Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About

Dunlop a hard, cow’s milk cheese, took its name from the native dairying cattle of Ayrshire, whose lowlands constitute the finest dairying region of Scotland. This all happened centuries ago, long before anyone had thought of manufacturing rubber tyres, still less of using Dunlop as a brand name for them. The coincidence almost spelled doom for the cheese, since the Milk Marketing Board, fearing that customers would suppose, even if only subconsciously, that Dunlop cheese would be rubbery, tried to drop the name in favour of the far less precise ‘Cheddar’.