Extra Mature Cheddar

A red-corner sticker on a plastic-wrapped block at Tesco or Sainsbury's, the word EXTRA MATURE printed across a colour the trade keeps to a strict ladder from yellow to deep red, is the everyday market the extra mature Cheddar sandwich is built out of. The grade carries a working window. A block under that sticker has been held in store for roughly 18 to 24 months, long enough that the milk acidity has tightened and the salt has crept inward, but not so long that the paste has gone dry and the wedge crumbles under the wire. It is the rung the supermarket aisle reaches for when a sandwich needs a Cheddar that is loud without being awkward, and the sandwich is built around that working window.

The grade is the sticker, not the cheese, which is why the regional source matters underneath it. A Somerset block at 18 months sits firm and grassy, the dairy land round Glastonbury and the Mendip Hills coming through as a clean fatty depth. A Devon block from the Quickes farm at Newton St Cyres at the same age runs slightly sweeter and nuttier, the herd's pasture audible behind the salt. A Cornish block off the Davidstow creamery near Camelford is firmer-rinded and a touch sharper, the wetter coastal weather concentrating the cure. Pick the supermarket block by its named county on the back of the wrap and the sandwich varies in three different directions before the bread has been touched.

What makes this grade a working sandwich cheese rather than a board cheese is precisely that the paste is still pliable. Slice it and the wire goes through cleanly with no shear. Press the slice between two fingers and it bends slightly before it breaks. There is a fine grit between the teeth, the first calcium-lactate crystals just starting to form, but no audible crunch yet, and the paste yields under the bite rather than fracturing into shards on the tongue. A board cheese held a year longer has lost that yield and reads dry; an extra mature block has it just barely, which is why a slice goes into a sandwich and stays settled into the crumb rather than spilling out the side at the first press of the teeth.

Each part of the build can break this sandwich. Slice the cheese too thin and the grade is wasted, the cure flattening out on the bread and the cheese tasting only mildly tangy. Cut it too thick and the bite goes to a dense wedge of fat the bread cannot keep up with, the Cheddar reading as a slab of cold cheese with a slice on either side. Spread the butter thin and the salt of the cheese drives through to the dry crumb and the slice eats parched; lay the butter in heavy and the fat doubles up on the cheese's own and the bite turns greasy. Reach for a strong pickle and the cure of the Cheddar gets buried, the cheese disappearing behind vinegar and dark sugar; leave it bare with white bread and butter and the sandwich reads as the cheese unaccompanied. A narrow Branston band, applied along the cheese face only, is the working compromise.

Slide one out of a foil pack at noon and the smell off the cut face is faintly butyric, the soured-milk note that Cheddar develops past a year, with a clean nutty depth behind it. The crumb gives without resistance under the teeth. The cheese arrives a beat after the bread does, the fine grit of the early crystals registering first as a faint sandiness rather than a crack, then the cure proper coming through as a slow build of salt and tang held against the dairy weight behind it. A spoon of Branston lands as a dark wave of vinegar and tamarind across the back. The slice carries on past the swallow, the salt holding on the tongue and the nuttiness receding last. Nothing in the bite shatters; nothing pulls apart. The cheese eats whole.

The British supermarket cheese sticker ladder is its own grammar at the chiller. Mild for a child's white-bread sandwich, medium for an everyday packed lunch, mature for the household default, extra mature for the cook who wants the cure forward, vintage for a Sunday board. Asking at a Waitrose deli counter for an extra mature wedge means asking for the grade and accepting whatever named producer is on the day; asking for the block by its producer, Cathedral City or Pilgrims Choice or Davidstow Cornish Cruncher or a Quickes wedge, means asking for the regional cheese and accepting whatever age that producer is selling that week. The two questions are different and the experienced shopper asks both.

The variations are the rungs above and below on the same ladder, each its own separate sandwich. A mature Cheddar one rung down sits softer and milder and accepts a heavier chutney happily because the cheese is quieter to begin with. A vintage Cheddar past two years turns drier and more granular, with audible crystal crunch and a sharper acid edge, and pulls the pickle back to nothing. A West Country Farmhouse Cheddar carrying the PDO from one of the four southwest counties is a cloth-bound, hand-cheddared block that runs longer and deeper than the supermarket extra mature even at the same age. A Scottish Cheddar from an island or Highland creamery brings the locality of its herd into the slice. The ploughman's plate folds the same wedge in with ham, pickle, and leaf to read as a different thing entirely.

Origin and history

Cheddar takes its name from a village in the Mendip Hills of Somerset where the cheese has been made since at least the 12th century. The earliest documentary record is an entry in the Somerset Pipe Roll of 1170, where Henry II is recorded buying 10,240 pounds of Cheddar at a farthing a pound. The technique that gives the cheese its name, the curd cutting, stacking, and turning called cheddaring, was systematised in the 19th century by Joseph Harding, a Somerset farmer working near Marksbury in the 1850s and 1860s, who codified the method into the standardised process British and overseas makers still follow.

The supermarket grade ladder Mild to Vintage is a more recent commercial invention, sharpened in the 1980s and 1990s as the British supermarket trade scaled into mass cheese. Cathedral City, today the country's best-selling Cheddar brand, was launched by Mendip Foods in Wells, Somerset, in the mid-1960s, named for nearby Wells Cathedral, and was acquired by Dairy Crest in July 1995, who moved production to the Davidstow creamery in Cornwall, the largest cheddar plant in the UK, originally built by the Milk Marketing Board in 1953. The grade EXTRA MATURE settled into the trade's standard ladder roughly between a Cheddar being held for a year and being held for two and a half, and the sticker now functions as the supermarket's shorthand for that window across every cheddar producer in the country.

The Protected Designation of Origin for West Country Farmhouse Cheddar was registered with the European Union in 1996, fixing the name to handmade cheese made and matured for at least nine months on the same farm, in Somerset, Devon, Dorset, or Cornwall. The PDO sits above the supermarket grade ladder rather than across it: a block can be extra mature without being West Country Farmhouse, and a West Country Farmhouse Cheddar can be sold at any age its maker chooses. Around a dozen farms now produce under the PDO, with Quickes near Newton St Cyres in Devon and Montgomery's at North Cadbury in Somerset among the best known.