Mostly about cheese

The standard advice given to people who move somewhere new is to throw themselves into local life. You’re supposed to join things, volunteer and generally get involved. I have interpreted this advice quite narrowly and am seeking out all local activities that are food related. I went to three markets last week alone. In addition to the two usual market days, Newbury hosted an Artisan Market on Sunday. I’m not entirely sure what an Artisan Market is, or artisan anything for that matter, but I think it might just mean that everything is very expensive.

Really I should have stayed away because, although I am normally quite a thrifty person, when it comes to food I’m a complete pushover. And the Cheese Man knew it. The man who was selling cheese that is – he wasn’t made of cheese. He was reeling people in with his delightfully accented English and then handing out samples of squishy cheese, many of them flavoured with truffles. I love cheese and truffles in equal measure and I was completely defenceless. Two chunks of cheese and £25 later, I started to feel buyer’s remorse. Until I got home, that is, and sampled the truffle brie on a Scottish fine-milled oatcake. It was so blissful it doesn’t seem to matter that we can’t afford to turn the heating on until November.

I’m not alone in my love of cheese and for some reason Samuel Pepys is the first cheese-lover who springs to mind. I can’t pretend to have read his complete diaries, which apparently run to over a million words, but I did read an abridged version. His life was simply extraordinary. Pepys attended the execution of Charles I and just eleven years later was on the ship that brought the king’s exiled son back from the Netherlands to be welcomed home as Charles II. The son of a tailor, Pepys went on to become a Member of Parliament, Chief Secretary to the Admiralty and President of the Royal Society. He witnessed the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London the following year, while also finding time to pursue various women, some less willing than others by his own account.  

But it is his cheese-related activities that resonate the most with me. Worried that his house was directly in the path of the Great Fire, Pepys took the precaution of removing many of his valuables (“which I did riding myself in my night-gowne in the cart”), putting his money in the cellar and digging a hole in his garden to bury “my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things.” Fortunately, his house escaped the fire and presumably Pepys dug up his Parmesan, dusted it off and ate it, but sadly his diaries are silent on this point. I have to admire a man who’ll go to such lengths to protect his cheese.

It’s the Farmers’ Market tomorrow and I’ll try very hard not to blow the monthly food budget on cheese. Did you know that Captain Scott took 3,500lb of Cheddar with him on his 1901 Antarctic expedition? I really need to find other interests.