He who purchases cheese from an establishment like that may be certain that he will get something ready for eating: though even among the customers of the best retailers there is some difference of taste regarding the prime of cheeses, and there are even people so eccentric, or so uneducated, that they actually prefer Stilton immature, chalky and sour. These may find what they want anywhere; they may even buy it in flat segments in London bars. But for the purchaser in general, who goes to a local shop which stocks Stilton and likes to see it for himself or herself, this much may be said. The cheese should be creamy, not white; the blue mould should be well distributed; and cracks should not be conspicuous. A little brown around the edges is normal when the cheese is mature; patches of brown elsewhere mean imperfect grass. Tasting is always advisable; the cheese-trier leaves little trace behind it.
A Stilton should be cut before it is over-ripe; it should be finished before it is dry. The custom is now common of slicing it horizontally so as to expose the least possible extent of surface to drying. This way the last of the cheese will be moister; but nobody will ever get the heart of the cheese as one gets it from the middle with a scoop, which latter in the end leaves one with a desiccated husk. Each must choose for himself; in any event a cheese will not go bone-dry if you eat it fast enough.
And why not do so? More than one reason is advanced as to why the modern small household shrinks from Stilton: and it is certainly true that the presence of a Stilton in a very bijou flat may make itself disagreeably felt, particularly if the weather turns warm. But there is no reason why a household of even two should (though, unassisted, they will hardly dispose of a whole Stilton before it dries) cope with a half Stilton in the period between its prime and its decay – in fact I have had recent proof of this – provided it is regarded as something more than a trimming. And it should be eaten nearly mature.
There are cheeses so mild that they need help; cheeses so strong that they need toning down. I have seen in commercial hotels people chopping up Canadian ‘Cheddar’ and adding Yorkshire Relish to it; and it is common and pardonable for men who are eating the powerful produce of Gorgonzola to mitigate it with cucumber or raw tomato in addition to butter. But mature Stilton needs neither modification nor mollification. The delicacy of crisp celery is permissible with it, particularly if one is making a breakfast of it. But butter does not help it; it has salt enough of its own; and all that it needs for accompaniment is bread, not too stale.
It is an insult to this cheese to buy or sell it by the pound. It is not a compliment to buy or sell portions of it in little jars. The best merchants know this; they merely shrug their shoulders and say that the demand must be met by the supply. The only hope therefore is that of educating the public taste which, in the last fifty years, has been steadily vitiated through a number of obvious causes. And if we can only cultivate an appreciation of and belief in our own cheeses we may recover some of those which we have lost and even lead foreigners to respect them. It is impossible to travel in France without encountering a great diversity of local cheeses as well as those of general fame, from Normandy to Alsace and so to the South, and in varying degrees this is true of all Western countries, Spain being perhaps the most deficient. Some of the most delightful foreign cheeses – including the finest of the soft Swiss ones – will not travel. But we may be fairly sure that any really good and keepable foreign cheese has its chances in England, and it is likely that in the best London clubs and hotels there is more cheese from France alone – Roquefort, Port Salut, Camembert and Brie – annually consumed than there is of all the English cheeses put together. Variety is a good thing and a good cheese is welcome from whencesoever it comes: few of us would wish to be Zoroaster. But it is scandalous that every British household should be familiar with, say, Edam (the round Dutch redskins) but that hardly anybody on the Continent has ever heard of any English cheese at all.
A little Stilton used to be exported to Germany; beyond that I do not know that any English cheese has ever gone abroad in noticeable quantities excepting only Cheshire, which is widely known as Chester. I was first apprised of this before the War by a Hungarian friend. He was telling me that he had been attending a debate of the Hungarian Parliament. A deputy had begun a sentence with ‘As the English writer Chesterton says …’ when he was fiercely interrupted by a colleague who leapt up and shouted: ‘Chesterton is a cheese!’ If our agricultural industry were not so depressed and the Ministry of Agriculture were able to be as active in promoting the export of English cheese as its sister department is in importing foreign dairy products in exchange for coal, the world, which does not know as yet that we have great painters, might at least learn that we have great cheeses. Stilton, at least, should be obtainable in every good hotel in Northern and Central Europe and, before it can be obtainable, its virtues must be made widely known by propaganda amongst foreigners. Tens of thousands of them swarm into London every year. How many of them, at the ‘Magnifique’ and the ‘Superbe’, are ever pressed to attempt Stilton? Why, half the waiters have never heard of it!
Throughout the nineteenth century British authors paid frequent tribute to Stilton, though there are always those who prefer to show their connoisseurship by mentioning something outlandish. In Jane Austen’s Emma there is a reference to Stilton. Emma, out for a walk, had hung behind Harriet and Mr. Elton in the hope of giving them a chance of tender passages. At last they looked round and she was obliged to join them:
Mr. Elton was still talking, still engaged in some interesting detail; and Emma experienced some disappointment when she found that he was only giving his fair companion an account of yesterday’s party at his friend Cole’s, and that she was come in herself for the Stilton cheese, and the North Wiltshire, the butter, the celery, the beetroot, and all the dessert.
‘This would soon have led to something better, of course,’ was her consoling reflection, ‘anything interests between those who love; and anything will serve as an introduction to what is near the heart.’
But it may be that Harriet, who had already been described as not clever, did not respond to the Stilton; which may explain why the course of this love did not run smooth, or even at all. Mary Lamb was very fond of Stilton and there is a letter in which Charles thanks Thomas Allsop for sending them ‘the best I ever tasted … the delicatest, rainbow-hued, melting piece I ever flavoured’. Stilton ought to have been mentioned in Handley Cross, and I thought it was. Looking back I can find only references to ‘chopped cheese’ (toasted?) at the Hunt Dinner and the cheese ‘strong, soft and leathery’ to which Mr. Jorrocks helped himself too greedily at that awful repast at the Muleygrubs. Elsewhere he is recorded as having written: ‘P.S.2. Tell Fortnum and Mazon to send me dozen pots of marmeylad’, so his knowledge of the right cheese must be assumed.
As to what is to be drunk with Stilton is a matter of taste, a matter also of what one has eaten and drunk before it has been reached. There are those who eat liquor with it, as it were, pouring port or beer upon it after it has gone dry. Moistening no doubt: but the Stilton may still cry ‘Non sum qualis eram.’7 Beer or burgundy, to my thinking; but better still, water, and whatever you like afterwards.
III
By Ernest H. Shepard
Having climbed the hill at Randwich, I expected to see a pleasant old-world village – a suitable setting