The tasting slate at La Cave a Fromage

I'm not shy when it comes to asking for tasters in cheese shops. Nibbling on a few slices while shooting the cheese with a fellow curd nerd is half the point of going to a good independent. Any self respecting retailer should be more than happy to let you try before you buy. 

But even when you do it's still easy to get it wrong and take home a dud. That's partly because tasting four or five cheeses in quick succession messes up your palette, but there's also that terribly English desire not to cause offence. Before you know it, the fatal words 'that's lovely' have left your mouth and the cheesemonger is wrapping up 200g of cheese that you don't really want.

That's why I like the cheese tasting slates served in the cafe-cum-restaurant of Hove-based cheese shop La Cave a Fromage. Not only are they a great option at lunch or in the evening with a glass of wine, but they are also a good way to test drive the shop's 220-strong range of cheeses. 

For £10, you get six decent-sized hunks of cheese on a slate with some excellent bread served by staff who know their stuff. Order the charcuterie tasting slate (also £10) and a bottle of wine and you have a fine meal for two for less than £40. And if there are any cheeses or charcuterie that you really like, you can buy more to take home with you, safe in the knowledge that you've picked some good uns.

I tried the slates out recently at an event hosted by the shop's supremely knowledgeable manager David Deaves for the Brighton Food Society. Of the six cheeses we tasted, it was a crumbly five-week-old Cerney goat's cheese and a fruity Epoisses that stood out for me, but the star was Lord of the Hundreds - a ewe's milk cheese from Sussex, which is similar to a young Manchego.

It wasn't a blockbuster, but I liked its sweet, slightly nutty simplicty. It also matched up nicely with a smooth Tourraine Malbec from Vignoble Gibault. The charcuterie was also pretty special, particularly the Trealy Farm bresaola and a rabbit and hazelnut pate.

I know what I'll be buying the next time I go there.

Photos courtesy of Adam Chandler. Read his excellent blog here: Lewes Foodie

A Neal's Yard tasting: save the cheeses!

It's not just whales that need saving. Certain cheeses are on the brink of extinction and risk being lost forever if we aren't careful. That was the premise of Neal's Yard's Endangered Cheese Traditions event last month, which was billed as a cheese tasting, but was also a lesson in how cultural, economic and social changes are threatening to wipe out some traditional cheeses. There was even a discussion about transhumant lifestyles.

Don't worry, I had no idea what a transhumant lifestyle was either until our host Andrew Nielsen explained it to us (more on that later). Nielsen is a great bear of an Australian, who gave up a career in advertising several years ago to become a student of the 'fermentative arts'.

He first became a cheesemonger at Neal's Yard, before moving to Burgundy to set up his own vineyard called Le Grappin. He's also an amateur brewer and dabbler in cider. “Anything a little bit funky,” is how he put it.

Nielsen picked a good company at the start of his 'funky' odyssey. Neal's Yard Dairy is one of Britain's great cheesemongers, specialising in British and Irish cheeses and working closely with small farmhouse producers. Set up by Randolph Hodgson in 1979, the company has two shops, one in Covent Garden and one in Borough Market.

The Borough shop is housed in a lovely high-ceilinged, glazed-brick building on the edge of the market, which long ago was a stables for horses bringing Kentish hops to the huge breweries that used to line the Thames. The tasting was held upstairs in what would have been the hay loft. 

 

The cheeses (starting at 12 o'clock on the plate) were:

Cotherstone - a pasteurised cows' milk cheese made by Joan Cross in County Durham

Sparkenhoe Red Leicester - an unpasteurised cow's milk made by David and Jo Clarke near Upton in Leicestershire

Abbaye de Tamie - made in the Haute Savoie, France, with unpasteurised cows' milk and matured by Herve Mons.

Beaufort d'Alpage - an unpasteurised cow's milk made by Robert Peret in the Haut Savoie

Salers du Burons - an unpasteurised cows' milk cheese made by Marcel Paille in the Auvergne, France

Pecorino di Fossa - an unpasteurised ewes' milk cheese made by Walter Facchini in Umbria

Bleu de Termignon - made by Catherine Richard in the Haut Savoie from unpasteurised cows' milk

Stichelton - Made by Joe Schneider at the Welbeck Estate in Nottinghamshire to a Stilton recipe, but using unpasteurised milk (so it's not allowed to be called Stilton.

The lethal drinks combo, from left to right, was: Saison Dupont Belgian beer, Asturian Llagar Herminio cider, Arenae Malvasia de Colares wine from Portugal, and Kernel Brewery porter.

All the cheeses and the drinks are on the brink of extinction with just a handful of producers still making them. You might argue that there are loads of companies making Red Leicester in the UK, but Nielsen's definition of a 'real' cheese is one made in a traditional farmhouse way (eg, by small producers with their own herd using raw milk). Taking that definition, real Red Leicester actually became extinct during the second world war when farms were forced to sell their milk to the government and large-scale factory production took over. That was until it was revived in 1995 when Sparkenhoe was set up.

Other cheeses are on the edge because they are such hard work to make. The Salers du Burons requires the cheesemaker to live high in the mountain for months on end as the cows move further up the slopes. This is the transhumant lifetsyle, I mentioned earlier, but people just don't want to live that way any more. “If you're an 18 year old French boy, you want to be going to discos, not living up a mountain with a load of cows,” said Nielsen.

The cheese itself was full-on with an earthy almost musky flavour. You could see why it has waned in popularity as tastes have changed. As the chap next to me said, “You have to wonder whether this one really is worth saving.”

The Pecorino de Fossa is struggling for similar reasons. It had a lot of meaty flavours going on and quite an acidic bite. The cheese has been made up in the hills around Umbria for centuries where it is covered in herbs and buried it in hay for several months. It's such back-breaking, labour intensive work that there are only two producers left.

Some of this might sound a bit worthy, but the evening was actually great fun mainly because Nielsen was such a knowledgeable and entertaining speaker. For most of the night he was a blur of energy, scribbling on flip charts and holding up photos, only stopping to take a few sips of beer. Like all true curd nerds, he got particularly excited explaining the science of coagulation (look at the love in this picture).

The next morning, I tried to work out which cheeses I would personally fight to save. The world would be a poorer place without Cotherstone, Sparkenhoe and Stichelton. I also liked the Beaufort and Abbaye de Tamie (which is very similar to Reblochon), but I could definitely live without the Pecorino, Salers and Bleu de Termignon. They were just too 'funky' for me. Sometimes cheeses go to the great monger in the sky for a good reason.

Endangered Cheese Traditions is one of many different tastings run by Neal's Yard. They all last about two hours and cost £50.

IJ Mellis: Scotland's answer to Neal's Yard

Iain Mellis looks rather stern in the photo that is emailed to me just before I interview him. But when I speak to Scotland's best known cheese-monger, he turns out to be much more personable than his portrait would suggest, happily chatting in a self-deprecating way about how he has built up his business.

He launched his first IJ Mellis shop in Edinburgh in 1993 and has since opened five more across Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and St Andrews. While Neal's Yard and Paxton & Whitfield fight it out in London, IJ Mellis has Scotland pretty much sewn up.

Mellis' cheese career stretches back to 1979 when he left school and became a lab technician working for the North of Scotland Milk Marketing Board in Inverness. From there he ended up as a cheesemaker producing cheddar all over Scotland, before making regional cheeses for Joseph Heler in Cheshire.

“I think you need to be quite an insular person with an eye for detail to make good cheese. I was a dreadful cheesemaker, I must say,” he says. “I would end up drifting away and talking. I would lose concentration and make howling mistakes. I really enjoyed it, but I was never going to make a great cheesemaker.”

Mellis flirted with the idea of opening a restaurant and becoming a chef, but “my ambition had overreached my talent”, he admits. Instead, he took inspiration from the fromageries he had visited  in France, and from British mongers such as Neal’s Yard in London and The Cheese Shop in Chester, and opened his first shop in Edinburgh's Victoria Street with his wife Karen.

“All our shops have that old fashioned way of trading as traditional grocers. I was influenced by old pictures of Sainsbury's shops at the turn of the century - the excitement of big piles of cheese and wheels upon wheels that are cut open. It was something that people had experienced in Britain decades ago before it all went prepacked and into fridges.”

These beautiful mountains of fromage include Continental classics imported directly from producers in France, Spain and Italy, plus a wide range of farmhouse English, Welsh and Irish cheeses, from Keens cheddar to Cashel Blue. But Scottish cheeses more than hold their own against these heavyweights of the curd world. Mellis recommends the washed rind Criffel from Loch Arthur, Isle of Mull cheddar and the new Corra Linn Manchego-style cheese from HJ Errington as the country's stand-out cheeses at the moment.

Most cheeses spend some time in one of Mellis' six temperature-controlled maturing rooms at the warehouse in Edinburgh, where they are matured to just the right point before being sold. Cheese maturing, also known as 'affinage', requires close co-operation with the cheesemakers to make sure cheeses are delivered at the right time and in the right condition for maturation.

“It's particularly important for softer cheeses. Not only do they have to be well made, but they can easily be ruined by people not handling them correctly with the wrong temperature or humidity,” says Mellis. “Everyone has to be attuned to that and it's important that we give information back to the cheesemaker about how the cheeses are maturing and tasting.”

Three more Scottish cheeses to try: 

Anster: A crumbly, citrusy cheese from the green pastures of north east Fife. Made from unpasteurised cow's milk; it’s a bit iike a Wensleydale.

Lanark Blue: Scotland’s answer to Roquefort, this sheep’s milk blue is made be Selina Cairns and has a creamy mellow flavour.

Cambus O’May: Made in Royal Deeside, this raw cows’ milk cheese was launched in 2009 and has won plaudits for its rich nutty flavour.

* A different version of this article first appeared in the April 2012 issue of Fine Food Digest

Paxton & Whitfield: 200 years and counting

Paxton & Whitfield had been selling cheese for nearly 30 years when a financial crisis known as the 'Panic of 1825' saw the British stock market crash and the Bank of England saved from collapse by a massive bail-out from the French.

Since then the retailer has seen the rise and fall of the British Empire, two World Wars and the Great Depression, so today's economic woes are nothing new to what is probably the oldest cheesemonger in Britain, if not the world.

First recorded as a partnership in 1797, but with history that can be traced back to 1742 and a stall at Aldwych Market, Paxton & Whitfield is today owned by entrepreneur Andrew Brownsword, who made his money in (cheesy) greetings cards and also owns Gidleigh Park Hotel. There are shops in Bath and Stratford upon Avon, but it's the London store in Jermyn Street that is a must for cheese fiends.

Anywhere between 150-200 cheese are crammed into the shop's counters at any one time, many of which have been matured in the temperature-controlled ripening rooms under the store. British cheeses rule, but there are plenty from elsewhere, including an amazing selection of French classics from Paris' most famous fromagerie Androuet (which is a paltry 103 years old).

If you haven't been to the Jermyn Street store recently, you'll be in for a shock. What was a dark cramped space that belonged in a Dickens novel has been transformed into an open contemporary shop with a nice tasting room at the back. The clever trick is that it still feels like a traditional cheesemonger. The gorgeous black and gold frontage has wisely been left well alone and staff still sport smart black aprons.

Keeping a 200-year-old business fresh is a tricky balancing act. Go too modern and you alienate the old boys with red trousers (and faces) that still totter around this part of London, but fail to move with the times and you won't attract the next generation of cheese lovers.

“I doubt there's a cheesemonger that has the history and heritage that we have. We're really proud of that and we would never want to forget it, but equally if we are going to continue for another 200 years we need to reflect what customers expect in the 2010s, “ MD Ros Windsor (below) told me for a recent article in Fine Food Digest.

She took over the running of the business 10 years ago and has since introduced a new brand and swanky website with an excellent online ordering section. One of the shop managers even tweets on behalf of the company here: @Paxtonscheese

The cheese counter has also moved with the times. Top sellers remain old school favourites like Montgomery's cheddar, Cropwell Bishop Stilton and Brie de Meaux, but new cheeses developed directly with cheesemakers also get their chance.

Cropwell's new blue Beauvale was trialled in Paxton stores last year and Robin Skailes developed his traditional rennet Stilton in conjunction with the shop. Other recentish additions to the range include 18-month Mossfield Organic - an Irish Gouda-style cheese apparently loved by Bruce Springsteen - and goats' cheese Windrush.

“The UK market is about as vibrant as it gets at the moment,” says Windsor. “Lots of youngsters are coming through, with Welbeck (School of Artisan Food) helping to develop a new generation of cheesemakers, but even the old established cheesemakers are bringing new cheeses to the market. That's really exciting.”