Ripeness is all

‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.’ The line from Life of Brian is followed by: ‘It’s not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.’ In fact, cheese animates the Bible and — building on Job’s searing image of the womb — its coagulation became an emblem of the Immaculate Conception, endorsed by no less than Hildegard of Bingen. This is just one of innumerable thoughts prompted by this Oxford Companion’s elegant, double-columned, well-illustrated pages. Here is a strong, pleasingly ripe case for cheese’s global role in social, political and economic history.

It all makes for many ‘cheese adventures’. That phrase — not here — was Boswell’s 1762 coining, when his infatuation with Louisa, a married actress, left him too poor to eat out:

I went to Holborn, to a cheesemonger’s, and bought a piece of 3lb 10oz, which cost me 14 ½ d. I eat part of it in the shop, with a halfpenny roll.