Celery and Stilton takes a pairing built for the end of a meal and asks whether it survives being put between bread. Stilton is a hard, salty, intensely flavoured blue that crumbles rather than slices; celery is watery, fibrous, and cold, with a clean vegetal bitterness and a loud snap. The two are a fixed partnership on the cheese course because the celery's water and crunch cut the blue's richness and the celery's mildness gives the salt somewhere to go. The sandwich is an attempt to carry that exact contrast, the crunch against the blue, into a form you can hold in one hand, and the whole build is organised around not losing it.
The craft is managing a cheese that will not behave like a slice and a vegetable that brings its own water. Stilton cannot be cut into a clean sheet, so it is crumbled or mashed and pressed into an even layer, which also distributes its considerable salt so no single bite is a brine pocket. The celery is the structural problem: cut too thick it makes the sandwich fall apart on the snap, cut too thin it loses the crunch that is the entire reason it is there, and either way it weeps. The fix is fine dice or thin batons, blotted dry, set into the crumbled cheese so the blue holds them in place rather than letting them slide. Butter to the edges waterproofs the crumb against both the celery's water and the cheese's oils. A sturdy plain bread is the carrier, because soft white collapses under a wet, crumbly, assertive filling.
The blue-and-crunch idea travels along the cheese course. Stilton with a sweet pear or a date answers the salt with fruit instead of vegetable; Stilton with walnut trades the celery's water for a dry bitter crunch; a milder blue softens the whole register. Each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.