Ripeness is all

‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.’ The line from Life of Brian is followed by: ‘It’s not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.’ In fact, cheese animates the Bible and — building on Job’s searing image of the womb — its coagulation became an emblem of the Immaculate Conception, endorsed by no less than Hildegard of Bingen. This is just one of innumerable thoughts prompted by this Oxford Companion’s elegant, double-columned, well-illustrated pages. Here is a strong, pleasingly ripe case for cheese’s global role in social, political and economic history.

It all makes for many ‘cheese adventures’. That phrase — not here — was Boswell’s 1762 coining, when his infatuation with Louisa, a married actress, left him too poor to eat out:

I went to Holborn, to a cheesemonger’s, and bought a piece of 3lb 10oz, which cost me 14 ½ d. I eat part of it in the shop, with a halfpenny roll. I then carried home my provision, and eat some more cheese with the other roll, and a halfpennyworth of apples by way of relish, and took a drink of water.

It is an illustration of the fluctuating status of cheese over 8,000 years, ever since the Mesopotamians discovered that ‘controlled rotting’ would enable milk to last longer and travel. (The phrase is Paul Kindstedt’s, one of the contributors to the Companion.) Sadly, by the 1920s, three quarters of cheese in England was imported from Canadian and New Zealand factories. But the Companion is veined by admiring references to ‘the monocled Major’ Patrick Rance, author of The Great British Cheese Book and rescuer, in the 1980s, of traditional cheeses threatened with extinction.

Alan Bennett’s recent Keeping On Keeping On has a neat entry about cheese:

The spirit of the small shop still persists in Booth’s, the local supermarket.