Why Cheddar is paler in winter
...and the cheese that dare not speak its name! Fascinating facts behind a new golden era for Scotland’s artisan dairy delights
IT should have been throttled years ago by the health-andsafety brigade. Undone by Brexit. And, most assuredly, clobbered by Covid-19. Instead, against all odds this is emerging as a Golden Age for artisan cheese-making in the United Kingdom – and particularly in Scotland. Not only, it seems, are ever more people making the stuff, but it is becoming ever easier to buy.
The Margiotta chain in Edinburgh, for instance, happily stocks the fine products of the Connage Highland Dairy in Ardersier, where the Clark family produce their own clothbound tributes to Gouda, Stilton and Dunlop – and many other cheeses besides, though my favourite is their Cromal.
Cromal is rather like Wensleydale, but better – crumbly, lemony, intriguing. And it is all thanks to the same contented, organically-reared herd of 150 cows, chomping contentedly on clover-rich pastures by the shores of the Moray Firth.
And one can think of many other entrepreneurs – the Isle of Mull outfit, the Yester Mill producers in East Lothian, Cambus O’May at Ballater, the Stone family’s Highland Fine operation at Tain and Humphrey Errington’s business in Lanarkshire.
It is all a far cry from the Seventies, when cheese was invariably orange, rubbery, and wrapped in plastic – save for such hideous imports as the ammoniacal Danish Blue.
BUT in that era the dairy scene was dominated by the Milk Marketing Boards, which kept the price of milk artificially high and more or less decreed what could and could not be sold.
Their demise in the Nineties has inevitably resulted in the loss of many small family-owned dairies. But it also removed a clipboard idiocy that did great damage to Scottish cheese production.
It was the Milk Marketing Board which insisted, after the war, on abolishing Dunlop, the traditional Scots for hard cheese, especially in Ayrshire, replacing it with the meaningless Scottish Cheddar.
They were frightened it would make customers think of rubber tyres. And they failed to spot winners. Shropshire Blue, for instance, was born no nearer Shropshire than Castle Stuart, east of Inverness – invented by Andy Williamson, who had been trained by the makers of Stilton.
However, he marketed his ‘Blue Stuart’ beyond Scotland as Shropshire Blue – until, in 1980, the North of Scotland Milk Marketing Board shut the dairy: Scotland’s only blue cheese was subsequently reborn in Nottinghamshire.
Nor need we document the repeated attempts of the authorities to shut down Humphrey Errington’s production of Lanark Blue – officials convinced themselves any dairy product containing live bacteria entailed pestilence and death – or the red tape that did for Bonchester cheese, a Camembert-style product.
John and Christian Curtis began making it at Bonchester Bridge, Roxburghshire, in 1980 – but, in September 1998, finally gave up.
‘We find the present regulatory regime intolerable,’ they stormed. ‘The benefits are obscure but the suppression of enterprise and loss of freedom are obvious.
‘We condemn parliament for its policy of appeasement to agribusiness and second-rate scientists, and for lacking common sense and resolution when confronted by food scares…’
But the tide was turning. In 1993 Iain Mellis opened his first artisan cheese shop, in Edinburgh’s Victoria Street.
He focused on farmhouse cheese because cheese made with milk from the same herd of cows, on the same land, in a family enterprise, has far more character and interest than cheese made on a larger scale in a plant where the milk is delivered by tanker.
All sorts of other subtleties come in – the time of year, whether the morning or evening milking is used, and how long cheeses mature before being sold.
Today, I J Mellis boasts five shops in Scotland’s cities, a brilliant website, and a growing wholesale trade – overseen by his son Rory, who joined in 2018.
But in March 2021 the artisan cheese sector, already worried about Brexit, was plunged into existential crisis by you-knowwhat – most critically, the shutdown of the hospitality industry.
WHILE you can put dairymen and packaging staff on furlough, one critical workforce could not be turned off – all the cows, ewes and goats. The milk kept remorselessly coming: what to do? What everyone did, as best they could, was to enlarge – and for some, to start – online sales. And with surprising success.
By the end of April 2020 Alex
Reid, of the Cambus O’May Cheese Co, found his hospitality sales down by 60 per cent – but up a staggering 600 per cent in retail and e-commerce.
At Connage Highland Dairy, they could only let one customer at a time into their sparkling shop – but the Clarks quickly invested in vending machines and a cheerful ‘One toot and your order’s out!’ system for customers to collect pre-ordered cheeses in their cars.
Soft cheese artisans now tried to make hard cheese too, for it stored longer. Conversely, hard cheese producers tried their hand now at soft cheese, for it could be sold more quickly.
The result has been ‘a proliferation of new cheeses,’ says one observer. ‘Hopefully, online sales in the UK will help to soften the blow that Brexit has dealt to small cheese producers who are finding it difficult to export their wares.’
What no one had foreseen, in these weeks and months of lockdown, was that we grew generally much more interested in what we ate and, increasingly, we shopped locally.
The real alarm was over soft cheese, which has a limited life. In the event, in a sort of massed allhands-to-the-pump endeavour, scarcely any had to be thrown away. Farm shops and the like eagerly snapped it up.
THE idea of sending out themed, cheese-tasting boxes caught on and Zoom cheese-and-wine sessions became a thing. Before the war there were some 2,000 cheesemakers in Britain. Today there are about 300, including respected producers such as Rowan’s Glen and Davidstow.
But Davidstow’s excellent Cheddar is esteemed precisely because it is consistent and unvarying.
The delight of artisanal cheese is that it varies all the time. Isle of Mull cheese is paler in winter, for instance, because the cows are living on hay, not pasture. And, just like wine, and on the same intangibles of weather, temperature and terroir, the same craft cheese will taste differently year to year.
If Iain Mellis is the prince of farmhouse cheese, then Svetlana Kukharchuk is its queen. Last month her Haddington shop, The Cheese Lady, won the Scottish award as the best food shop this side the Tweed.
‘We believe that fine cheese is good for you. It is good for your body and good for your soul,’ enthuses The Cheese Lady Website. Never mind your tastebuds. This is spiritual: blessed are the cheesemakers.