FOOD AND DRINKCheesy feat

This is the most important time of year in the calendar for that part of me which loves cheese. I yearn for it all year. I talk about it for months — perhaps not as animatedly as I bang on about the coincidental start of the shooting season, but euphorically none the less. For this is the time of year when you can buy vacherin, the finest, most extravagant pressed-curd product ever devised by those cheese-eating surrender monkeys across the Channel.

Oddly enough, the first time I ever tasted it I was in a Chelsea restaurant called Monkeys, which delights in snorting with contempt at the myriad health guidelines laid down by Brussels. The staff at Monkeys know that vacherin cannot be eaten out of the fridge, or even from under a Perspex case following an officially dictated period of refrigeration. Put vacherin in the fridge, and you will kill it. All those delicious germs that make it live and breathe and taste so sensational will die in your refrigerator, unless you have the good sense to defy European laws by turning off the machine (which might be an interesting loophole).

On the occasion of my introduction to this sensational product, I had just consumed an excellent grouse and a magnum of fine claret when the cheese butler sidled up to me. I asked if he had anything that smelt like poo, and he suddenly went into dodgy video-store-owner mode, looking to the left and right, scrutinising me minutely, before reaching below the counter (actually, to the second shelf of his trolley) and unveiling the cheese version of pornography: a round of vacherin that was so runny and stinky that I was awestruck.