NosH&Jumper
Cheese Glorious Cheese
Tuesday November 13th 2007
Next time you enjoy a fine British farmhouse cheese – say a flavourful chunk of Montgomery’s Cheddar or a soft piece of blue-veined Colston Bassett Stilton – spare a thought for the cheesemongers who champion British cheese and provide a vital retail outlet for small-scale cheese producers. “Buying your cheese from a good cheesemongers is so important,” says Patrick Harbour. “Farmhouse cheeses need care and attention and you can really taste the difference when you buy from a cheesemonger where they know and care about the cheeses.”
Cheese-maker Anne Wigmore has supplied cheesemonger Neal’s Yard Dairy for over 20 years. “Randolph Hodgson of Neal’s Yard was one of our first big customers,” explains Anne, “it was very exciting when he started buying our cheese. Over the years, whenever we’ve been trying to create a new cheese, Neal’s Yard has been enormously supportive and bought our experimental batches which meant we could afford to try different things. About fifteen years ago Randolph said to me that there was a gap in the market for a good, white rind, semi-soft sheep’s milk cheese and I started trying to make one. When we found a recipe we liked he said ‘if you can do that, I can sell as much as you can make’ and that’s been true ever since; that’s our Wigmore cheese and it’s so popular that we can’t take on any new customers for it.”
La Fromagerie’s elegant London shops are noted for the quality of the cheeses they sell. As Patricia Michelson of La Fromagerie explains “the whole point of our business is that we have direct contact with the cheese-makers; no middleman involved and we have a relationship with them. We can request the cheeses to come in young or semi-matured. We then have our dedicated rooms where we store the cheeses at the right temperature to ripen them or to work on them, for example, brushing them with alcohol. It’s an extension of the cheese-making process, a chance to put our imprint on the cheese. Not many cheesemongers do it because you have to hold the cheese for longer – but it means we sell the cheese when we think it’s absolutely right, which is important for us.”
Philip Rippon of Rippon Cheese Stores in Pimlico sees his role partly as one of communication: “The main thing is that because we deal with the people who make the cheese we can give them feedback from the customers. It’s a two-way thing. People eating a cheeseboard in the restaurant want to know about the cheeses – we get the stories from the cheesemakers and pass them on to the restaurants.”
Opened in 1983, Rippon Cheese Stores suffered badly a few years ago, when a huge Sainsbury’s supermarket opened nearby. “Our first Christmas when it opened was dreadful,” remembers Philip “everyone bought their cheese there. The second Christmas, however, all our customers came back; we’d downscaled stock after the last poor Christmas and were nearly caught out! What happens now is that if people just want a piece of ordinary cheese they buy it there with their weekly shop. If, however, they are having a dinner party or it’s Christmas or Easter or a special occasion they’ll do their shop, then come to us for their cheese. We like it when people come in and say ‘We’ve got eight people coming for dinner tomorrow, what do you recommend for a cheeseboard? And then they come back and say ‘The cheeses were fantastic; everyone really enjoyed them. That’s very rewarding.”
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