When most people think of English cheeses, myself included, they think of Cheddar or Stilton, which are easily the most popular and widely known varieties of English cheese. But just as there are increasingly more incredible farmstead cheeses being made here in the States, the same goes for England. While there, I tasted some of the best cheeses I have ever had, and all of these cheeses were made on small family farms that had maybe twenty-five cows, max.
It is no surprise that cheese made on a smaller scale will taste better. Cheese making, especially making natural rind cheese, is labor intensive. To make these natural rind cheeses, the cheese-maker must essentially baby-sit the cheese for months, possibly even years, washing and turning the wheels constantly. Not to mention, the cheese-maker must have the right environment in which to keep the cheese (you don’t get natural caves everywhere like you do in the famous cheese making regions of France). However, both of these steps do not even matter unless you have high quality, sweet tasting milk. The bottom line is that no matter how long you wash or age cheese, if it does not come from good milk, it will fail to impress. Good cheese comes from good milk, and good milk comes from happy cows (and sheep, and goats)…but not all happy cows (and sheep, and goats) come from California. (Sadly, there are many very un-happy cows on California’s industrial dairy farms, but more on that later.)
Two places in England must be mentioned: Neal’s Yard Dairy and the Chester Cheese Shop.
A native Londoner friend recommended Neal’s Yard Dairy to me. He said, “Melissa, you HAVE to go to Neal’s Yard Dairy. Not only do you get cheese, but with every cheese you taste or buy there, you get a story.” Now, he did not mean that the cheese mongers gave you a little bed-time vignette with every sliver of cheese, but rather they can tell you about the farm and the farmer/cheese-maker where every single one of their cheeses come from.
You can read about the history of Neal’s Yard Dairy on their website. It is quite a fascinating tale. However, there is one very important aspect of it that I would like to pull out. Randolph Hodgson, after earning a food science degree, was the first cheese-maker for Neal’s yard Dairy. He eventually became the owner for the dairy, but even in the beginning, he bought cheese to supplement the ones made on site. The Neal’s Yard history states that “initially he did what everyone else did and went to a wholesaler. The cheeses that arrived were fairly anonymous and compared to the detailed knowledge Randolph had of his own cheese, he knew very little about their provenance or why they might taste different from one delivery to the next.”
Because Randolph did not know why some cheeses tasted different from others, rather than going through the middleman (the wholesaler), he started to go directly to the farmers. There he got to know each farmer, their herds, and how they make their cheese. This was all knowledge that he could then pass onto his customers, so when a customer came in and wanted a cheese that would go well with a certain wine, or a cheese that would be a perfect compliment to follow a roast duck meal, or a cheese that would be excellent along side a Stilton, he could point them in the right direction. After all, not all consumers of cheese are cheese experts, nor are they interested in becoming cheese experts—they just want to be guided to the right product so that they can enjoy it without doing extensive research.
So, to this day, when you go to Neal’s Yard for cheese, all the cheese mongers know about the origins of all the different cheese. Having hundreds of cheeses all in the same shop, this may seem like a daunting task. But you must also realize that with the exception of two cheeses, every single cheese they carry comes from the UK (the two not from the British Isle are a Greek Feta, and a goat cheese made in Oregon). Carrying only cheese made in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, or Wales means that they can go directly to each farmer and learn about the cheese. This would obviously be an impossible task if they were importing cheese from all around the world.
The second fromagerie I wanted to mention is The Cheese Shop in Chester. Carol, the owner and founder The Cheese Shop, originally owned her own restaurant. She became frustrated with not being able to source excellent cheeses, as wholesalers had no information about the cheeses they had available to restaurants. As a farmer’s daughter, she knew what excellent cheese was, and the way that good cheese should taste. Cheese is a living thing that is always changing, much like a good wine (this statement gets a little complicated with the politics of pasteurization, which I will get into in my next post). So Carol decided to open up the Cheese Shop.
Like Neal’s Yard Dairy, The Cheese Shop in Chester carries mainly all cheese from the British Isles, although she does have a few Scandinavian cheeses as well as some from continental Europe. However, when you go the Chester Cheese Shop, all the ladies can tell you about the farm, the farmer, the cheese maker, and the cheese recipe of each cheese. As I mentioned in a previous post, I tried a cheese made by a little old lady in the next town over that tasted like honey. It was incredible—one of the best cheeses I have ever had. The woman who makes this cheese is 85 and only makes it, “when she feels like it.” The woman helping us at the counter expressed her worry that when the little old lady dies the recipe for the cheese will die with her. Yes, it is quite a melodramatic story…but it was damn good cheese.
So, I will continue on with my cheese discussion in coming days, but I wanted to point out that the benefit of going to places like the Cheese Shop and Neal’s Yard Dairy is that the people who work there are experts. They are connected to their product and so passionate about it that they beg you to try it. They want to tell you about it, to educate you about it. Even if you are not interested in becoming a cheese expert, you will at least be assured to walk out of there with a better product. In addition, you are supporting farmers who simply cannot compete on an industrial scale. You are supporting farmers who have only 25 heads of cattle. And you get to enjoy some of the best cheese in the world.
These two shops are merely the finest examples of all the cheese purveyors we visited while in England. Every town and village we went to had a market with a cheese stand, and almost every town and village had a cheese shop. And each one of these cheese shops or stands had a cheese monger who was dying to tell us about his favorite cheese and where it came from. Yes, you could buy cheese at the supermarkets as well, and you could find some very good cheese at the supermarkets, but nothing like these small shops in each town. Like I said, when you buy from specialty purveyors (whether they be cheese mongers, butchers, or green grocers), you are buying from an expert. You end up with a better product because the people selling it to you are actually interested in what they provide, and you are supporting “the little guy” in a capitalist culture of big industry. The bottom line is that “the little guys” make tastier products because they actually can pay attention to what they are making or selling.
Ah, there is so much about cheese to be said, so I will stop for now, and pick up the discussion later.
1 comments:
Visiting Neal's Yard is a bit of a dream for me. Someday...
I worked at a gourmet cheese shop in Minneapolis for 3 years and we carried on average a variety of 8 to 10 different Neal's Yard cheeses at any one time. So good!
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