Red Leicester Sandwich

Cut a slab of Red Leicester and the deep orange face makes a promise the cheese spends the rest of the sandwich failing to keep. That colour is annatto, a dye pressed from the seeds of a tropical shrub and worked into the curd, and it reads to the eye as something sharp and aged. The cheese underneath is mild. Red Leicester is gently nutty, faintly sweet, and notably crumbly, with none of the bite a deep orange like that suggests. That gap between what the colour says and what the cheese delivers is the design problem of the whole build. A mature Cheddar is loud enough to be most of its sandwich; Red Leicester is quiet, so everything else has to be calibrated not to drown it out.

The cut comes first, because the cheese will not behave like Cheddar. Red Leicester crumbles under the knife and will not give a clean thin sheet, so it is sliced thick or laid in broken pieces and pressed into an even bed, which keeps its mild flavour present in every bite rather than vanishing into the bread. Butter spread to the edge does double duty: it waterproofs the crumb against the moisture in any chutney, and it carries the cheese's faint nuttiness across the slice so the bite does not open on plain bread before the flavour arrives. The counter is where restraint earns its keep. A fierce Branston or a raw onion that a vintage Cheddar shrugs off will flatten this cheese completely, so the pairing runs gentle, a mild fruit chutney or a leaf of salad, enough to lift the cheese without shouting it down. Soft white or plain wholemeal carries it, because an assertive crust competes with a filling whose whole appeal is its mildness.

The eating is built around that mildness rather than against it. The cheese crumbles cool and dry on the tongue, a clean nutty note coming up slowly, more like a toasted hazelnut than anything sharp. There is no tang to pull the mouth tight, no salt spike, just a soft savoury depth that sits low. The butter carries a faint richness underneath, and a mild chutney lands a beat later as a small sweet warmth at the edges, the only bright thing in the bite. It is a low, even, gentle mouthful from start to finish, and the orange that looked like it would bite turns out to be the calmest cheese on the British bench.

Its place is the everyday lunchbox and the children's plate more than the cheeseboard or the gastropub. Red Leicester is a supermarket staple, the orange block in the chiller next to the Cheddar, and the sandwich it makes is school-lunch and packed-lunch food, the mild option chosen precisely because it does not overwhelm. On a British cheeseboard it earns its spot as the colour contrast, the orange wedge set against the pale Caerphilly and the blue-veined Stilton, picked for the look as much as the taste. In the deli or the cafe the Red Leicester sandwich is the quiet alternative ordered by people who find a mature Cheddar too strong.

The variations stay in the same mild register rather than reaching for heat. Red Leicester with a sweet fruit chutney answers the nuttiness with fruit; with tomato and a few salad leaves it becomes a lighter lunch; melted into a toastie it turns soft and a touch sweeter rather than sharp. The wider British cheese bench runs the very same build with louder fillings, a mature Cheddar that needs no help carrying its own sandwich, a salty crumble of Stilton, a tangy slice of Wensleydale, each one changing what the counter has to do and what the bread has to hold up to.

The cheese has a longer and odder history than its supermarket present suggests. It is the survivor of a Leicestershire dairy tradition that was nearly extinguished, and the very orange that defines it on the shelf is the thread that ties its name to a wartime ban. The deepest fact in the sandwich is not on the plate at all but on a single farm that brought the old cheese back.

Origin and history

Leicestershire farmers were making a coloured pressed cheese from surplus milk by the eighteenth century, dyeing it orange with annatto since at least the 1700s to set it apart from the Cheddars it competed with. For most of its life it was simply Leicester cheese. The "Red" in the name is a twentieth-century accident: during the Second World War, annatto was banned as a non-essential import, every pressed cheese had to go to a pale national ration recipe, and the dyed version became "Red Leicester" only to distinguish it from the wartime "White Leicester" once the colour came back.

The war very nearly ended the farmhouse cheese for good. Traditional clothbound Red Leicester made on farms dwindled through the rationing years and after, and the last farm producing it stopped in 1956, leaving the name to factory blocks for the next half-century. For roughly fifty years no farmhouse Red Leicester existed at all; the orange in the chiller was an industrial cheese carrying an old county's name.

It came back on one Leicestershire farm. In 2005 Jo and David Clarke, on Sparkenhoe Farm at Upton near Market Bosworth, began making clothbound Red Leicester again from their own herd's unpasteurised milk and named it Sparkenhoe after the farm, the first farmhouse Red Leicester produced in the county in around fifty years and still the only unpasteurised one made anywhere.