A Cheesemonger’s Compendium of British and Irish Cheese Book Review

Editor’s note: Many stories about British cheese reference Neal’s Yard Dairy. We wrote about it recently in a roundup of the cheese you’ll find at Borough Market.

A Cheesemonger’s Compendium of British and Irish Cheese introduces 158 of the finest British and Irish cheeses, each selected by cheesemonger and author Ned Palmer, who previously wrote the British bestseller, A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles. Whether you’re traveling around England and Ireland or just visiting your local cheese counter, the book is a go to guide for turophiles and anglophiles alike.

Included in the book is a chapter on the cheese board, including how to put one together, how much to buy, how to keep cheese, what to drink with cheese, and more. There are indexes of both the cheeses and the cheesemakers, and six pages of delightful maps of Britain and Ireland so you can look up cheeses from anywhere, with cross-referenced page numbers of the descriptions.

Ned Palmer is a big name in the world of British cheese. He first encountered quality cheese in 2000, when he got a job working on a stall at Borough Market, London’s mecca market for foodies. The cheese that changed his life was Trethowan’s Gorwydd Caerphilly, which made him realize just how good cheese can be. From there he went to work at one of London’s best cheese shop, the Neal’s Yard Dairy in Covent Garden, where part of his job involved visiting cheesemakers all over Britain and Ireland. In 2014 he set up the Cheese Tasting Company which, among many other things, does online cheese tastings.

Cheese wedge image credit Claire Littlejohn

Palmer reckons that there must be, at a conservative estimate, at least 1500 different cheeses in Britain and Ireland. It depends how you count, of course. Is Cheddar one cheese or hundreds of different distinctive Cheddars? But the author says he has tried to choose the best examples of their type, his own personal favorites, and some with especially interesting stories.

Sinodun Hill image credit Claire Littlejohn

And there are interesting stories galore, from family histories, from cheeses that died out but were revived, from attempts to recreate historic cheeses like monastic cheeses, and stories of people migrating to the UK for the love of cheese.

British cheese image credit Claire Littlejohn

Palmer divides his chosen cheeses between six categories: fresh, mould-ripened, blue, washed-rind, semi-soft, and hard. He isn’t hard and fast in his categorizing, however, as he accepts there are overlapping boundaries, and some cheeses are hard to categorize anyway, which is one reason the book is a delight to read. He judges each cheese on its own merits, and you can rely on his descriptions rather than a marking system to decide if you want to try a cheese or not.

Take his description of Bix, a cow’s milk cheese made in Oxfordshire by Rose Grimond, who used to be an actress then also ran a stall at Borough Market before becoming a cheesemaker. She was, as the author says, ‘completing a trifecta of excellent ways to not make a fortune.’ He describes the cheese like this: “The colour is very deep yellow, like Jersey butter, and the texture has the richness of Devon clotted cream, the flavour is clean with a mineral edge and a hint of mushroom from the rind.” How could you not want to taste it after reading that?

The 240 page full color book is available in hardcover and was published by Profile Books and illustrated by Claire Littlejohn.