This cheese is new to me and also my first foray into the world of Alex James’s range of cheeses. Perhaps it’s because I lived in Manchester in the nineties and so always erred towards the Gallagher brothers in the Blur/Oasis face-off, but I had yet to try any of the bassist-turned-country-squire’s offerings until now, when my friends at Pong Cheese kindly sent me some.
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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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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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Happy St. Patrick’s Day to anyone who celebrates it. Over the last couple of weeks, courtesy of the Pong Cheese Irish Selection Box, I’ve learned a great deal about the history and diversity of Irish cheese. Today’s cheese sums up the island’s cheese renaissance, blending fresh milk from green pastures with inspiration from further afield – in this case, France. As you can see, though, Humming Bark is not a cheese for amateurs. It’s not just flexing its muscles; it’s actually burst through its shirt, Hulk-style.
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If there’s one Irish cheese that seems to deserve an automatic place on any St Patrick’s Day platter, it may well be this one. Second out of the Pong Cheese Irish Selection Box I was sent to review is Cashel Blue, which is named after the ‘Rock of Cashel’, the medieval castle where St Patrick is said to have started converting the pagan Irish to Christianity, using the three-leafed shamrock as a metaphor for the Holy Trinity.
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Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
If you’re a literary sort, then the name Adlestrop might mean to you a poem by Edward Thomas that evokes the last hot, indolent English summer before the outbreak of the First World War. The poem was inspired by an impromptu train stop at the village of Adlestrop, which is in Gloucestershire, just a couple of miles from the makers of…
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Some cheeses have the whiff of legend about them. Tornegus whiffs of both legend and old dishcloths, what with it being a washed rind cheese. You might not have heard of Tornegus but its family tree takes in some of the greatest British cheeses and their producers.
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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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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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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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