Nov 2, 2010
UK Guardian Newspaper Article forwarded by my Dad:
To those who love it blue cheese is the apotheosis of a technique that encapsulates civilised food production. Surely there's no finer expression of the form than stilton?
Cheese would defy time. Its purpose is to extend the natural life of milk, to insulate itself from the things that spoil it. The press, the salt and the rind seal in the goodness and stave off decay. I was in the Jura mountains a couple of weeks ago, where hoary folk still make hard gruyère to last the bitter winters.
For humans to invent cheese, they needed stable communities, agriculture, a basic grasp of biochemical effects and some rudimentary technology. The food thus manifests civilisation. In blue cheese, mould, normally the ruin of cheese, is harnessed to provide flavour, texture and an insistent whiff. And though it's often said that there are no truly blue foods – blueberries are really a bluish purple, and blue food colouring might actually function as an appetite suppressant – the marbling of blue cheese, which can range from the spider's web of stilton to the teal craters of roquefort, mingles with the physiology and stink to represent how humans can tame nature.
The "blue" in blue cheese is Pencillium roqueforti, a fungus that feeds and breeds on the curds. This is widespread in nature and thrives in certain habitats, not least specific limestone caves. Blue cheese presumably arose often and by accident as soon as cheese was invented, and no doubt people binned it until a brave or hungry person ate it, didn't die, and sought to make it again. We can't be sure when that happened, but in the second century Pliny described a blue cheese "bearing off the prize at Rome". That must have been sheep's milk and thus an ancestor of roquefort, which is the oldest blue cheese in continuous existence.
True roquefort dates at least to the time of Charlemagne, and Einhard describes the ninth-century monks of Vabres near Roquefort-sur-Soulzon serving the emperor a sheep's milk cheese veined with blue mould. At first, he writes, Charlemagne refused to touch the stinking product, but the abbot persisted, and the king finally ordered the monks to send him two whole cheeses a year, nearly bankrupting the monastery.
Stilton, the so-called "king of cheeses", is one of the few British foods the French will grudgingly appreciate. The eponymous town is in Cambridgeshire, 70 miles north of London on the high road to Auld Reekie. But, of course, they don't make the cheese there. In 1996, the EU granted stilton Protected Geographical Status limiting manufacture to Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Those counties were the historical centres of production, the cheese being named after that coaching town that sold a lot of it.
It's a travesty that today's stilton producers are now compelled to use inauthentic pasteurised milk thanks to a brief food scare of the 1980s – one, you'll remember, of many. American cheesemaker Joe Schneider now produces "stichelton" in Nottinghamshire, a stilton-style cheese using raw milk. It is exceptional.
Of course blue cheese is superb in the kitchen. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall makes some excellent-looking gougères, and Patricia Michelson of La Fromagerie told me: "Surprisingly, blue cheese goes with a lot of food including fish and meat, and of course with vegetables. You can eat it at any time of day, too: at breakfast we serve a delicious, mild Bavarian one." Cooking mellows the harsh metallic aromas in blue cheese, while dissolving the food into a silky, sweet-sour slick. "If you're feeling extremely flush," says Michelson, "you can blend a little roquefort with unsalted butter, chill it, then cut it into little coin-shaped rounds and melt them over a steak."
This is high season for many blue cheeses: Michelson says that stilton is, in fact, often better in late summer and autumn than at Christmas. I can't think of anything more delicious than fresh walnut bread with a strip of stilton, a dollop of something sharp and sweet, and perhaps a perfect pear. Or a reeking roquefort as the centrepiece after dinner, or some mild gorgonzola in a sauce for pasta. Fiona Beckett has successfully paired stilton with sauternes, but for God's sake don't start pouring port over it. The happy, incomparable interplay of sharpness and fat is at its best when appreciated on its own, in all its rich, redolent glory.
Great caption for the article's image below:
The Cropwell Bishop Creamery - for some stilton fans, the centre of the known universe. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
