About the Reluctant Cheesemonger

So, how do you become a cheesemonger?

If not by choice or design, it has to be by accident.

Due to the quirks of life, driven by circumstance, like many people, one drifts into a career that one hadn’t planned.

I like cheese, but I was never overly interested in it.

Growing up in France, immediately after the war, my family’s consumption of cheese was fairly limited. There was Gruyère, which we used for cooking certain dishes that required it, and sometimes Camembert or a goat’s cheese at the end of a meal.

I think this was the experience of a majority of French families in the 1950s.

Personally, I had no idea how cheese was made, or anything about it other than the fact that it was a product we ate.

It’s not as if my family didn’t have some connection to cheese, though. Like most French families in the 50’s there was a link to small family farms. They said ‘ Scratch a Frenchman and you’ll find a peasant’.

My sister remembers sleeping in a room at our great-grandmother’s farm cottage in the Loire Valley, where Valencay pyramid goat’s-milk cheeses were drying on the beams.

So, how did I come to open a cheese shop in Oxford’s Covered Market, you may ask?

Well, it was the spring of 1983.

At that time, 99 percent of English consumers only ate Cheddar and Stilton at Christmas.

There were a few regional varieties, but these were relatively small in quantity and sales.

The Milk Marketing Board had put paid to individual farmhouse production, which had been common before the Second World War.

So, at that time, there were only a handful of cheesemakers still making traditional, unpasteurised farmhouse cheese, and only a few specialist cheese retailers selling them.

Then, quite inadvertently, whilst visiting Oxford with my road-manager friend Gerry, I wandered into Oxford’s Covered Market.

At the time, I was marketing and creating merchandise for popular bands. T-shirts, jeans, badges and so on.

A far cry from the production and sale of cheese.

The Covered Market of that time bore no resemblance to the fast-food outlet it has now morphed into.

There were seven butchers.

A proper, old-fashioned grocer.

Two fishmongers.

Four greengrocers.

A Swiss delicatessen.

And other fresh-food outlets, such as bakers.

All of them were suppliers of and supported by the university kitchens, local citizens, pubs and restaurants.

As I walked around, I realised that the only thing missing was a fromagerie — a specialist cheese shop, like the ones I had seen many times in the streets of Paris.

Having negotiated a pitch with the council, the die was cast.

I went back to France and sourced a range of continental cheeses from a leading Paris wholesaler.

I’ve already said that I knew nothing about cheese.

I didn’t know how it was made, how it was handled, how it was matured, and, most importantly, how its origin was established.

Yet the shop was successful from the very first day it opened.

I relied on my French wholesaler to supply a range of wonderful cheeses from the Pyrenees, the Alps, Normandy, the Loire Valley, and elsewhere.

There was also vintage Dutch cheese and cheese from northern Italy.

I learnt the trade, although I was absent from the business for periods of time, as I was now involved in the film industry with my sister, who was a theatrical and film agent in Paris.

What I learnt about cheese was about taste, maturation, and the great variety of origins, flavours and consistencies.

But still, I knew nothing about the actual process of making cheese.

Or its origins.

Apart from the fact that I knew it was made from milk.

When I came back to the UK in 1994, I decided to create my own cheese.

The creation of that cheese is a long story, which I will write about elsewhere.

I chose to produce it at a Stilton dairy in Hartington, because of their expertise in making Stilton and other blue cheeses.

I developed the recipe with the young cheesemaker there.

And that was where I started to learn about curds and whey.

As the years went by, Oxford Blue turned out to be an excellent and very popular cheese.

I created another cheese, Oxford Isis, which was awarded the Cheese Lovers Trophy in 2008.

Oxford Blue had already won many medals since its first manufacture.

But eventually, I decided that enough was enough, and I’ve never entered any of my cheeses in any of the ever-growing list of cheese awards.

The British Cheese Awards were trumped by the World Cheese Awards, would you believe?

And I think there is another one called the Global Cheese Awards.

So, when did I begin to realise the real truth behind the pleasant image of the “dairy industry”?

I had done no research into animal husbandry.

I was genuinely innocent of the horrors of industrial milk production.

There is more on this matter under the “About Us” heading, where I go further into the subject.

So, what was the trigger that started me on this journey of revelation and reformation?

It was my wife, Lou.

Having retired from midwifery, she joined my company.

And it was her insistence that I investigate the similarities between industrial milk production, driven by profit, and the promotion of formula milk instead of breastfeeding since the war.

We need to recalibrate.

So, the more I investigated, and the more time I took to visit industrial dairy farms, the more convinced I became that I had to do something.

Something to help move the agenda towards producing cheese with a conscience.