‘Might just as well have been eating old motor tyres.’
No sensible person would wish to exclude or decry foreign cheeses. It would be a calamity were no more Camembert, Brie or Bel Paese to land on these shores: Dutch cheese is a change and Parmesan is a necessary of life. But it is ridiculous that we should neglect our own fine cheeses to such an extent that a foreigner can visit these shores (Europe in fact knows as little of our cheese as it does of our landscape-painting) without discovering that we possess any, let alone thinking of importing some to his own country. Taste can only be improved and cheese-makers heartened if those who care for England, Cheese and Farming, indulge in vigorous propaganda. Supply will only come from demand, and there will be no demand unless the public is stirred from its present apathy and brought to realise the mechanical monotony of its present diet.
The causes of our present lack of pride in home produce and interest in the subtleties of the palate may be left to others to trace. Puritanism and Utilitarianism I dare say may be partly responsible; each despising art and taste. The neglect of cheese, at any rate, is no new thing: it is forty years since Mrs. Roundell, in one of the finest, amplest and best written Cookery Books ever published, said sorrowfully: ‘Some persons, however, still have the courage to enjoy cheese.’ Unless more acquire this well-rewarded courage it is likely that all our English cheeses will die out and that we shall end with a few European cheeses for the intelligent minority (for cheese in France and Italy will not die) and for the others mere generic soapy, tasteless stuff, white or red, called cheese, imported from across the Atlantic. The appetite may grow by what it feeds on: it may also diminish: another generation and our population may positively dislike the strong ripe cheeses of our fathers.
‘Can’t we even talk about the cheese?’
Of the chapters in this book all except two deal exclusively with English cheeses; those two are occupied with Scotch Dunlop and with Irish cheeses as a salute to neighbouring kingdoms. Many cheeses might have been added – such as Double Cottenham (made now only in a few farmhouses), the cheeses of Derby and Lancashire, and the various cream cheeses. But the book had to have limits.
The references to Canadian and other American cheeses are intended only to apply to the bulk of that which we import from North America; it is a scandal that names like Cheddar and Cheshire should be allowed to apply to the stuff. I have heard of, though never tasted, several American cheeses said to be individual and good, such as Rowland, Wisconsin, Redskin, Golden Buck and O.K.A., said to be made by Trappist Fathers. If these be good and will travel, by all means let us try some; there cannot be too many good cheeses within our reach. But at present it is English cheese that is most in need of trumpeting, just as it is the Roast Beef of Old England and not the Roast Lamb of New Zealand – which latter, by the way, some tuneful New Zealander ought by now to have gratefully celebrated in song.
(May I add, as a postscript, that I must not be held responsible for those of my colleagues who have called a Welsh Rabbit a ‘rarebit’ – a vile modern refinement.)
II
By Sir John Squire
Hotspur, in Shakespeare, exasperated by the timid, tedious, superstitious Glendower, exclaims of him:
I had rather live
With cheese and garlick in a windmill, far,
Than feed on cates and have him talk to me
In any summer house in Christendom.
Here, the hero, unlike Horace who was happy to write
Me pascunt olivae
Me cichorea levesque malvae1
appears to regard the Simple Life as merely the less unpleasant of two gross evils: though as concerns the one matter of garlic Horace would certainly agree with him, as is indicated in the third Epode where he laments ‘quid hoc veneni saevit in praecordiis’2 and prays that Maecenas, who had given it to him, should suffer the worst of fates if the offence were repeated. Mr. Belloc, perhaps, would more thoroughly accept what Hotspur contemned: he possesses a windmill and he has written notably about cheese and the eating of raw onions.
‘Lived in the wilderness twenty years together without any other meat?’
It is possible that one could live on that diet; Mr. Burdett in his Little Book of Cheese quotes the old Doctor Thomas Muffett:
Was not that a great cheese, think you, wherewith Zoroaster lived in the wilderness twenty years together without any other Meat?
and calculates that the cheese, to last, must have weighed a ton and a half. Remembering the widow’s cruse of the other Prophet, it may be that Zoroaster had technical resources which obviated the necessity of so great a bulk. But supposing a man were to wish to live on cheese alone, and that it were possible, there is no cheese in the world so nourishing and so little likely to pall as Stilton. Everybody who has ever entertained a Stilton must remember the sigh of sorrow which goes up when the last of it has been eaten or has become inedibly dry.
It is the King of Cheeses, if all the qualities of cheese are taken into account: that a cheese should be not only a ‘thing in itself’3 (to use the phrase of German philosophers who thought that green cheese was what the moon was made of) and as the perfect rounding off of a meal – the sunset of it, caseus et praeterea nihil4 – but as, at need, a meal in itself. There are excellent cheeses which can agreeably be daubed on the remains of a roll at the end of luncheon, without adding noticeably to the amount consumed; and some of them are hardly distinguishable from the butter with which they are usually taken. But the best of the creamy and semi-liquid kinds need accessories, can only be eaten in small quantities, and cannot be conceived of as staples of life. One cannot imagine Zoroaster, whatever his magic antidotes against time and clime, spending twenty years of solitude in the unmitigated company of a mound of ‘Cream’ or of Camembert – before a day was out he would have been thinking more of the Camembert’s crust or even the other’s silver paper as something approximating to solid food than he would have thought of the softness within. On the other hand there are solid, leathery or rubbery cheeses which are undoubtedly edible in quantities on occasion but which are either so tame or so peculiar that they would become rapidly wearisome. And, again, there are sturdy cheeses so pungent and even stinging that a little of them taken ‘neat’ must go a long way. Ripe Stilton, as an unaccompanied iron ration, would excel them all. And, as the conclusion of a meal, it should always be regarded as a full-sized course in itself, and not as a trimming; and thought should be taken beforehand accordingly. To begin a meal with hors d’œuvres which is going to end with Stilton is not to whet but to waste the appetite – olives I don’t count.
When Stilton began it is evident no man knows. The process of making it was doubtless a gradual growth. A recent correspondence in The Times showed an almost acrimonious difference of opinion as to where the credit of its invention lies. Had it not been for the fact that the French have recently erected a