Cheddar cheese is one of the kings of cheese; it is pale coloured, mellow, salvy, and, when good, resembling a hazelnut in flavour.  The Cheddar principle pervades the whole cheesemaking districts of America, Canada and New Zealand, but no cheese imported into England can equal the Cheddars of Somerset and the West of Scotland.

Named for a village near Bristol where farmer Joseph Harding first manufactured it, the best is still called Farmhouse Cheddar, but in America we have practically none of this.  Farmhouse Cheddar must be ripened at least nine months to a mellowness, and little of our American cheese gets as much as that.  Back in 1695 John Houghton wrote that it “contended in goodness (if kept from two to five years, according to magnitude) with any cheese in England.”

Today it is called “England’s second-best cheese,” second after Stilton, of course.

In early days a large cheese sufficed for a year or two of family feeding, according to this old note:  “A big Cheddar can be kept for two years in excellent condition if kept in a cool room and turned over every other day.”

But in old England some were harder to preserve:  “In Bath...  I asked one lady of the larder how she kept Cheddar cheese.  Her eyes twinkled:  ‘We don’t keep cheese; we eats it.’”

Cheshire

A Cheshireman sailed into Spain
To trade for merchandise;
When he arrived from the main
A Spaniard him espies. 
Who said, “You English rogue, look here! 
What fruits and spices fine
Our land produces twice a year. 
Thou has not such in thine.”

The Cheshireman ran to his hold
And fetched a Cheshire cheese,
And said, “Look here, you dog, behold! 
We have such fruits as these. 
Your fruits are ripe but twice a year,
As you yourself do say,
But such as I present you here
Our land brings twice a day.”

Anonymous

Let us pass on to cheese.  We have some glorious cheeses, and far too few people glorying in them.  The Cheddar of the inn, of the chophouse, of the average English home, is a libel on a thing which, when authentic, is worthy of great honor.  Cheshire, divinely commanded into existence as to three parts to precede and as to one part to accompany certain Tawny Ports and some Late-Bottled Ports, can be a thing for which the British Navy ought to fire a salute on the principle on which Colonel Brisson made his regiment salute when passing the great Burgundian vineyard.

     T. Earle Welby,

     IN “THE DINNER KNELL”

Cheshire is not only the most literary cheese in England, but the oldest.  It was already manufactured when Caesar conquered Britain, and tradition is that the Romans built the walled city of Chester to control the district where the precious cheese was made.  Chester on the River Dee was a stronghold against the Roman invasion.

It came to fame with The Old Cheshire Cheese in Elizabethan times and waxed great with Samuel Johnson presiding at the Fleet Street Inn where White Cheshire was served “with radishes or watercress or celery when in season,” and Red Cheshire was served toasted or stewed in a sort of Welsh Rabbit. (See Chapter 5.)