The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Pastures old and new
With a 500-year family legacy on the land, Mary Quicke knows a thing or two about making cheese. Her secret recipe? Lush Devon grass and the odd kiss for the cattle…
Saying cheese with a family firm in Devon
‘EXCUSE ME, LADIES,’ Mary Quicke murmurs to her cows as she crouches among them to pose for photos. ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ she asks, as one plants a wet bovine smacker on her mouth. Quicke doesn’t mind a bit: she is truly, madly, deeply passionate about cows.
Under her stewardship, family-owned Quicke’s has become Britain’s foremost artisan cheddar-maker, with an annual turnover of £4 million and a shelf stacked with international and domestic cheese awards. Honoured in 2005 with an MBE for her contribution to farming and cheesemaking, Quicke, 63, is widely acknowledged as the UK’S doyenne of cheese.
Over the decades, she has carefully bred her 600-strong herd and developed a pioneering grazing system that yields milk ideal for clothbound cheddar, the iconic cheese of south-west England. Her ‘ladies’ roam outdoors all year round, dining almost exclusively on lush Devon pasture, and their milk
captures the deep, rich flavour of the landscape across the seasons.
As we stand amid the cows, with spectacular views over rolling hills, Quicke tells me how her family has tended this sublime 1,500-acre corner of Devon for almost 500 years. But she didn’t originally plan for a life on the land. Her father, Sir John Quicke, had revived the art of cheesemaking on the farm in the 1970s, firmly believing healthy pasture was essential for the highest-quality milk. But although he impressed upon his six children the profound importance of preserving the landscape, he didn’t want them to feel duty-bound to join the business.
So, Mary headed to London to study English literature. But as she neared the end of her PHD, Devon called her back. She worked for a year in a Shropshire farmhouse creamery to hone her skills, ‘Milk that is fed on grazed grass has a “cow breath” quality that I absolutely love’ and returned to Home Farm, six miles north of Exeter, in 1984 to take over cheesemaking from her mother, Prue.
Convinced the secret of truly spectacular cheddar was in the cows, Quicke experimented with different breeds and grazing methods, to improve the quality of the farm’s milk. In a bold move, she replaced high-yielding Holsteins with lower-yielding crossbreeds of Friesian, Swedish Red and Montbéliarde cows, which can graze outdoors in Devon’s mild climate almost all year around. She also devised a system of moving them to
a different pasture every 12 hours and assiduously measuring the growth of the grass. This ensures the land is given sufficient time to recover and the cows enjoy a varied diet.
‘Milk that is fed on grazed grass has a “cow breath” quality that I absolutely love,’ Quicke says. ‘It’s a glorious warm, vegetable, slightly green aroma, that definitely comes through in the milk.’ Essentially, she has intertwined the science of cheesemaking with the warp and weft of the land, to produce smooth, rich milk – and wonderful cheddar.
It’s a rare approach in an age of industrial-scale dairies, where cows spend much of their lives indoors eating specially formulated feeds to maximise their milk yields. But for Quicke, working in partnership with the land is the only way. ‘The natural world on its own won’t deliver us delicious things to eat, so all farming involves some degree of persuading nature to give us food,’ she says.
Today, Quicke oversees production of a range of clothbound cheddars aged up to two years, as well as goat’s-milk cheddar, Quicke’s own versions of Red Leicester and Double Gloucester, and hand-patted whey butter. Everything is made the old-fashioned way, with heritage starters (strains of bacteria that turn lactose into lactic acid) and ‘cheddaring’ by hand. This ancient technique involves cutting the drained curds into blocks, then repeatedly turning and stacking them until they reach the desired level of acidity and moisture.