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Cheddar Cheese may seem like the quintessential English cheese, and indeed, sales of Cheddar represent 51% of cheese sales in this country.
However, Cheddar is now made and enjoyed all over the world and is the second most popular cheese only to mozzarella in popularity in America.
Advanced cheese production techniques have taken this humble cheese from a village in the Somerset countryside to a national food hero.
Read on to find out more about the history of Cheddar cheese.
The first cheesemakers were farmers who used the cheesemaking process to preserve raw milk when there was too much to drink. The process was as simple as separating the liquid and solid parts of the excess milk, the curds and whey. The result was a soft cheese, but farmers soon learned how to heat and mature the curds to make a harder cheese that lasted longer.
Traditionally, cheese is named for its place of origin, so our search for the original Cheddar cheese takes us to the village of that name in Somerset, England, near the famous Cheddar Gorge.
Due to the temperate climate, the area around the Cheddar Gorge in Somerset boasted lush pastures for dairy cows to graze.
The village of Cheddar also benefited from nearby caves, which had constant temperatures and humidity levels, ideal for storing and maturing cheese.
Storing cheese in these conditions gave it the distinctive tang and full flavour characteristic of matured or vintage Cheddar cheese.
Traditional cheddar cheese production involves a unique method of storing and drying the cheese called cheddaring.
Cheddar cheese makers developed their method of finishing the cheese, contributing to authentic Cheddar cheese's delicious flavour and texture.
Known as cheddaring, this process involves pressing the fresh curd to extract as much liquid as possible and adding a little salt for flavour. The dried curds are then cut into large cubes and stacked on each other. After a while, the cubes are cut into smaller sizes and restacked. The weight of the pile pushes out even more moisture. This process is repeated several times, resulting in a hard, long-lasting cheese.
Records show that the English royal court appreciated the quality of the cheese from the Cheddar area in the 12th century. The earliest references to Cheddar cheese are in the accounts of King Henry II, who purchased 10,240 lbs of the cheese at a farthing a pound!
This delicious cheese was still considered fit for royalty in 1840 when Queen Victoria received half a ton of Cheddar as a wedding gift.
The Industrial Revolution largely bypassed rural cheesemakers until Joseph Harding introduced mechanisation in the mid-nineteenth century.
Joseph Harding, born in 1805, was a Somerset farmer who replaced some of the hand labour of cheesemaking with machinery and introduced strict hygiene rules. Harding's goal was to produce a high-quality authentic Cheddar that travelled well, and his success in doing so attracted the attention of cheesemakers all over the world.
Harding shared his techniques with cheesemakers, first in Scotland and then in America, making the production of traditional Cheddar possible far beyond the grassy meadows surrounding the Cheddar Gorge.
British cheese became a mass-produced product during the Second World War. The government was so keen to increase food production to feed the nation that the concept of government Cheddar cheese was introduced. Most British milk production was commandeered and used to make a generic cheese that was called Cheddar cheese but was in fact an industrial product.
The rise of industrialised Cheddar ruined the livelihoods of many farmhouse producers in Somerset. The name Cheddar was not protected, so a large cheese industry developed in the UK and beyond. Soon, a cheese called Cheddar was being made worldwide, but it bore little resemblance to the authentic cheddar cheese traditionally made in the Somerset countryside.
We include a variety of Cheddar Cheeses in our range. Find out more on our website here.