There are many fine Scottish cheeses I could have brought to you on Burns Night: Lanark or Dunsyre Blue, gorgeous cheeses sadly not currently in production; punchy cheddar types from the Isle of Mull or Barwhey’s; the stunning enigma of a cheese that is Paddy’s Milestone; or the bluest blue cheese ever seen, Hebridean Blue. Instead, dear reader, I’m bringing you a cheese from the time when Nordic men with big beards spelled trouble rather than the launch of a hipster hygge café.
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So, turns out that today is #CheeseLoversDay. Other than a hashtag, I’m not sure what this consists of but it did seem to mean I had to write something. Then I started to worry: if I post about a particular cheese, will all the other cheeses think that I love that cheese the most? Finally, I got a grip and decided to just write about the last cheese that I bought, on a recent foray to East Anglia.
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Apparently yesterday was Blue Monday, supposedly the most miserable day of the year. Based on a not-very-scientific-looking formula that takes into account weather, debt, breaking New Year’s resolutions and the fact that next Christmas is aaaages away, we were all supposed to sink into a pit of existential doom. Admittedly, it was a bit cold and rainy outside and the remains of the Quality Street were impinging somewhat on my healthier eating plans but all in all, it wasn’t so bad.
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Sometimes cheeses come to me as a mystery to be solved. When my in-laws presented me with a piece of Savoyard, I assumed from the name it was French. ‘Oh no,’ says mother-in-law, who knew everything there is to know about cheese before I was even born. ‘I think it’s made down the road from us, in Wiltshire.’ So began The Search for Savoyard.
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2016 was seemingly all about Scandinavia. You couldn’t move for newspaper articles about how to hygge up your home with a furry throw or make cloudberry jam for your meatballs. Amongst all the candles and crayfish, one thing caught my eye – apparently, the hard, traditional ginger biscuits, much-beloved of our Viking cousins (and known as pepparkakor in Sweden) go very well with blue cheese.
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The end of the year. A sudden drop in temperature restores more seasonal climes and, with that, a craving for stodgier, heartier, fattier foods. As luck would have it, my in-laws recently bought me this cheese, Doublet, that they’d bought at their local market. And boy, does it ever fit the bill.
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Some things are born from the embers of disaster. This recipe is one of them. If you read food blogs, you would think that nothing ever goes wrong and that all dishes arrive from the oven aromatic and done to a turn, just waiting to be single-lit photographed with attractive rustic props. Not so my membrillo this year. No matter how long I cooked it for in a low oven, it retained the consistency of sloppy jam. It’s still delicious but there will be no cute little stiff diamonds of it on my cheese this year; more of a smear. The upside is that it’s spreadable so perfect to lather over some pastry.
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When the temperature starts to plummet and the nights to draw in around mid-afternoon, it’s time to lay down some fat for the winter months ahead. Some might call it greed; I call it an evolutionary imperative. Mince pies and chocolate coins are a good start but fondues take some beating in the ‘optimum intake of calories in one sitting’ stakes.
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I’ve been cooking with a lot of cheeses recently but haven’t had much time to scout out new ones. So, when I saw that my veg box supplier had added a new cheese to its catalogue, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to sound it out.
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Jerusalem artichokes are like the tube engineers of the allotment. From February until November, whilst other vegetables are getting all showy and plump above the soil, the artichokes beaver away underground, doing their thing. Considering, or perhaps because of, their unstoppable ability to produce monster yields, they are not a popular vegetable, despite their sweet and nutty taste. Admittedly, this might also be due to their reputation for causing…ahem…digestive mayhem. As far back as 1621, John Goodyer was moaning that ‘which way soever they be dressed and eaten, they stir and cause a filthy loathsome stinking wind within the body, thereby causing the belly to be pained and tormented, and are a meat more fit for swine than men.’
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Fromage Homage 