Rolling back the years

Our grandmother Ivy’s recipe for vintage Cheddar was so good that we’ve never seen any reason to change it; after all, those awards weren’t given out of charity. And as far as the process of making it goes, we’ve also stuck to the traditional ways she followed, from ensuring the quality of the milk to ageing at just the same temperature she had in her barns.

There are, though, a few things that have changed. One of them is the form that the Cheddar is made in. These days, we form and age our Cheddar in blocks, which is the most convenient and environmentally sustainable way of storing and transporting it. Back when Ivy began making cheese, however, it was in giant wheels, the form that Cheddar had taken for centuries up till then.

Originally, the choice of the wheel as the form of Cheddar may well have been arrived at by chance. It seems that milk was traditionally stored in round pottery containers, which meant that early experiments in preserving milk meant that cheese took on this form naturally. There were some obvious advantages to it, as well: made into giant heavy wheels, cheese could be rolled from one place to another by hand.

There were, in the days before science gave cheesemakers more ability to control their work and the conditions around it, some other advantages to the wheel. The round shape meant that the bacteria in the maturing process could do their work all across the cheese, creating taste and texture, and also meant that the rind that formed to protect the cheese was even. It was also a naturally sturdy shape, which was an advantage when cheese often developed cracks and fell apart during ageing.

As England and then the world became more connected, Cheddar became famous beyond Somerset. By the 17th century, helped by the consistent quality and easy transportation given by the wheel shape, it was in huge demand. Wheels grew and grew in size, to the point where it took two men to lift one. This was made easier by the invention of cheddaring, where the curds were pressed to speed up the process, making the cheese firmer and easier to form.

It’s said that King Charles I restricted Cheddar exclusively to his court in the 1640s, but perhaps the most famous wheel of Cheddar was the 1,000lb one given to Queen Victoria on her wedding in 1840 and then toured around the country. By then, though, the writing was on the wall for the wheel: scientific advances and then industrialisation meant Cheddar began to be made in the more easily stackable blocks we’re now familiar with.

For grandmother Ivy, however, starting out as a local cheesemaker, Cheddar was still produced in the traditional circular shape. Ivy’s son John, who later took over the cheesemaking business, remembers his father Tom heading to the dairy at 6am to turn the Cheddar out of the moulds, and that this was hard work: “They were 60lb then,” he says. His sister Margaret, who worked in the dairy alongside her mother, remembers Ivy taking over this job herself: “It was a knack, turning them out,” she says, “and she could do it.”

These days, that’s a skill we no longer need. It’s made our lives a little easier, for sure, but you can rest assured that it hasn’t affected the quality or taste of Ivy’s Reserve. When it comes to that, we won’t change a thing.