One of the very first lessons in food etiquette I ever learnt came courtesy of a 91-year-old. Boxing Day is rarely a time for heated debates or recriminations. Everyone is far too bloated and worn out from the festive excesses of the day before for temper tantrums or hearty conversations.
But that didn’t stop my friend David’s mother exploding at the antics of her father, an otherwise utterly taciturn nonagenarian whom I was sat next to at an assorted gathering of the residents of our street in Chester in 1988. I was only nine years old and I remember being fascinated by what, at the time, seemed a car tyre-sized wheel of stilton that took centre place on the living room table, surrounded, like calorific ladies in waiting, by robust, carbohydrate-wrapped porcine plates of pork pies and ham sandwiches.
He pulled up the utensil to reveal a cheese that was veined like cracked porcelain
Old Mr. Edwards, a war veteran dressed in tweed who gave off a whiff of carbolic soap and scented tobacco, seized his moment. Wielding his spoon aloft, he plunged it deep into the centre of the stilton, pulling up the utensil to reveal a hillock of cheese that was veined like cracked porcelain and emitted a fugitive aroma of toast, leather and soil.
“What on earth are you doing Dad?” admonished his matriarchal daughter in front of the now silenced assembled throng. A curtly delivered calumny followed, where all of us were informed in no uncertain terms that stilton, especially an entire wheel of it, should be treated with more respect and absolutely must be deftly and gently sliced from the outside in.
“It’s not a pudding Dad,” was the final reproach. I’m not sure if old Mr. Edwards reacted audibly to his daughter’s fromage-fixated fury. But I suspect that he was internally thinking, ‘We won the war for this’, before unabashedly tucking into his prize, digging his spoon in with glee.
Stilton production in the 1950s
This was my introduction to stilton, the cheese that defines Britishness in the same quiet, committed way that Aston Martin distinguishes British cars and Sir David Attenborough condenses our devotion to axiomatic care and kindness.
But it’s a love affair that we, the British public are, without fanfare or attention, losing our ardour towards, according to Richard Mayfield, head cheesemaker at the Long Clawson dairy in Melton Mowbray.
“Overall, stilton sales have dropped by around 16% in the last decade,” he tells me as we stroll around the hastening and maturation rooms of the colossal premises Clawson inhabits in deepest Derbyshire. This is one of only three counties (the others being Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire) where it’s legal to call this particular type and style of blue cheese stilton.
“The problem is that the average stilton buyers are in their late 50s and 60s, so they are slowly dying out,” Richard continues. “What the stilton industry needs is something akin to what Brewdog have done with real ale; making it fashionable with a younger audience without changing the core of what it is to the point where it’s unrecognisable.”
Richard has worked for Clawson since he left school in 1988. But stilton itself dates back far longer. The first known recipe was published in 1726 while, in that same decade, Daniel Defoe praised stilton as ‘the English parmesan’ when he sampled it in the village of Stilton during his travels, compiled in his book: A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain.
Pouring milk into vats in the 1950s
Ironically, the inhabitants of Stilton itself can’t call their cheese by this name today. The village, being situated in Cambridgeshire, is just south of the three counties which, two and a half centuries later, won the exclusive rights to the title after being awarded ‘protected designation of origin’ status by the European Union.
It was in the 19th century that stilton cemented its status as the most quintessential of British cheeses. Edward Lear, in his poem, ‘The Jumblies’, wrote of his assorted characters who sailed away into the sea in a sieve, bringing along with them, “a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws/And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree/And no end of Stilton Cheese.”
By the time George Orwell came to write his magnificent essay ‘In Defence of English Cooking’ in 1946, he proclaimed, in the case of native cheeses, that “there are not many of them but I fancy Stilton is the best cheese of its type in the world.”
That ‘type’ is a blue cheese which, to this day, is increasingly dismissed as ‘stinky’ by a generation reared on bland supermarket cheddar sold by the rectangular slab.
The consequence is that, in the last decade, four of the eight stilton-makers in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire have folded. Clawson is one of the survivors and by far the largest remaining stilton-maker. As Richard tells me, they’ve had to innovate in order to survive in surprising ways.
“We now take out all the protein and sell it on to make body-building powder and baby formula and chocolate,” he reveals. “What we used to pay to dispose of now makes us quite a lot of money.” Made using only pasteurised milk (using raw milk was banned after a bacterial scare in 1988), I walk with Richard past immense stainless-steel bathtubs, each holding 19,500 litres of milk. Around 280 whole wheels of stilton, each weighing around 9kg, are formed from this.
Veining on the cheese
Colston Bassett
Wheels of stilton
Starch cultures and blue mould, called penicillium roqueforti, are added along with rennet, a plant fungus made from lab-grown enzymes created to imitate those found in a calf’s stomach. This turns what begins as liquid into something approaching Greek yoghurt in terms of consistency. Next, curd is cut up into cubes and added to the vat. When the curd sinks and the whey rises, the curd is drained and left overnight to settle.
“Making stilton is slow compared to other cheeses,” Richard tells me, his face almost entirely obscured by the ‘beard snood’ he wears for hygiene as we traverse the factory. “We only shut for ten days a year for annual maintenance and we finish the Christmas production around the end of October. Now (it’s early July) we’re on full production for Christmas, round the clock, every day. A vat of cheddar can be turned around in an hour or two. Stilton is much slower, and some of the processes, like adding salt to the curd, are done by hand.”
Cheddar can be turned around in an hour; stilton is much slower
Walking through an air-locked door, we enter the hastener and maturation rooms, where the stilton we eat at Christmas really starts to take shape. “Unlike other blue cheeses, stilton has to be formed under its own weight,” says Richard. “You can’t press it. You have to turn it by hand. We’re looking for little fissures and cracks in that cheese; we want that spider’s web or marbled effect. If you force stilton under pressure then it would just form pockmarks of mould like other blue cheeses.”
Gazing at the countless wheels of stilton, the difference between stilton and other blue cheeses is already obvious. While the markings on roquefort or gorgonzola looks like acne, those famous blue veins on stilton look like wrinkles by comparison.
After six weeks, a kind of cheesy acupuncture is imposed on the stilton wherein it is needled to let air inside. It’s at this point in the process, Richard reveals, that many a neophyte cheese factory worker realises they’re not cut out for the stilton business. “People come to Clawson to start work and they have to leave because they claim they can’t work here because of the smell; it’s too strong!”
After six weeks a kind of cheesy acupuncture is imposed on the stilton to let air inside
It’s true that the aroma created by a room filled with 2,500 wheels of stilton isn’t subtle. But the odour is far from mephitic. The cheeses that have been here for 14 weeks emit a gloriously addictive musk of barnyards, herbs and hay bales.
Gobbling stilton and crackers in the boardroom after our tour, I ask Richard and Nikki Matthews, the senior brand manager of Clawson who joins us, what stilton needs to do to rise again from its contemporary decline and find favour with younger customers and older diners alike.
“Getting it on more pub menus would be a really big step,” admits Nikki. “And I think it’s important to show what a great history stilton has. There are centuries of backstory to this cheese. And, all the time, when I insist that someone who claims they don’t like stilton eventually tries one of our cheeses, they’re always surprised at how much they like it. I used to be one of those people myself,” she adds.
Clawson truck
Richard weighs in with a firm warning to nascent cheese browsers, viewing the classic fromage in supermarket aisles. “If the cheese is packaged in a rectangular slab shape, then it’s not going to be much good,” he insists. “Stilton would never be packaged like that – it couldn’t be.”
Ultimately, it’s in stilton’s natural refusal to adhere to the modern food manufacturing priorities of speed and uniform consistency that its salvation from the threat of industrial cheddar may lie.
“Making stilton is a bit like having kids,” concludes Richard. “They all develop at different ages. They’re all individual. You can’t make an identical stilton; every cheese is slightly different. There’s a touch of witchcraft to stilton for sure. We make cheese, but there’s always an element of sorcery and dark arts to that process.”
