Hard and semi-hard cow’s-milk cheeses

The oldest named English cheese of all is Cheshire. Made in the north-west since Roman times, and mentioned in the Domesday Book, Cheshire is a crumbly-textured cheese of varying colour that has an obvious acidic tang to it. That at least is the modern style, which was developed from around the end of the 19th century.

Before that, Cheshire was a firmer cheese, similar to Cheddar in texture as a result of its being matured for longer. Selling a younger cheese was purely a matter of economics. If the cheese was saleable young, a dairy farmer could go to market with a new batch virtually every week, as opposed to a couple of times a year if he had to mature it.

Cheshire was so much the standard English cheese that, in the 18th century, it became the only cheese supplied to the Navy. The salty pasture land of the Cheshire Plain is what is thought to give the region’s cheese its characteristic tang.

Cheshire’s northern neighbour, Lancashire, produces another of the great regional cheeses, and one that can be traced back as far as the 13th century. Sharply flavoured, salty and crumbly when young, Lancashire is often favoured as a good cheese for toasting, but unpasteurised cheeses matured for at least six months make fine cheeseboard specimens. Tasty Lancashire is the designation for older cheeses, the texture of which is noticeably firmer than the younger ones.

Double Gloucester is a smooth-textured, mild Cheddar-like cheese made in wheels that have thick rinds to protect them during cheese-rolling competitions. It isn’t entirely clear why it came to be known as Double, but the best guess is that it was because it was made from two lots of full-cream milk. Accordingly, there is a Single Gloucester made from a mix of full-cream and skimmed milk.

The deepest-coloured English cheese is Leicester, usually called Red Leicester despite its not coming in any other colour. Leicester is a mild, waxy cheese with a lemony tang. Originally coloured with carrot juice, it is generally sold quite young nowadays, but when matured for longer than six months, develops a rounded nutty flavour.

Wensleydale, a white, salty, crumbly cheese is also of ancient lineage, probably dating back to the arrival of Cistercian monks in the Yorkshire Dales in the 11th century. This is one of those cheeses that benefits from being eaten young and fresh.

Blue cheeses

Along with Cheddar and Cheshire, England’s other ancestral cheese is Stilton. Unlike Cheddar, which is made all over the known world, Stilton may only be made within a geographically precisely defined area at the convergence of three counties: Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire.

It is mentioned by Daniel Defoe in his tour of the British Isles in the 1720s, although he wrongly says that the cheese was made at the village of Stilton in Cambridgeshire, which it never was. It was, however, sold there at the famous Bell Inn. In those less squeamish days, a whole cheese might well be served to the diner actually wriggling with maggots, with a spoon provided to scoop them up.

Cheese patterned with blue mould is a survivor from that less fastidious era. During its initial maturation period, when the cheese acquires its stubbly grey crust, it is also pierced with steel needles. As air gets into it, the exposed paste develops its characteristic blue-green mould. Traditionally eaten at Christmas and accompanied with good port, Stilton also comes in a much milder, blander white version sold younger.

There are blue versions of Cheshire and Wensleydale and, in Devon, a fine blue sheep’s-milk cheese called Beenleigh Blue, which is like a less salty version of France’s Roquefort. A similar cow’s-milk blue with a mellow, creamy taste, made in Thirsk, is called Yorkshire Blue.

Shropshire Blue is an orange-pasted cheese with blue veining, although much of it made outside that county now, while Dorset’s once-extinct Blue Vinney – a gentler-flavoured blue than Stilton, produced from skimmed milk – is now made again in the Sherbourne Valley.

Soft cheeses

Cheeses made in imitation of the great, ripened soft cheeses of France, such as Brie and Camembert, have become an English speciality of recent times. Of these, Somerset Brie is one with a particularly elevated reputation, and is Britain’s biggest-selling soft cheese. Creamy and rich, it softens to a delicious ripeness if kept for a few weeks after it is bought. The same producer makes Somerset Camembert.

Gloucestershire’s Stinking Bishop, named after a local variety of pear and washed in sparkling perry (the West Country’s pear equivalent of cider), gained fame through being featured in the Wallace & Gromit film, The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit (2005). It is an exceptionally runny cow’s-milk cheese with a strong aroma but a relatively gentle flavour. Burland Green from Cheshire has something of the mushroomy aromas of good French Brie when ripe.

Goat’s-milk cheeses

A new generation of sharp-tasting, chalky-textured, white goat cheeses is now giving some of the French cheeses a run for their money. These include Golden Cross from East Sussex, Bexton from Cheshire, Ragstone and Perroche from Herefordshire and Tymsboro from just outside Bath. As with their continental counterparts, some of these are sold in a coating of wood ash.