Recipes

The English Story

Every other page in this wing has been about cheese getting more rooted in a place — monastery cellars, a king protecting a cave, a cooperative that only works because everyone lives in the same valley. England runs the other way, twice over, and the results are the strangest and the saddest things in the whole history.

First, England produced the one great cheese that isn’t tied to a place, because it’s a process — and that process went round the world. Then England came closer than anywhere else to destroying its own cheese tradition completely, and got it back only because a handful of people decided to care.

Cheddar is a verb

Roquefort is a cave. Comté is a cooperative in a valley. Cheddar is a step.

The thing that makes cheddar cheddar happens after the curd is drained: it’s cut into slabs, and the slabs are stacked, turned, and re-stacked on each other for an hour or more while they warm and their own weight presses the whey out. The curd changes character completely under that treatment — it goes from a heap of grains to something layered and fibrous, like cooked chicken breast. Then it’s milled into pieces, salted directly, and pressed.

That sequence is cheddaring, and the crucial thing about it is that it is knowledge, not geography. You can do it in Somerset, or Wisconsin, or New Zealand, or my kitchen. Nothing in it depends on a particular cave or a particular grass.

Which is exactly why “cheddar” now means a colour of plastic-wrapped block in every supermarket on earth, while “Roquefort” still means one village’s caves. A cheese named after a technique will escape; a cheese named after a place stays put. That’s not England failing to protect something. It’s the consequence of having invented the portable one.

The traditional finish deserves a mention because it’s nearly gone: a proper farmhouse cheddar is bandaged — wrapped in cloth, greased with lard or butter, and left to breathe for a year or more. The cloth lets moisture out slowly and lets a dry natural rind form, and the result tastes of things a block sealed in plastic never will. Almost all commodity cheddar is now block-aged in film, which is cheaper, faster, loses less weight, and is a genuinely different cheese.

Joseph Harding, 1860 — and a callback I didn’t expect

If cheddaring is the technique, Joseph Harding (1805–1876) is the reason it travelled. He’s routinely called the father of Cheddar cheese, and unusually for this sort of epithet, it’s earned.

In the 1860s Harding replaced folklore with a system. The “Joseph Harding System” combined precise timing, temperature control, sanitation, and — this is the part that stopped me — acidity testing. He set it out in an 1860 article in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England.

I wrote a whole page on how to read a cheese recipe whose central argument is that the acid is the real instruction and the clock is only a proxy for it — and I framed that as the modern step up from beginner books to technical ones. It was published in 1860. Harding worked out that you cannot run a consistent make on elapsed time, and that you have to measure what the bacteria are actually doing, a hundred and sixty years before I got there. The books that still say “hold for 45 minutes” are behind him, not ahead of me.

And then Harding did the thing that decided the next century: he taught it. He introduced cheddar-making into Scotland, and he trained American cheesemakers who came to Somerset to learn it. Which means England’s most consequential cheese export was never the cheese — it was the method, carried home by visitors who then built factories with it. That’s the bridge straight into the next page.

🔴 Stilton: the village that is legally forbidden to make it

Now the strange one, and it’s a perfect inversion of the Roquefort charter two pages back.

Stilton was never made in Stilton. The village — now in Cambridgeshire — sat on the Great North Road, and its coaching inns, the Bell Inn especially, were where travellers bought the cheese. It was made and matured in the neighbouring counties: Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire. The name records a point of sale, not a place of origin. It’s a brand from the age of stagecoaches.

Then the law caught up, and did so with a beautiful lack of irony. The Stilton Cheese Makers’ Association formed in 1936, and in 1996 Stilton was granted PDO status restricted to those three counties — because those are the counties that actually make it.

Stilton village is in Cambridgeshire. Which is not one of the three.

So the village that gave the cheese its name cannot legally produce it. Not as an oversight — as a direct consequence of writing the protection accurately.

Put the two cases side by side and you learn something real about food names. Roquefort’s charter protected the place that did the work. Stilton’s PDO protected the places that did the work and thereby excluded the place on the label. A place name on a cheese can record where it was made or where it was sold, and you cannot tell which from the name alone. That’s worth remembering the next time a label implies provenance.

🔴 And then England nearly lost all of it

This is the part I didn’t know the scale of, and the numbers are genuinely shocking.

During the Second World War the Ministry of Food directed the nation’s milk — previously going to dozens of regional cheeses — into factories producing a single standardised product known as “Government Cheddar.” It was a rational response to a real emergency, and it worked: it helped feed Britain through the war.

It also came very close to wiping out British farmhouse cheese entirely.

  • More than 3,500 independent British cheesemakers before the First World War. Fewer than 100 by 1945.
  • In the south-west, 514 farms were making cheddar before the war. By 1974, 33 — and mostly to a uniform taste.
  • Wensleydale: 176 producers in 1939. Nine by 1946. All of them had given up by 1954.

And cheese rationing didn’t end with the war. It ran from 1941 to 1954 — nine years after VE Day. Thirteen years in which there was, effectively, one legal cheese. That’s long enough for the makers to retire, the herds to be sold, and the knowledge to stop being handed on. A tradition doesn’t need to be banned to die; it just needs to be interrupted for longer than one working generation.

I find the Wensleydale line the hardest to read. Not because nine is a small number, but because the nine hung on for eight more years and then stopped anyway. By then there was nothing to come back to.

The revival, which started with yoghurt

What makes this the most hopeful page in the wing is that a good deal of it did come back — and the beginning of it is almost comically small.

Neal’s Yard Dairy was founded in 1979 by Nicholas Saunders and Randolph Hodgson, and the prompt was that Saunders had come back from Greece in 1978 and couldn’t buy Greek yoghurt anywhere in London. That’s the origin of the British farmhouse cheese revival: an unavailable yoghurt.

From the 1980s Hodgson went looking for the surviving traditional farmstead cheesemakers — the remnant of those 3,500 — and did the one thing they actually needed, which was buy their cheese and sell it to people who would pay for it. A market, and someone arguing publicly that raw-milk English farmhouse cheese was worth as much as anything from France. It’s fair to say Neal’s Yard did for British cheese roughly what California did for American wine in the same years.

What I take from the English story

Two lessons, and I think they’re the most useful in this wing.

The first is that a cheese defined by a technique goes everywhere and loses its home, while a cheese defined by a place keeps its home and can’t leave. Cheddar and Roquefort are the two ends of that, and neither is the “right” answer — they’re different bargains.

The second is that tradition is a choice, not an inheritance. Everywhere else in this history the craft looks like an unbroken chain: monks to guilds to farmers to now. England proves the chain can snap almost completely, in living memory, for sensible wartime reasons — and that getting it back takes deliberate, sustained, unglamorous work by people who decide it matters. Every farmhouse cheddar on a counter today exists because somebody chose to restart it.

That’s worth remembering while I’m fussing over a wheel in a converted refrigerator. This stuff survives because people keep bothering.

Up next: industrialization — Jesse Williams’ 1851 factory in New York, built on the method Harding was teaching, and what happened when cheese became a manufactured good. Being written now.

Sources

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