Every Tuesday Mary Holbrook drives 130 miles from her farm in Somerset to London, to look after her cheese. She does this at Neal’s Yard Dairy in Bermondsey, where she sends her produce to be ripened in special maturation rooms before sale. Wednesdays are spent washing, turning, wrapping and generally lavishing her four styles of goat’s cheese with care and attention. Then Holbrook drives back to Sleight Farm to manage the 200-acre property, tend her livestock (she also raises pigs and cows) and carry on making cheese.
At Neal’s Yard, where we meet after one of her Wednesday sessions, Holbrook is regarded with affection and something approaching awe. “She’s an amazing cheesemaker,” managing director David Lockwood tells me, adding that Holbrook’s weekly visits to the dairy “totally expands people’s minds”.
What Holbrook has over most other cheesemakers in the country, as well as an obvious perfectionist streak, is experience. An archaeologist by training, she began making cheese in the late 1970s after tiring of her job as a museum curator in Bath. The career change occurred, without much forethought, at her husband’s family farm near Timsbury. “It began with a couple of goats,” Holbrook says. “I thought, oh, too much milk, make some cheese, we can sell the cheese, get some more goats. It kind of developed like that.”
Her approach was and still is resolutely unscientific. She describes her cheese as “peasant-style” and laughs when I ask if she uses any hi-tech equipment. “I have a pH meter,” she says. “I think I might have used it once, five years ago.”
“You observe what’s going on with the curd,” says Lockwood, dropping in on our conversation. “You’re saying, ‘This feels right,’ or ‘This needs more salt.’ You’re looking at the cheese.”
“I’m fiddling with it,” says Holbrook wryly.
Most people um and ah a bit, feigning modesty, when asked why their product is so good. Holbrook has no time for that. “Well,” she says, “I suppose, a) it’s the way I make them, b) it’s the fact that I don’t pasteurise, so they’re getting the character of the milk. And c) we’ve got old, unfertilised pastures with nettles, dandelions, thistles and wild flowers, which is different from what most people are feeding their goats.”
The goats themselves – a mixed breed, “League of Nations” crew of about 100 – she speaks of with affection, even though they can be “absolute so-and-sos – you can never quite tell what they’re going to get up to”.
The cheese is no less unpredictable, which is one of the reasons Holbrook finds it difficult to hand over control, despite employing a full-time cheesemaker at the farm.
“I want to keep a close eye on what’s going on,” she says. “You do have to keep changing things. People find that really hard to understand. ‘Oh, but last week you told me they were not salty enough.’ ‘Yes I know but this week the curd’s draining differently so you need to use more salt.’ I think that’s where I’m most useful,” she concludes with a smile. “Being that awkward person.”
Timsbury, Bath BA2 0HN
