A British revival

There was an episode in the latest series of The Apprentice in which a bungling ex-army man was commissioned with selling the best of British produce in a French market. He chose to represent his country with huge quantities of ear-and-sphincter sausages and factory cheddar, made a big loss, and was fired from the show. There really was no excuse. British cheeses have come an enormously long way in the last decade or so, as a quick peer into one of the Neal’s Yard shops reveals. In 1989 the Department of Agriculture was all set to ban unpasteurised cheese amid listeria panic. The Specialist Cheesemakers’ Association was set up in response; it now has about 140 members, three quarters of whom have started making cheese since the association was formed. Cheese has been the key to many a small farm’s survival.

According to Anne Hastings of Neal’s Yard, there has been a distinct revival of interest in traditional British cheeses, where before people had concentrated on emulating Continental types. There are, it is true, wonderful British cheeses that resemblance more famous European examples — I tried the delicious Berkswell, a sheep cheese reminiscent of a medium-young Pecorino; Doddington, a lovely sweet cow’s milk cheese, hinted at Comté.

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But here’s a list of those traditional cheeses being sold in Neal’s Yard shops. There is Cheshire (the oldest recorded cheese in the British Isles), great handmade, clothbound cheeses by Appleby’s of Cheshire, always picking up awards. There is the Lancashire from the Kirkhams of Goosnargh, who have been making cheeses for three generations but have reverted to the traditional method of binding them in cloth and buttering them, instead of encasing them in wax. The Calvers in Somerset stopped making block cheddar in the 1990s and returned to making traditional round cheeses; their Westcombe Cheddar has had great success.