Prepare to enter the Christmas cheese coma

Picture: Alex James Co

For reasons I won’t bore you with, my diet this Christmas has had to be substantially modified from the traditional gorging on things that, I’ve been told, will lead to an unfortunate outcome. But the one thing I’ve not given up (or been told to…yet) is cheese. In fact, one of the last functions performed before battening down the hatches and being confined to our Tier 4 bunker this week was to carry out the annual gathering-in of pricey festive cheeses. Which, I readily accept, is probably the most middle class thing I’ll ever commit to the blogosphere.

So, while some of you prepare to binge on cake, crisps and Quality Street, I’ll be giving my nine months of calorie-controlled abstention the slip and dive into the fifty quid’s worth of exotic queso we picked up on the final port of call of Crimbo preparations yesterday. That haul includes an Italian Robiola, a pricey brick of Parmesan (not for grating over spagbol - eating it on its own is a delight), Roquefort and Comté. Given that - at time of shopping - a no-deal Brexit was steaming towards us like an asteroid on collision course, so in rehearsal for next Christmas’s cheese board, exclusively sourced from these islands, we also picked up a Lancashire Black Bomb, Caerphilly and an Oakwood smoked cheddar from Dorset. Whatever the outcome of Boris's final EU negotiations, we can be rest assured that there’s plenty of British cheese to fill the void left by being priced out of Port Salut and Edam, let alone a cheeky Camembert de Normandie. 

In fact, the UK produces more than 700 cheeses, from the geographically familiar Cheddar, Cheshire and Wensleydale to the Christmas-traditional Stilton, and even a local interpretation of that ultra fromage français, Brie. While cheesemaking is most strongly associated with our European cousins, it's a tradition dating back to the Stone Age in this country, according to cheesemonger Ned Palmer, whose paperback A Cheesemonger's History Of The British Isles has been the surprise bestseller in this year’s Christmas book sales.

Palmer reveals that cheese may have been part of the British diet for 6,000 years, when our pre-agricultural ancestors were still hunter-gatherers, mostly living off fish and fruit. Palmer believes that cheese came to these islands via neolithic explorers who found cheese being made - as a means of preserving goat milk - on the continental mainland. As a result, its existence in Britain might even pre-date Stonehenge by a millennium, ironic, given how those slabs, presumably built as an altar, would make for an excellent cheese board for the various types that come from the surrounding fields of Wiltshire (fun fact: the phrase “like chalk and cheese” originated in the county). At first, ancient Britons experienced what we’d now call lactose intolerance to this creamy new substance from abroad, but the human metabolism adapted - over a thousand years or so - to all forms of dairy. Early cheesemakers honed their craft (no pun intended), and across Europe as a whole, both hard and soft cheeses began to evolve and diversify. Hard cheeses, in particular, became migratory, especially when the habit of moulding them into wheels allowed them to be literally rolled from town to town. At some point in English history, someone in Gloucestershire discovered they could be rolled down a hill competitively for lols. 

Fast forward to Roman times, and Palmer reveals that the invaders are quite likely to have brought their own cheesemaking skills to this part of the empire, which should require a substantial rewrite of that scene in Life Of Brian about what they did for us. We can, Palmer surmises, add ripened stinky cheese to better sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system and public health. However, he also says that cheese in the UK didn’t really get going until the Anglo-Saxons were in charge, when it was even used in a medicinal capacity for treating everything from chest infections to sore feet.

Fast forward again to the 21st century, and we’ve been eating more locally made cheese in the UK than ever before. In the early days of the first lockdown we consumed as much as 23% more cheese than in the same period last year, according to market research company Kantar. But with this came a downside, as the closure of pubs and restaurants led to as much as a 90% decline in trade sales of artisanal cheeses, threatening the future of small, independent manufacturers who’d been hitherto enjoying a boom. British craft cheeses have been returning over the last 40 years, with more recent champions including former Blur bassist Alex James, who runs a burgeoning business from his Oxfordshire farm (with such rock and roll-influenced delights as 'Blue Monday No.7' and 'Grunge No.5'). 

Picture: Alex James Co

The Specialist Cheesemakers Association estimates that there are more than 200 artisan manufacturers in the UK, many applying traditional, smallholding techniques, to produce their own interpretations of classics as well as new varieties. However, it also warns that the pandemic may lead to many of these manufacturers going out of business, with the traditional skills they employ being lost forever in the process. Perhaps cheese itself can spearhead the fightback against the dreaded lurgy. In July, Dutch researchers revealed that patients admitted to intensive care at a hospital in Nijmegen were deficient in Vitamin K, which is found in spinach, eggs and some types of cheese. Given that COVID-19 causes blood clotting and the degradation of elasticity in the lungs, the vitamin has been found to be key to producing proteins that regulate clotting and can protect against lung disease. Not every cheese, though, can offer these benefits, but the cheese industry is inevitably keen to point out the other health benefits of their product, not the least of which being a source of protein and calcium. 

That, then, is my prompt to dive in and indulge. Cholesterol and blocked sinuses be dammed. We’ve got a fridge full of cheese and, with most other festive treats now on my verboten list, I’m going to indulge tomorrow afternoon, with a cheeky glass of port, and worry about the consequences on Boxing Day. Once a year, right?