Farmhouse cheesemaking

Susannah Stone was the trail-blazing cheesemaker in the Highlands who made history by reviving the crofter’s crowdie. Her first batch, she now admits, was made with ten gallons of surplus cow’s milk, hung up to drip in a pillow slip over the family bath. That was in 1962, a practical solution to a farming problem at a time when she had no ambition to make cheesemaking her career. The Milk Marketing Board (MMB) bought everyone’s milk and held the cheesemaking monopoly. An enterprising farmer’s wife making her own cheese with her own farm milk was virtually unheard-of.