A cheese-themed journey in Britain

BRITAIN – On a sunny October afternoon in the London neighbourhood of Bermondsey, a cool breeze surprised me with the winy smell of apples. It brought on a sudden sharp craving for a nice chunk of cheddar, the fruit and the cheese together being a favourite after-school snack when I was growing up in Connecticut in the United States.

I was on my way to a privileged lesson in British farmhouse cheeses at the beginning of an eight-day, cheese-themed trip to London and Somerset run by speciality tour company Cheese Journeys (cheesejourneys.com).

My destination was the empyrean address for anyone who loves best-quality British cheeses: the ageing cellars of the Neal’s Yard Dairy. Not normally open to the public, they occupy a set of soaring, vaulted spaces created from four arches of a red-brick Victorian railway viaduct.

Here, along with my group of 18, I would be getting a fascinating tutorial in both British cheeses and the cheesemongering company that saved many of them from extinction.

On this trip, I would learn how these cheeses, especially cheddar, are made and aged from the cheesemakers who produce mighty rounds on their farms in Somerset in the West Country.

The hosts were also steeped in cheese: Ms Anna Juhl, the founder of Cheese Journeys, and Ms Laura Downey and Mr Chris Palumbo from Fairfield & Greenwich Cheese Co, a pair of cheese shops in Connecticut towns.

The journey had started with a morning tour of Borough Market, one of the largest and oldest food halls in London, by American-in-London guide and cookbook writer Cecilia Brooks.

That had been followed by a superb picnic lunch of gigantic sausage roll sandwiches from the Ginger Pig, a stall in the market that specialises in free-range British meat and poultry and is known for its delicious sausages.

Neal’s Yard Dairy (www.nealsyarddairy.co.uk) was founded by Mr Randolph Hodgson in a ramshackle corner of London’s Covent Garden in 1979.

It launched the renaissance in British farmhouse cheeses not only by creating a retail showcase for them, but also by building an efficient international distribution network, ageing cellars and partnerships that have helped many British cheesemakers stay in business and thrive.

Donning protective plastic bonnets, shoe caps and jackets, we began our tour of the ageing cellars with Ms Yvonne Yeoh, a charming Singaporean woman who shuttles between New York and London and is the sales director for Neal’s Yard.

“The human diet as we know it today began with fermented foods, notably cheese, bread, wine and beer. Fermented foods were the beginning of the gastronomic complexity we now rather feebly describe as ‘delicious’,” she said.

“Does anyone know how milk was preserved as a food before there was refrigeration? You made cheese.”

We sat down for a tasting of seven Neal’s Yard cheeses, including a couple of surprisingly complex soft cheeses – Wigmore, a washed-curd ewe’s milk cheese made in Berkshire; and Elrick Log, a raw goat’s milk cheese from Lanarkshire in Scotland.

It was the long, thin, sunny triangle of Montgomery’s cheddar that stopped me in my tracks, though.

Its pleasantly earthy barnyard flavour, with notes of mushrooms and broth and a lingering finish, was the ringing apotheosis of cheddar cheese, and its taste immediately became one I would not only never forget but also crave forever.

A manor fit for cheese

The following morning, we left London by bus to go to North Cadbury in Somerset, where cheesemaker Jamie Montgomery makes this very rare cheese with milk from his herd of some 200 mostly Friesian cows at Manor Farm.

On the way out of London, Ms Juhl discussed her travel business.

In 2013, she and her husband teamed up with Neal’s Yard to launch Cheese Journeys. Today, they run cheese-themed trips to Belgium, England, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland, with six trips planned for 2024.

Two hours later, we arrived at North Cadbury Court (www.northcadburycourt.com), a magnificent country house which would be our home for the next six days.

The sweeping lawn in front of the house had been mowed in a pattern of green stripes, which flattered its orange lichen-speckled Elizabethan facade. Parts of the house date back to the 1300s; the south side has sweeping views of rolling countryside.

The Montgomery family no longer lives in the house and has converted it into a rental property with 21 bedrooms, an indoor pool, a gym and a snooker room.

My room, the Oak Room, came with a four-poster bed, a soaking tub in a large windowed alcove and original Tudor mouldings on the ceiling. But my favourite room was the library, with its original edition of Puck Of Pook’s Hill by Rudyard Kipling, volumes of poetry by Keats and Shelley and a shelf full of Anthony Trollope.

“Owning the castle, which is what I call staying at a house like this one, creates an easygoing house-party experience guests enjoy,” Ms Juhl said.

The arrangement also allowed her to put her preferred private chef, Frenchman Sylvain Jamois, in the estate’s kitchen. He has a mastery of British country-house cooking rarely found in restaurants, including handmade pies, potted prawns and roasted suckling pig.

Biology, chemistry, craft

When he came to fetch us for a tour of his farm and dairy the next morning, Mr Montgomery had straw on his sweater that established his credentials as a farmer at the helm of his family’s 112-year-old diary (www.montgomeryscheese.co.uk).

He gestured at his cow-dotted pastures and said: “Our job is to try and get the taste of all of this into our cheese.”

He added: “The French call it terroir, the whole idea that something can only come from one place, but I call it common sense and respecting nature.”

He showed us how cheddar is made.

We stood around the oblong stainless steel-lined vat, where the morning’s pale yellow milk was being stirred by two mechanical arms to begin forming curds. Next, the curds were separated from the whey and churned by hand by the cheesemakers, before being cheddared, or allowed to coagulate.

The curds were then cut into rectangular sheets that were shredded, salted and fitted into cheddar moulds to be pressed overnight. The new cheeses were then wrapped in cotton muslin, and smeared with lard (to encourage the growth of healthy mould and help the cheese to retain moisture) before being brought to ageing cellars.

I liked all our farm visits, because it was so interesting to see how every farmer and cheesemaker had his or her own style.

At Westcombe Dairy (westcombedairy.com), Mr Richard Calver and his son, Tom, have converted their farm to regenerative agriculture, a term that describes farming and grazing practices meant to improve the land.

The Calvers also favour leaving nature to its own devices in their pastures, “because the more diverse the plants the cows graze on, the richer the flavour palate of the cheese”, said Mr Tom Calver, who previously trained as a chef and worked in London.

“But we’re not against innovation either,” he said with a grin when he led us into the dairy’s maturing cellars, where a cheddar-turning robot, nicknamed Tina the Turner, has taken over the backbreaking work of shifting the heavy rounds of cheese as they age.

We tasted the cheese over a picnic lunch of salads and charcuterie with deliciously hoppy suds from a local craft beer brewer called the Wild Beer Co.

“Alec, how would you describe the Westcombe cheddar?” one of the cheesemongers from Connecticut asked me.

I replied that it had a somewhat less formal flavour than Montgomery cheddar, with an occasional whiff of herbaceousness and notes of hazelnut, caramel and citrus.

A memory of my paternal grandmother moved in my head, of the day her elaborate description of the taste of a piece of cheddar from upstate New York sent my brother and I into a gale of giggles. “Someday, after you’ve learnt how to express taste, you’ll find there are few subjects more worthy than a good piece of cheddar,” she said.

Fifty years later, I learnt that she was right. NYTIMES