I’ve had a little break from blogging for a while, mainly because I quite like absenting myself from all forms of social media every now and then. It’s perhaps not coincidental though that my break coincided with the ‘hunger gap’, the time of year when there is least fresh produce available to pick and eat. It’s been a busy time down on the allotment though, with a feverish period of digging, weeding, manuring and planting- and now we are finally starting to reap the rewards.
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Happy St George’s Day! It may not be a classic territorial cheese but, since it was launched in 1994, Stinking Bishop has become one of England’s most well-known cheeses. As a washed rind cheese, it predictably divides people but once you get past its pungent rind, this is a consistently great cheese with a creamy, delicious and – honestly! – inoffensive paste.
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It’s hard to choose one quintessential English cheese. For some it might be Stilton. Others may plump for their own regional territorial, a Lancashire or perhaps what’s thought of as our oldest cheese, Cheshire. But there is one cheese that has a habit of featuring on many an ‘England’s Best Cheeses’ list (as well as in Pong’s English Selection Box) and that cheese is Montgomery’s Cheddar.
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Spring heralds many things. Fresh goat’s cheeses are one of them and rampaging weeds are another. In my garden, the ground elder has started to stretch its legs.
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When tackling any cheeseboard, it makes sense to start with the less, ahem, feisty characters. So it is that, in breaking open the Pong English Selection Box, Cerney Ash was first on the cracker, given that its stable-mates are a mature Cheddar, a Stilton and Stinking Bishop itself.
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Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’ Henry V, William Shakespeare
It doesn’t get much more patriotic than a Shakespeare quote about our national patron saint – and, in a further twist, Shakespeare’s birthday is also on Saint George’s Day, April 23rd. In truth though, these days most English people would be hard pushed to tell you anything about Saint George other than he took on a dragon. However, in other countries such as Italy, Bulgaria, Croatia and Latvia, St George’s Day is traditionally tied in with the start of the cheese-making season and is a time to bless their livestock. All of which seamlessly leads me into Pong Cheese’s English Selection Box, which would seem to present the ideal way to honour St George, Shakespeare and farm animals all in one.
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At the risk of recycling and mangling a very laboured analogy, it seems that mixed milk cheeses are like buses – you wait three years and then they all come along at once. Doublet, which I wrote about at the end of last year, is a Somerset cheese made using cow and sheeps’ milk. This week I bring you Sharpham Savour, which uses cow and goats’.
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