On holiday in Corsica, I ate a lot of cheese: le niolo, which is made from goat’s milk and so addictively delicious I would sometimes eat a slice at breakfast, lunch seeming too far off; and brocciu, a fresh, ricotta-like cheese made from ewe’s milk that is excellent with bread and salad and rosé, but which we also ate in the form of a rich but pleasingly unsweet ice-cream. Naturally, my dreams grew worse with every day that passed; cheese gives me nightmares. But my consumption grew exponentially. And even when I wasn’t eating it, I was talking about it. Beside the pool, my friend S and I would describe the characteristics of our favourites out loud to one another, two crazy voluptuaries with pink shoulders and sun-frazzled hair.
I love cheese. It came into my life when I was nine, and my parents took me to France for the first time – we ate oozing supermarket camembert in some long grass by the side of a country road, and I knew in an instant that Dairylea triangles would henceforth no longer quite do it for me – and there it has remained, centre stage, ever since. Lately, though, it has begun to play an even more vital role in my life. When, not so long ago, my worries about Brexit threatened to take over my waking hours – if I wasn’t picturing the 13-mile lorry park that will be the M20 some time quite soon, I was thinking about medicines and which ones, if any, I should try to stockpile – cheese stepped in, acting as a kind of proxy, a repository into which I could hurl all my other anxieties. What I mean is that I now fixate almost exclusively on what supplies of brie and chaource will be like next spring – and the rest is just so much noise.
My friend the shrink tells me that she regards this as a pretty nifty psychological mechanism, a form of repression that allows me to fret a little, but not too much – and doubtless she’s right, up to a point. Then again, perhaps she does not quite grasp my deep feelings in the matter of cheese (if she did, I bet she would already have tried to make me do some form of lactose-based cognitive behavioural therapy).
Eating paper-thin slices of young comte the other evening, I thought, like some lover turned half-mad with longing: comte! I only discovered you a decade or so ago, and now you are set to leave me. I find that I know almost by heart the most concerning details of the LSE’s recent report on the impact of Brexit on the UK dairy industry, and that bits of it now float unbidden into my mind at all manner of moments.
Last week, having somehow resisted the purchase of a tiny, almost loopily overpriced French cheese in a local deli – oh, the darling way that green frond was wrapped around its ashy rind – I suddenly remembered the words of the man from Arla, the dairy that commissioned the study. Thanks both to disruption to the supply chain and vastly increased tariffs, if we leave the EU with no deal, he noted, speciality cheeses may soon become “very scarce”. Reader, you know what happened next. I turned around, pulled a fiver from my wallet, and swiftly bought the little fromage that was barely the size of a 50p piece. If things go on like this, I’ll be broke even before the tariffs arrive.
It’s no use people making jokes about red Leicester, and how I’ll come to love it, ha ha. Until such time as Britain vastly increases its milk production, we’re dependent on EU countries such as Denmark and Germany if we want to maintain our own supplies of cheddar and, yes, red Leicester – which is something I will, once this long hot summer is over, think about every time I stick a slice of cheese on toast under the grill.
No writer can live without rubbery cheese on toast, and no true cheese lover without, say, gouda so old you taste crystals with every bite. Given that I’m both things, I must therefore prepare for the worst. As my dear shrink friend would also say: alas, repression works only up to a point. Even as I type, the fear rises. What grim times. OFM
rachel.cooke@observer.co.uk
