Cheese!

Looks like it's dairy week on my Blip. Today, cheese!

The only cheese I can remember from when I was very young, before we went to Hong Kong, came in the form of cheddar and Dairylea triangles. Unless my memory's playing tricks, I think I can remember life before that little red strip that you pull to make it easy to get the foil off the triangle. I recall unfolding the foil at the tip and tearing it back from there. The cheddar I associate with my dad's home-made pickled onions, after two of which your eyes would water and your jaws ache. 

I'm not sure there were any great cheese epiphanies in Hong Kong, although I think I remember cheese and pineapple on cocktail sticks at my parents' parties. However, when we came back to England, we started going to France every summer, to a campsite in Les Sables D'Olonne. It was that kind of camping where the tent is already up when you get there and the entertainment was largely restricted to a barn with a table tennis table, where my brother and I would pass some of our day. I think it was then that I was first introduced to Camembert and to this day I think of my dad when I hear the word.

Rightly or wrongly, it was the exoticism of Camembert that led me to see my dad as some kind of cheese connoisseur. When I went on a school trip to Boulogne in my early teens, I was determined to bring him back a cheese that would impress him. However, confronted by the comprehensive cheese counter in the French hypermarché, and unwilling to engage with any member of staff in case they didn't speak English, I ended up simply buying the smelliest one, which came in a rough, orange rind. My dad expressed some delight when I gave it to him and said he'd take it with him when he went away with his brother, Bill. He told me much later that they had to throw it out of the window a little way into the journey as it was rendering the car uninhabitable. 

From Camembert it was an easy step to Brie and then, in my twenties, when I attended more dinner parties than during the rest of my life combined, I started to explore the various cheeseboards that were presented at the end the meal. (It was around this time that I discovered the trashily sublime combination of Brie with digestive biscuits.) And so it was that I finally succumbed to the hardcore of blue cheese. (I always wondered who discovered it was edible rather than putting it straight in the bin.)

These days, I'm often tempted by anything unusual looking on the Booths cheese counter, although these can be dauntingly expensive. Look at this fellow, for example: £8.38! However, the good news is that I found him in the 'reduced' cabinet at Booths, so he was mine for a more palatable £4.19 :-)

PS I loved this Monty Python sketch, 'The Cheese Shop', long before I'd heard of almost any of these cheeses. Even now, a couple of them elude me.