of amino acids from the politics of the Industrial Revolution; the persnickety jargon used to describe flavor from the the gender-based division of labor on British farms over the past five hundred years; the way the grass travels through the four stomachs of an Ayrshire cow; the quantifiable differences between West Country Cheddar like Bob Bramley makes at Westcombe Farm from the orange bricks labeled cheddar that dairies anywhere beween Canada and Canberra shit out of their closed-vat peepholed push-buttoned metal megastructures.

And I don't even know the goddamn half of it. 

Comments

[tejal]

Really enjoyed reading this.