A Dairylea cheese triangle, released from its foil and then sucked from the silver was one of my fledgling food critic experiences. Somehow, it’s bloody deliciousĪnd that’s not to mention “spready cheese”, which to my mind is a vastly underrated pleasure, one far too déclassé to ever be cited in “proper” food writing. A Dairylea triangle sucked from its foil was one of my early food critic experiences. Or the Primula cheese and chive that I squeezed on to Ritz crackers when Mam was watching Dynasty with Joan Collins on Friday nights – so very satisfying, so very chic. I so vividly remember opening the fridge door and finding Kraft Singles, feeling as though I had hit the jackpot – they were so perfect for sneaking up your sleeve, with an extra one for your mate, and then eating down on the old abandoned allotments, or wherever we’d made our latest den. To me, this is the taste of the summer holidays of my childhood. Nor can I ever be sniffy about heavily processed cheese, like the stuff that comes in squares wrapped in plastic, or the squeezy stuff in metal tubes. Tableware and crackers, table linen, Northfields ( .uk). Forty years later, I am still not bored by cheddar.ĭress, by Roksanda, from all cheese, .uk. We knew nothing better and we never got bored.
Maybe Gran had the smallest chunk of stilton at Christmas. In the 80s, my family only ever ate cheddar, or, if we were branching out, red leicester. It would be a long road until I found myself eating fancy French reblochon or Swedish västerbotten or any other of those cheeses you might see on a board in a fancy gastropub, accompanied by some of those black, tasteless charcoal wafers that mean you’re somewhere posh. The cheese I ate in my childhood lacked variety. It’s still there as you get undressed and head for the toothbrush, and even in your dreams. You’ll still know about that piece of brie long after it has slipped down your gullet. Cheese also has staying power milky, fatty things linger in your mouth. We may never show much passion for fermented bean curd, stinky herring or decaying vegetable stalks, but we will have a lovely, wobbly piece of whiffy brie smeared on oatcakes. Cheese, however, has always been the exception: a flirtation with the extremities of taste that we somehow took to our hearts.
Some people have even called our food boring. The British were never a nation who embraced stinky or slimy things, and we’ve never been ones for fermented nibbles or stuff covered with mildew or fungus. It’s so unlike everything else we love, so unique both in flavour and in the sticky way it feels in our mouths. My theory about cheese is that it is special to British palates because it’s so, well, completely weird. How does this magic happen? Why is it so unique to cheese? Why do some vegans – who have managed to dodge all other animal products – go on a lifelong quest to find the most pungent nut-based cheeses? And why do many would-be vegans name cheese as the one thing they cannot let go? Cows and farmers and dairy technicians and cheesemakers have perfected it, using techniques older than time to make something intense, pungent and sating that always hits the spot they’ve done all the hard work, and now it’s just sitting there in my fridge, available to me at any time. I’ve thought about the transformative powers of cheese a lot over the years. And, in the same vein, after a hard day we have all leaned on that slightly fearsome chunk of apricot-laced wensleydale that we panic-bought before Christmas before promptly forgetting about it – now, doesn’t it taste good on cream crackers with a big cup of tea and EastEnders? Suddenly, your overdue car MOT seems marginally less upsetting. We have all at some point found ourselves standing in the light of the chiller cabinet, scooping grated red leicester from the bag, head back, mouth open, pushing those slivers of loveliness down our throats and somehow feeling instantly better. Find that toasty loaf you’ve got for emergencies in the bottom drawer of the fridge, add a dollop of something runny like brown sauce or some sort of chutney, and there you go: now you have dinner.Ĭheese, in all its salty, fatty majesty, could well be the king of comfort foods. It’s because an almost empty fridge containing a small slab of ageing cheddar harbours at least a glimmer of hope – and even if that cheddar has a tiny speck of mould, you can just scrape it off and turn a blind eye (I won’t tell anyone). Why does cheese feel like a cuddle? Well, it’s because it just does.
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