Hard Cheese

I like cheese. I tend to eat the stuff in moderation as I don't think it is particularly healthy but I do love it. Mostly it is just a sprinkling to add flavour but occasionally I'll get a wedge of the stuff or make cheese on toast. For a very special occasion I even like to knock up a fondue which is essentially just a heart attack in a paraffin heated vessel but it does have the novelty factor of allowing various cheeses from around the world to be heated up into one artery clogging gloop. All of this is great fun but I end up frustrated by the local supermarkets: not by a lack of cheese so much as the fact that they seem to think that "cheese" is a synonym for "Cheddar".

I'm not really sure when this started. I think the supermarkets have always favoured British cheeses, which is fair enough, but there have traditionally been a good few varieties. Nowadays, I am lucky to see a Red Leicester and Double Gloucester sneaking in beside the Cheddar. Very occasionally a Wensleydale (usually sullied with berries) or a Stilton sneak in but it's usually just every conceivable variety of Cheddar with varying maturity, colour and geography. To appease the cheese freak there is a little section at the end marked "speciality cheeses" which is essentially everything that isn't Cheddar. Unfortunately, this rarely covers iconic cheeses such as Cornish Blue, Cheshire, Caerphilly, Cotswold, Crowdie, Dunlop, Lancashire, Shropshire Blue... well, you get the picture.

The problem of cheese choice is even worse when it gets to European cheeses. This is a problem if I want to do the fondue as most of the recipes for this use cheeses from Switzerland, France, Italy and so on. Funnily enough, it is the smaller supermarkets such as Lidl and Aldi that tend to come up trumps. Possibly this is because they have stores all over Europe but even then they have at least two shelves taken up with Cheddar.

Now I must point out that I've nothing against Cheddar. It's a great cheese and as well as tasting good it's fantastic to cook with but I do like a bit of variety. I've got some vouchers for Sainsbury's to spend and they have one of those shops the size of a Zeppelin hangar near to where I work in Livingston. I'll give it a try. I'm sure they must have some variety of cheese in there - just as long as it's not 57 varieties of Cheddar.