Cheese

A certain well-known cheesemonger’s in Jermyn Street, which looks and smells like everybody’s ideal of a high-class London cheese-shop, recently told me that there is ‘no such thing as seasonality in cheese, sir. It is all the same, all year round’. Admittedly, the quality of the product has to be high before differences begin to show. Many supermarkets and delis keep the stuff in such unsuitable conditions – too cold or tightly suffocating in plastic – that, sure enough, everything they stock tastes pretty uniformly of mild, pure, baby soap. At the other end of the spectrum, the best cheese shop in London is Jeroboam’s.