Cornish Yarg Sandwich

Cut a slice of Cornish Yarg for a sandwich and you cut through a rind made of leaves. Yarg is a semi-hard Cornish cow's-milk cheese whose young rounds are patted all over with stinging-nettle leaves, which dry onto the surface as a mottled grey-green coat and are eaten with the cheese. Under that coat the paste runs from soft and creamy just inside the leaf to a drier, Caerphilly-like crumble toward the middle, mild and clean with a lemony tang. The leaf is the reason the sandwich exists: the nettle rind tastes faintly of mushroom, of woodland and damp earth and minerals, a savour the pale interior on its own does not have.

Because the rind carries the flavour, the cut is the craft. Every slice has to take a band of the leaf coat with it, so the cheese is cut down through the round in wedges rather than shaved off the face, and laid so the grey-green edge runs through the sandwich rather than being trimmed away. A rindless slice from the centre is just a mild young cheese with the whole point removed. The slice is set thick enough to register, because Yarg is gentle rather than loud and a mean sliver vanishes between bread.

The cheese is delicate, and the failures are about overwhelming it. Yarg is lactic and lemony, not a sharp aged block, so anything assertive flattens the earthy note the leaf is there to provide. A vinegary pickle buries it; a seeded or sour loaf argues with it; a thick spread of chutney drowns it. Slice it too thin and the rind flavour never arrives; cut it without the rind and the sandwich is a different, blander thing. Soft plain bread with butter is the honest frame, the butter sealing the crumb and carrying the cheese, the bread saying nothing so the leaf can.

Held to the nose the rind smells of mushroom and the forest floor, a damp green earthiness over the clean milk of the paste. The bite gives easily, the soft crumb meeting the cheese, and two flavours land in sequence: the interior arrives first, creamy near the rind and crumbling drier behind it, mild and faintly citric and cool; then the leaf coat follows with its mineral, mushroomy, vegetal note, darker and stranger than the milk. A good slice tastes of two things at once where a block cheddar tastes of one. There is no heat and no sharpness, only the soft lactic cheese and the earthy edge of the rind.

It sits in the West Country cheese tradition, the kind of cheese a Cornish farm shop or a deli cheese counter sells by the wedge and a customer takes home to eat plainly. Ordered at a counter it is asked for by name, Cornish Yarg, often with a remark about the nettles, which are the thing everyone remembers and the thing the cheesemonger leads with. A few peppery salad leaves are the usual companion, chosen because they echo the green of the wrap rather than fight it, and the whole assembly is meant to stay quiet and let the leaf rind be the surprise.

Its variations stay inside the same idea of a wrapped rind. The Wild Garlic Yarg, the same cheese coated in wild-garlic leaves instead of nettles, swaps the rind flavour for a green allium note while keeping the structure exactly. A few salad leaves alongside the nettle version extend its woodland register. The wider British cheese sandwich, the mature Cheddars and the Wensleydales and the blues, is a louder family that asks for a sharp pickle to stand against it, which is the opposite handling from a cheese built to be left gentle. Each of those is its own counter order.

The Grays, the Nettle, and Lynher

The cheese is old in method and young in fact. Cornish Yarg is made at Lynher Dairies on Pengreep Farm near Truro, and its name is simply Gray read backwards, after Alan and Jenny Gray, the Cornish farmers who began making it. By the makers' account the Grays revived it from a nettle-wrapped cheese recipe written down by Gervase Markham in 1615 and found in their farmhouse attic, a story that gives the cheese a Stuart pedigree though the documentary trail for the dish stops well short of an unbroken line back to it.

The cheese that is actually sold is a creation of the 1980s British farmhouse revival. The Grays sold the recipe in 1984 to Michael and Margaret Horrell, who built it into a business; Catherine Mead established Lynher Dairies and a second dairy on Pengreep Farm in 2001, and when the Horrells retired in 2006 all production of Yarg moved there. The nettles are still picked and pressed onto each round by hand, the leaf changing the acidity at the surface and the way the curd matures beneath it.

Alan and Jenny Gray gave the cheese the name that reverses theirs, and Lynher Dairies near Truro has made every round of Cornish Yarg since 2006.