Food/Cheese recipes

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FD/Cheese (story and recipes) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Elec Telegraph

ISSUE 1980 Thursday 26 October 2000

The cream of cheese

It took a self-styled brash, open, jolly New Zealander to champion the cause of the British cheesemaker, says Tamasin Day Lewis

This week's recipes

LIKE an Antipodean Miss Jean Brodie, Juliet Harbutt is addressing us, her charges, black spectacles perched perilously far down her nose, eyes heat-seeking out any anarchy in the ranks. "If you don't like the class you're judging, tough. And don't write down in your tasting notes 'I wouldn't give it to my dog'. That's no good for the producer. Stingy judges will be sent back to be more charitable."

A bit high: makers, experts and judges gather at Stow-on-the-Wold for the British Cheese Awards

You know where you stand with this lady, who laughingly refers to herself as: "Miss Ferocious. I'm a dictator. Well, you heard me!" When we meet a week after her British Cheese Awards, I dare to hope that I have acquitted myself favourably as a "new girl" invited to judge the Best Modern British Cow's Cheese less than six months old, and the Best English Cheese.

What we award the top gold medal in the former category, neither I nor my judging partner can divine.

Juliet works all year to create this event, which began seven years ago with 296 British cheeses (today, there are almost 700 entries). "Most people can name only five British cheeses, in which they include Brie and Edam," she confides.

Originally from Wellington in New Zealand, Juliet went walkabout from her deli restaurant to look for new ideas. She didn't find any on her cookery course in Paris, but one day, tasting some wine with her friend Stephen Spurrier, and nibbling on a Poilane loaf and some rather fine goat's cheese, she had an epiphany.

"It just came to me. I thought: 'This is it. Why bother with all this cooking? I'll open a wine and cheese shop in London.' " And that is how Jeroboam in Bute Street, South Kensington, was born. When it first opened, my brother - who lived round the corner - raved about it, and I remember buying my first Vacherin Mont d'Or there.

"I decided I could do better than Paxton and Whitfield and Fortnum's," she explains. "I wanted to buy direct from the cheesemakers. People heard about the shop and beat a path to my door. I became obsessed with trying to find cheesemakers. If I didn't know they existed, no one else did.

"I remember one of them, Dougal Campbell, walking into the shop and unloading a huge cheese on to the counter," adds Juliet. "His very upright Uncle Sidney, who was a customer, had told us: 'I do like your cheeses, but I do feel you ought to stock my nephew's.' Dougal cut us each a bit of his Tyn Grug and we both yelped, 'Garlic!' The cows had obviously found a patch of it. I bought the cheese on the spot."

When Eugene Burns picked up the Best Modern British and Best Irish awards last year, before his tragic death a few months ago, he remembered Juliet as the first person to say yes to buying his wonderful, washed-rind Ardrahan cheese. The Irish award is now named after him.

"Jeroboam was very successful," she continues. "The customers rather liked having a brash, open, jolly New Zealander telling them what to buy."

The shop, however, was too small a soapbox from which to galvanise the masses. "I wanted to preach the gospel of cheese and spread the word." So she sold out to her partner, and rang Tesco, to whom she became a consultant. She told them: "You could do marvellous things with cheeses."

Juliet's idea was to expand their horizons from the dull, the boring, the bland. "I divided cheeses into seven types - fresh, soft white, semi-soft and so on - so that people could learn about them. Then I decided to promote types and strengths of flavour, a revelation for people who thought they didn't like Camembert because it was too strong, but were prepared to try it when you told them it was the same strength as Edam.

"The reason we don't promote cheese in this country is because we don't see it as something to eat - we talk about cooking with it. Hard cheeses are good for cooking, but we should be promoting types and strengths, using the leftovers to cook with."

This year, Juliet has based the British Cheese Awards at Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire, and introduced a day for the public, during which 6,000 people come to sniff, taste, buy and talk cheese, and view the extraordinary collection of 688 cheeses from 146 cheesemakers that we have judged. The Supreme Champion this year was the Irish Coolea.

There are 70 judges, each expert teamed with a food writer or retailer. "The experts can tell if a cheese is technically correct. You lot have the palate."

My first category, the under six-month cows, consists of 28 different cheeses, and my expert is the quietly knowledgeable Simon Yorke from The Huge Cheese Company. Some offerings leave us gasping with horror - appearances and smell can be infinitely deceptive - the best looked reminiscent of mouse droppings; the ugliest, in Simon's words, "all grey and mouldy like Grandad's garage", yet able to suddenly thrill the palate in a unexpected and brilliant way.

As we travel our row, my ears keen to the sounds of my fellow judges for whispered tales out of school: Matthew Fort's cry of "Truly offensive, vulgar, farmyard"; Jeremy Lee's "Highly superior, most worthy, I'm chuffed as punch."

Juliet tells me me pointedly: "Those who've done a good job get invited back." She doesn't judge. "I won't. I tend to know the cheeses, and if I don't, people think I do. Randolph [Hodgson, of Neal's Yard Creamery] and I do tend to tear our hair out and think, 'How did they miss that one,' but it's not the Randolph and Juliet awards." So why does she do it? "I'm a nervous wreck for a month beforehand, but it's really important to the cheese industry, and I feel terribly proud of the cheesemakers. I tend to think of them as mine. I'm so excited for them when they get a medal. We don't award first, second and third prizes. We give gold, silver and bronze medals, which are a symbol of excellence for the consumers.

"What is frustrating and mysterious to me is how few makers use the label after the event - only about one in 20. If you see a gold label on a bottle of wine in the supermarket, you try it. Maybe it's the British reserve, or apathy. It's why I, a New Zealander, have ended up running the British Cheese Awards."

This week's recipes

Onions baked with goat's cheese and thyme (Serves 4)

Bearing in mind that all good cheese is worth eating raw, I bought a perfect Ragstone made by Charlie Westhead at Neal's Yard Creamery, and ate most of it with fresh figs before cooking with it. Just as delicious in this dish would be Mine Gabhar, the Wexford goat's cheese.

12 small onions or 24 shallots Olive oil Salt, pepper, nutmeg and cayenne 6-7 oz/170-200g soft goat's cheese 1 heaped tbsp chopped thyme or marjoram 2 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely chopped

Preheat oven to 360F. Blanch the onions in boiling, salted water for 5 minutes to soften them. Drain and halve vertically. Oil a gratin dish and place the onions in it, cut-side up. Season with salt, pepper, nutmeg and a pinch of cayenne and add a bit more oil to moisten. Cut and crumble the goat's cheese over the onions, then sprinkle with the thyme and garlic, and bake for 40 minutes.

Rumbledethumps (Serves 4-6)

A dish said to originate in the Scottish borders, the "rumbling" is the mashing, the "thumping" is the beating down. Sending Juliet back to her notes, I discovered that Simon and I had awarded our top gold medal in the "cow's under six-months" class, to a cheese called Old Stowey, which is made on my doorstep in Somerset by Amode Katirar (call Monastery Cheese on 01278 733566 for details of stockists). If you can't find it, a good, strong, extra-mature Cheddar such as Montgomery's, Green's or Keen's will work too.

1 large onion, peeled and sliced 1 lb/450g cabbage, cut into strips 1 lb/450g potatoes, boiled and then skinned 2-3 oz/55-85g butter Salt and pepper 4 oz/110g Old Stowey or strong Cheddar

Cook the onion and cabbage in boiling salted water until tender, then refresh in a colander with cold water, and drain. Mouli or mash the potato with the butter, then mash in the cabbage and onion. Season. Transfer the mixture to a gratin dish, cover with a layer of grated cheese, and brown under a hot grill [broiler].

Taglierini with baked fennel, cherry tomatoes and Wealden Round (Serves 2 )

Wealden Round is a fabulously fruity unpasteurised soft cow's milk cheese; again, do try some before cooking with it. It is another of Charlie Westhead's cheeses from Neal's Yard Creamery in Herefordshire. I bought the parsley and garlic, and the black pepper and garlic versions; both are organic.

2 fennel bulbs, tough, outer leaves removed and very finely sliced 2 dozen organic cherry tomatoes 2 cloves of garlic, sliced Olive oil 8 oz/225g taglierini or fine spaghetti Butter 5 oz/140g black pepper and garlic Wealden Round (they usually weigh 6.5oz/180g

Preheat oven to 400F. Put the fennel, cherry tomatoes and garlic into a small roasting tin, splosh on a few tablespoons of olive oil, and bake in the oven until the fennel is softened and basking in the tomatoey juices. This should take about 20 minutes. Cook the pasta according to the instructions on the packet, drain, add a good knob of butter to the pan, then the soft cheese and taglierini, stirring on a gentle heat to coat. Add the vegetables in their juices, season and serve. You can add a good extra dollop of cheese to the top of each bowl to melt in as you eat it.

DBitchiestDespot Co-Despot posts: 12 (10/29/00 6:41:04 pm) 205.188.195.32 Reply | Edit | Del

Re: FD/Cheese (story and recipes) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm drooling over those recipes . . .

Something I've done when catering parties is to pipe Brie into jumbo black olives. . .refrigerate until about a half hour before serving time and bring to room temperature. Very good and very easy. . .

-- Anonymous, March 14, 2001


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