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Cheshire
Oh,
to feel the pressure / Of a precious piece of
Cheshire
/
Cheese!
--Hal
Shaper,
Treasure
Island
: The
Musical
Cheshire
...has
been for centuries the prime cheese of
England
, the
cheese of the rich and the poor, the king and the peasant, the sailor and
the soldier. --Adrian Bailey, The Cooking of the
British
Isles
The
oldest English cheese,
Cheshire
dates
back to pre-Roman times. Adrian
Bailey, in The Cooking of the British Isles, says that the soldiers of
the 20th Legion, garrisoned in
Chester
in the
first century, stuck chunks of
Cheshire
on their
swords and toasted them over open fires.
While
most of the
Cheshire
available today is factory-produced and lacks character, there is at least
one producer--Abbey Farm,
run by the Appleby
family--that makes excellent farmhouse
Cheshire
from raw
cow's milk. In
Cheshire
, parts
of
Shropshire
(where
Abbey Farm is) and Staffordshire, the rich sedimentary salt deposits under
the pastures transmit themselves through the milk into the cheese, giving
it a fresh marine taste.
Cheshire
is also produced by a cheddaring process, and it has a similar, firm and
creamy but also crumbly texture, with a buttery, salty flavor and a lemony
finish. Author Steve Jenkins describes it as "a bit like root beer or
horehound candy with undertones of roasted chicken."
As the
Romans discovered,
Cheshire
responds
well to heating and is a traditional cheese to use in Welsh Rarebit: toast
topped with a mixture of grated cheese, onion, mustard and beer, then
broiled until browned. But it's also delicious on its own. Max
McCalman, the maitre
fromager at New York's cheese restaurant Artisanal,
recommends pairing it with a light, young, fruity red wine such as
Beaujolais or Dolcetto, or a white such as Sauvignon Blanc, or, more
traditionally, ale.
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