the taste of the countryside

Cheddar is an ideal food all year round, of course, but there are certain times of year where it really comes into its own. Summer is one of them, particularly when we’re talking about eating alfresco – or outdoors, as we still call it in Somerset.

There are so many ways to eat Cheddar, all of them enhanced by fresh air and the sight of grass. There’s a cheeseboard in the garden with all the trimmings, from chutney to fruit and nuts (have a look at some of the suggestions in our Recipes section). You could linger over a light quiche eaten on a picnic blanket or some well-weathered garden furniture. If you’re looking for something quicker, there’s not much that beats a sandwich of crusty white and our deliciously tangy vintage, upgrading those childhood memories of sunny picnics. And let’s not forget the classic Ploughman’s, with pickled onion, piccalilli and a big hunk of baguette or heading into fancier territory with salads and some charcuterie.

For those of us here at Ivy’s Reserve, though, Cheddar and the outdoors have a particularly strong link, one that goes right back to where we started. That’s because, when our grandmother Ivy began making Cheddar to her own recipe, a significant portion of the cheese was kept back for feeding the family and others working on the farm, and most of it would be eaten out in the fields.

Ivy’s son John, who later took over the dairy business, remembers days working with his father Tom, Ivy’s husband, with the cows. “When you were working out in the fields, there wasn’t time to come back to base, and you’d always eat bread and cheese,” he says. “It would be a chunk of cheese and a piece of bread, and they’d sit down with a knife cutting bits off the cheese and they would tear bits off the bread.”

One of Ivy’s many jobs was to prepare these packed lunches: cheese and bread wrapped in a linen cloth (and, in the very early days, some cider too), delivered to Tom and the workers by herself or with one of her daughters. In the busiest times, Ivy would get through a full 60lb Cheddar because they were feeding so many, all of it carefully sliced up with a wire in the dairy’s cheese room.

Maybe it’s because of the family tradition, but for lots of us here at Ivy’s Reserve, Cheddar still tastes best this way. We love the versatility of our Cheddar, from pairing it with other foods from home and abroad to adding its unique complexity to full dishes, but there’s something about enjoying it on its own, with just some bread, that really allows you to savour it at its best. Add in the shade of an old tree, with a view of the River Brue or one of our gently rolling Somerset hills, and we also have the ideal reminder that it’s Nature that plays the biggest part in producing our Cheddar. That’s another tradition that Ivy passed down to us.