The UK village that lost its cheese

Stilton Cheshire, red Leicester. There are more than 700 cheeses produced in the UK, but in parts of the English-speaking world, a certain type is so ubiquitous that it's simply referred to as "cheese".

Cheddar is the most popular cheese in the UK, accounting for nearly half of all British cheese sales, and according to recent polls, it's the favourite cheese among Americans and Aussies, and one of the most-eaten types in Canada, too. But while cheddar has become a dairy staple from Wisconsin to Wales, the fact that one of the world's most-consumed cheeses has no protected designation of origin means that it's also become one of the most mass-produced. These days, industrialised cheddar is churned out in more than a dozen countries and the plastic-packaged blocks bear little resemblance to their cave-matured predecessors.

But if you want to taste authentic cheddar cheese, the way it originally tasted, you need to visit the 5,400-person village of Cheddar in the county of Somerset in south-west England. Here, as far back as the late Middle Ages, cheesemakers used caves in the towering limestone cliffs of Cheddar Gorge as natural refrigerators.

Back then – and for centuries afterward – cheese would have been made in small individual dairies. But as a result of rationing during World War Two, most of the milk in Britain was used to make a single generic cheese dubbed "Government Cheddar". This nearly wiped out local cheese production in Britain, slashing the number of farmhouse producers from more than 3,500 before World War One to barely 100 by the end of WW2, and, for years afterward, there was no-one making traditional cheddar in Cheddar.

That finally changed in 2003 when one local couple, Katherine and John Spencer, decided to revive the cheesemaking methods that had made the name of their village world famous. And now, their Cheddar-made cheddar is winning international awards.

"We spotted a gap in the market for a traditional Cheddar made where it all began," Katherine explained from the small office adjacent to the couples' Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company dairy. "Our aim was to perfect a quality handmade cheese, using raw milk from one farm that was more akin to the cheese that would have been made here hundreds of years ago than the mass-produced blocks we tend to associate with cheddar today."

Although the couple had a background in the cheese industry (Katherine had worked as a continental cheese importer and John in supermarket supply), this was a new direction. With three experienced cheesemakers working for them, they began researching local and historical cheese recipes. Over a six-year period, they perfected their brand of cheddar, eventually persuading local landowner Lord Bath to allow them to store some of their cheese in the same caves that gave the original cheddar its unique taste centuries earlier.

According to professor Paul Kindstedt, who teaches a course on the history of cheese at University of Vermont, cheddar's origins go back to the 14th Century, when local cheesemakers implemented a process known as "scalding" (heating the curds to high temperatures in order to force liquid whey from the cheese) before pressing the curds into a harder cheese. Since a cheese's moisture level is what makes it perishable, scalding enabled cheddar to last longer.

BBC