Appleby's Cheshire

Appleby’s Cheshire & A History Of Cheshire Cheese:

Cheshire is one of Britain’s oldest cheeses; for centuries, it was more famous and popular than cheddar. Sadly, after WWII, it fell out of popularity; Appleby’s Cheshire is the last remaining farmhouse Cheshire still in production today, and it’s a beautiful example of how Cheshire cheese should be, traditionally made using raw milk and cloth-bound matured.

The History of Appleby’s Cheshire:

Appleby’s cheese production was set up in 1952, on the exact farm where it’s still made today, at Hawkstone Abbey Farm in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. It was developed by Lucy Appleby at Reaseheath College and then made alongside her husband Lance. Lucy came from a long line of Cheshire cheese-making matriarchs and wanted to continue the production of Cheshire and her ancestral cheesemaking line. Appleby’s is produced today from the same recipe that Lucy developed but is now made by Lucy and Lance’s grandchild, Paul Appleby, a third-generation cheesemaker who devotes his time to Cheshire cheese alongside his wife Sarah and their head cheesemaker Garry Grey.

Paul and Sarah live on the family farm with their five children and continue the legacy that is now even more special and precariously tragic for British cheese. Appleby’s is the very last, traditional, raw milk Cheshire cheese in production in the UK. They also use milk from their own herd to produce this glorious example of Cheshire, once the star of the show.

History of Cheshire Cheese:

What’s so interesting about this is how many producers of Cheshire cheese there used to be; it was once the most famous of all the British Territorial cheeses. In the early 1900s, there were over two thousand Cheshire Cheese producers in the UK, and this wasn’t even the height of the Cheshire cheese boom. To understand a little bit more about this change, we must delve into history.

Cheshire-style cheese is one of the oldest cheeses in the UK and has been produced since Roman times, with mention in the 1086 doomsday book plus multiple mentions in other historical texts. It first started its steady incline to fame in the 1600s; during this time, most of the London cheese market was filled with butter and cheeses from Suffolk, but in 1640, the area around Suffolk suffered a disaster, mass flooding led to diseases in the cattle and highly decimated the Suffolk dairy trade.

Following this, the quality of Suffolk cheese dropped significantly, farmers were skimming the cream from the top of the milk and using it for butter production and faster turnaround of profit; this quickly became a standard practice, leaving Suffolk cheese of poor quality and lacking in any real taste.

There is mention of this in Samuel Pepys’ diary from the 1660s, ‘The quality of Suffolk cheese was so bad that even the servants complained about being asked to eat it’. This huge drop in quality alongside a rather entrepreneurial businessman named William Seaman, opened up the trade of Cheshire Cheese to the London Market. William was a London merchant who happened to originate from Cheshire, between William and his family, they financed the first shipload of Cheshire Cheese to London, arriving in October 1650 with 20 tons. This new flavourful cheese experience, with whole milk and no cream skimmed off, went down an absolute storm with the London gentry, who were left clamouring for more. It was so sought after and showed such a position in society that the gentry would often send whole cheeses as presents to one another. By 1664, dock records show 364 tons arriving in London, with 1000 tons per year in the 1670s increasing to 5500 tons by 1729. All this production brought about huge changes for agriculture in the Northwest as they tried to keep up with the production needs while also bringing huge profits and wealth to the area too. It’s estimated that by the 1720’s, around 100,000 cows were milked solely for the production of Cheshire cheese in Cheshire and the surrounding counties of North Wales, South Lancashire, Staffordshire and North Shropshire. Popularity continued to increase throughout the 1700’s with Cheshire becoming the most-eaten cheese in London and its fame slowly spreading further throughout the south, too. Alongside this, the British Navy then chose Cheshire cheese over Suffolk; from around the 1730’s, they were purchasing 1800 tons annually.

At a time of vast change throughout the UK, farming, agriculture and transport through the Industrial Revolution came the first bell-ringing toll of decline for British cheese, although they certainly didn’t know it at the time.

This double-edged sword of the Industrial Revolution saw faster transport developed to London through the new canal systems and the start of the rail networks. Towards the end of the 1700s, there was a need for a larger workforce, and men flocked to jobs in the city. The speed of the rail network meant milk could now be delivered to the city faster than it ever had been before and arrive without souring to feed the nation with liquid milk. This now left a huge number of cheesemakers with no market for their cheese, as previously, cheese production was required to preserve the milk.

The second belling ringing toll of decline for Cheshire cheese, and it should be said, all artisan cheese in the UK was the start of the absolutely draconian Milk Marketing Board in 1933. This was a government idea to offer dairy farmers a set price for their milk, which then meant farmers didn’t need to go to the effort of making cheese anymore to add extra profit; they could milk their cows and get paid. What it also meant unbeknownst to everyone when this launched was the Milk Marketing Board wanted every dairy farmer to join up so they could hold the whole market pricing and make block cheese fast to sell at whatever price they wanted to. If farmers wanted to make their own cheeses with excess milk beyond their contracted production amounts, they had to buy their milk back from the Milk Marketing Board, who started to add extra clauses into contracts and make it as difficult as possible for this to happen. They also hounded anyone who had not joined up and claimed sole use of certain words used to describe cheeses, such as Farmhouse, which they used on all of their factory-made block cheese and disallowed any other cheesemakers to use. The milk marketing board finally went in the early 1990’s after nearly sixty years of tyranny over the cheese industry. The final toll of disaster for Cheshire Cheese and, again, artisan cheese, in general, was World War II rationing, which only allowed for the production of certain cheeses that would not spoil easily, and even for the few chosen kinds of cheese, they had to be produced in the government-approved style. Rationing in the UK went on until 1954; in this time, we seem to have lost many of our cheese-making skills through the makers not coming home from war to the farms had just closed down, and makers moved on to other professions. All of these different factors have had a huge impact on the artisan cheese industry which has only recovered in the last few decades with a little cheese revolution.

Back to Appleby’s:

Appleby’s survived, against all odds, over the last six decades they have persevered and are still here today as an exemplar raw milk, traditional make, producer. Appleby’s believe each clothbound Cheshire encapsulates a moment in time, the soil, the grass pasture, the cows, the weather, the season. We couldn’t agree more.

The making process of Appleby’s Cheshire starts with raw milk from their own herd. Each make is produced from the evening, and then the morning milking together, which is then popped into the cheese vat with traditional starter cultures then added. The addition of the starter cultures starts the acidification process; once the curds are formed, a small amount of annatto is added, which gives the cheese its nice orange glow, and then the long process of cutting the curd, blocking it up, and tearing it begins. The curds are then left to sit for a while before being tested by the cheese maker; if they’re at the correct point, the curds are salted and then put through a peg mill before being finally put into moulds and pressed.

The salt comes from their own land in the salt plains of the Cheshire marshes, which they extract to use within the cheese making. The cheese production process all happens in one day and is a very long, hard and heavy-lifting process, but it all adds to the flavour and texture of the final product. The maturing time is 12 weeks; cheeses are all clothbound and matured on-site in the farm's converted barns and overseen daily by the team.

The taste profile of this cheese is rich, savoury and tangy with mineral qualities alongside zesty notes. It has a crumbly and moist texture and is a well-balanced beautiful cheese alongside such a rich history.

Appleby’s Cheshire has won multiple accolades over the course of its life with a few from its recent years as follows, Gold at the 2019 World Cheese Awards, Best Coloured Cheshire at 2017 International Cheese Awards, Gold for Farmhouse an Traditional at the 2017 International Cheese Awards.

Pairing Suggestions: Try this with a crisp cider, figs, dates or fruit cake.