Cheese

Undemanding French cheeses for high summer include soft bloomy Chaource, with its faint smell of mushrooms, and fresh, light goat’s cheese such as Valencay. In specialist retailers, look out for fine farmhouse Cheddars. Pasteurised will be a consistent product, boring or not depending on the source and particular batch; non-pasteurised can scale great heights but, as it is more of a ‘living’ product, it can also develop strange taints and off-flavours. A rigorous quality mark is that administered by Mendip Foods for the Milk Marketing Board – the farmhouse logo (three cheeses in a pyramid with the words ‘Farmhouse English’). An excellent, non-pasteurised farmhouse Cheddar such as Montgomery, made by old-school craftsman and opera-lover Harold Chase, who plays recordings of Verdi to his cows, is dense, crumbly, nutty, with a long, satisfying after-taste. Chef Peter Kromberg at London’s InterContinental hotel likes his ‘with a tossed salad and a glass of 6-year-old Alsace Riesling’.