The cow is of the bovine ilk;

One end is moo, the other, milk. ~ Ogden Nash

Since moving to our little village in Wiltshire my husband and I, and our little dog, have enjoyed many beautiful walks through the surrounding countryside.  Our house sits on the very last street before the village gives way to farmland, and the briefest of strolls lands us in fertile green pastures. The joys of the legally protected right to walk on footpaths and other routes, even those that cross private land, is one which I shall cover in a future blog. For now I shall just note that these footpaths give us access to land and scenery that would otherwise be merely glimpsed in a blur from our car windows as we speed past on our way to somewhere else, and they allow us to get up close and personal with the animal which has contributed greatly to my personal happiness over the years – the cow.

There she stands in her pasture, calmly grazing and chewing her cud. They often cluster together in the corners of the fields like a group of gossiping mothers waiting to pick up their children after school. As we stroll quietly through their realm, trying not to disturb them, they turn their heads and watch us, still chewing, tails swishing, an ear occasionally flapping at some insect. The more curious ones will begin to slowly stroll in our direction, following at a safe distance as if to see just exactly what we are up to and where we are going.

After scrambling over the stile at the far end of the pasture I usually turn around for one last look, and am always met by the calm, peaceful gaze of several pairs of beautiful, long-lashed brown eyes. Cow eyes are beautiful, by the way. How being told you have cow eyes came to be an insult I’ll never understand. It should be a compliment.  Sometimes I’ll wish them all a good day, and thank them for all their work in turning that lush green grass into one of the greatest things on Earth – cheese.

Apart from helping to tend a large vegetable and fruit garden back in the U.S. this is probably the closest I have ever lived to the source of my food, and I find it fascinating, not least because of my life-long love of everything dairy. Yogurt, ice cream, butter, lashings of cream – these are the things which make my heart sing – but cheese, well, cheese was my first love and remains a staple of my diet to this day. One of my favourite lazy night dinners is a plate of buttery toast, slices of crisp, juicy apples, and chunks of extra-sharp Cheddar cheese.

Don’t get me wrong, the U.S. is no mean shakes when it comes to dairy products. The Pacific Northwest alone is home to some magnificent cheeses. The lush, coastal grazing of the Northern Oregon coast have helped make Tillamook vintage white extra sharp cheddar one of my all-time favourites, and the Cougar Gold produced by the Washington State University Creamery has been known to cause a stampede in the local Costco when it appears each winter for just a short time. And lest you think cheddar is all they can do there are artisanal cheese makers like the Rogue Creamery which produces a blue cheese that is sublime, and which won the award for the best blue in 2003 at the World Cheese Awards in London.

Nevertheless, here I am living in the U.K., actual home of the World Cheese Awards. Each year approximately 3,000 cheeses from around the world converge in our corner of the world to be judged, and I have to say there could be no better place for such a competition to be held. After all, this is also a country whose very own British Cheese Board (BCB) earlier this year, as part of its quest to pinpoint the scientific formula for the perfect cheese on toast recipe, gave a prize for the best cheese on toast poem to be submitted to them. The winning entry came from Thomas Frater of Newcastle on Tyne, whose poem so impressed the BCB that he was given the honour of sitting on the judging panel of cheese on toast experts who would determine the best formula.

Here is just a sampling of Mr. Frater’s prize-winning poem:

One of history’s greatest wheezes:

Eating bread with melted cheeses.

Breakfast, dinner, tea or lunch,

What could beat that juicy crunch?

In August of this year the British Cheese Board announced their conclusions, and the scientific formula for the perfect cheese on toast was revealed to the world as:

You might think I’m making all this up, but I’m not. It’s all true. You have to admire a country that loves its cheese, and its cheese on toast, with such dedication and strict attention to detail.

There are over 700 named British cheeses produced in the U.K., according to the BCB. Many of these are variations of cheeses familiar to most of us – Cheddar, blue, Stilton. What fascinates me are some of the other cheese varieties we don’t often see in the U.S. They come with evocative names like Double Gloucester, Shropshire Blue, Wensleydale (familiar to any Wallace and Gromit fan), Caerphilly, Cornish Yarg, and my all-time favourite name, Stinking Bishop, which is described as smelling either like a rugby club changing room, or dirty socks. I’ve never actually tried Stinking Bishop, or been in a rugby club changing room, so I have to take the word of others about the smell.

Perhaps what I love, what intrigues me so much about British cheese, is just the fact that here people have been tending their herds and flocks and turning milk into rich, tasty cheese for thousands of years. The town of Cheddar has been producing its namesake cheese for over 800 years, ageing the cheese wheels in the caves of Cheddar Gorge, which is still done to this day.  Records show that as far back as 1170 King Henry II purchased 10,240 pounds of Cheddar cheese to be served in his court. That’s a lot of cheese. I don’t know much about King Henry II, but he can’t have been all bad if he loved cheese to that extent.

And so as my husband and I walk down the lanes and pathways near our home, as we squelch our way through mud deep enough to suck the shoes right off our feet, and as we pass cows grazing peacefully in their green pastures, we’re following in the footsteps of people – and cows – who have done the same for thousands of years. It gives me a greater appreciation for how hard they had to work to eke out a living, and fills me with admiration that somehow they didn’t just eke out a living, but they managed to invent and perfect something that over 800 years later is still loved and enjoyed the world over.

An apple pie without the cheese, is like the kiss without the squeeze ~ Unknown

“Well, many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese – toasted, mostly…”  ~ Robert Louis Stevenson