Yes, I’ve eaten Red Leicester before. If truth be told, I was practically weaned on Red Leicester. I ate so much that it probably permanently altered my DNA. We always had a slab of it in the fridge – cheese sandwiches, cheesy jacket potatoes, cheese salads. But when I grew up, I went off Red Leicester. It always seemed to look a bit sweaty and shiny and taste quite sharp and, if I’m honest, there’s probably an element of food snobbery about its colour. We’ve been so conditioned to think that all colouring in foods is bad – salmon shouldn’t be pink, smoked haddock shouldn’t be yellow and children’s juice shouldn’t be the colour of dayglo socks from the 1980s – that orange cheese somehow feels a bit wrong. But back to the colouring later…
Category Archives: cheese
Wild Garlic Yarg
I chose this cheese as in the space of a week two fellow cheese-fans raved about it and posted photos. I’d tried original Yarg cheese before but not this variation. I bought it from a local market next to a river; as South London goes, it’s about as rural as it gets and the kind of leafy damp place I imagine wild garlic might have grown in the past, before the rusty shopping trolleys squashed it all.
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Innes Log
I was pleased as punch recently when ‘the real me’ won a selection of British cheeses from La Cremerie in a recipe competition with my Spenwood Soufflé with Blackberry Sauce. When they arrived (and I could smell them even before I opened the box – bliss!) I was even more pleased that one of them was from Staffordshire, county of my birth. I’d been searching for homeland cheeses for some time but with little luck. I had a brief flutter of excitement when I found a cheesemaker based around the corner from where I used to live but hope was dashed when I discovered that they’d ceased production. Then when I tried making Staffordshire Oatcakes for the first time, I wanted to use local cheddar but I may as well have been trying to get my hands on Novak Djokovic’s donkey cheese. I surrended my quest.
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Millstone
I choose a cheese to write about in a myriad of different ways. Some I hunt out because I’ve heard great things about them or because they have an intriguing history. Some are given to me by travelling friends. Some I panic buy at the last minute because I’ve just remembered. But this week’s cheese is the first that I’ve bought because I was amused by the fact that it looks like its name.
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Fowlers Sage Derby
There’s something of the déjà vu about Sage Derby. I feel nostalgic for it, it reminds me of my childhood but I haven’t the foggiest idea why. I never remember eating it or seeing it in the house. I grew up in the next door county so perhaps it was always on the supermarket shelves (I was going to say pub menus but in those days it was all chicken-in-a-basket and a piece of Stilton on the cheeseboard would have been the talk of the town.) So, I don’t know why I think I know Sage Derby. Mum, if you’re reading this (and sometimes I fear it’s only my Mum reading), let me know if we ever ate Sage Derby.
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Mouth Almighty Lancashire Cheese
I’m a bit cynical about celebrities and ‘their’ products. I find it hard to believe that Britney Spears is really out the back chopping up lychees, quinces and civet cat testicles to make her perfume or that Frank Lampard is holed up in his garret, writing children’s stories (or writing joined-up letters, quite frankly). So when I heard that Sean Wilson – or ‘Martin Platt off Coronation Street’ as he’s been called for the last thirty years or so – was making cheese now, I’ll confess, I thought ‘Yeah, of course he is…’
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Oxford Isis
After surviving a brush with Stinking Bishop last month, I got cocky and decided to plump for another washed rind cheese. Traditionally renowned as ‘the really stinky ones’, these are the cheeses that get banned from public transport or the ones you should sew into the cushions if your spouse has an affair. This time round it was Oxford Isis and I have to say, things were not looking good when I got into the car and my other half said, ‘Oh no, I think the baby’s just done something’, a refrain that was to be repeated every time I opened the fridge door over the next two days.
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Blacksticks Blue
I was drawn to this cheese by the story of its name. A blue cheese (rather obviously), it was named ‘Blacksticks’ after a farm of the same name near to the dairy, where some tall chestnut trees looked like black sticks against the winter sky. I love the British countryside in the autumn and winter (my other half likes to go on about ‘crows in ploughed fields’ as he knows it will make me all misty-eyed) and, as the summer starts to wind down, it seemed an appropriate cheese to check out.
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Stinking Bishop
I’d heard so much talk about Stinking Bishop that I was starting to think it was some sort of novelty cheese. Dubbed ‘the stinkiest cheese in Britain’ in 2009, it seems to be the marmite of cheese-lovers – you either love it or hate it. My sister’s boyfriend adores it but the Other Half thinks it’s the devil’s work. Its appearance in a Wallace and Gromit film where it raised Wallace from the dead further cemented its reputation as a hardcore cheese.
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Alham Wood Junas
Mention British farm animals to most people and they’ll conjure up an image of green fields trimmed with hedgerows, black and white cows grazing the grass and chewing the cud. Or maybe fluffy sheep cropping the sparse vegetation on a mountainside. At a push, perhaps some cheeky goats in their perennial eating-the-washing-line stance. What they probably won’t come up with is a herd of black water buffalo, great horns curling over their horizontal ears. But that’s exactly where this week’s cheese comes from. And the buffalo aren’t paddling in the floodplains of Pakistan or India; they’re grazing the pastures of Somerset.
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Fromage Homage 