Stilton and Celery

Stilton and celery is the end of the cheeseboard moved into bread. Blue Stilton is dense, salty, and loudly pungent, a cheese that crumbles into damp clods rather than slicing and that hits the nose before the tongue; celery is cold, fibrous, watery, and almost flavourless beyond a clean green snap. On a Christmas cheese plate they sit side by side for a reason, the celery's water and crunch rinsing the blue's richness off the palate between bites. This sandwich takes that exact give-and-take and folds it into something held in one hand, the snap set against the salt, the cold against the warm pungency. The celery is doing structural work here, not garnishing the edge of the plate.

A crumbling cheese and a weeping vegetable make a build that wants to fall apart, and the assembly is mostly about stopping it. Stilton will not go down as a clean slice, so it is crumbled or pressed into an even bed, which has the side benefit of scattering its considerable salt so no single bite lands a brine pocket. The celery is the harder problem: cut into thick sticks it levers the sandwich apart on the first snap and rolls out the side, cut too fine it surrenders the crunch that is its entire reason for being there, and either way it leaks. The fix is a fine even dice, patted dry, pressed down into the crumbled cheese so the blue grips it and holds it still. Butter to the corners seals the bread against both the celery's water and the cheese's oils. A sturdy loaf carries it, because a soft white one would slump under a wet, salty, crumbling load.

Get the balance wrong in either direction and the sandwich tells you at once. Too much Stilton and it is a salt bomb that numbs the mouth and pulls every other note flat; too little and the celery is just cold wet string between buttered bread with nothing to justify it. The right ratio is more cheese than celery by weight but enough dice through it that a clean green snap interrupts every mouthful, the crunch arriving as relief exactly when the blue threatens to overwhelm. A few cooks add a smear of butter or a spoon of chutney to round the salt, and a walnut goes in often enough to count as orthodox, its dry bitterness a third texture against the soft cheese and the wet celery.

The smell is the blue announcing itself, sharp and mushroomy and faintly farmyard, rising off the sandwich before it reaches the mouth. The first bite is salt and pungency and the dense slightly greasy give of the cheese, and then the celery cracks through it cold and wet and clean, a bright vegetal snap that cuts the richness mid-chew and resets the palate. The contrast is the whole sensation in the mouth, warm soft savour against cold hard water, and it repeats bite to bite as the dice keeps interrupting the blue. The finish is long and salty with a green coolness behind it, and the aftertaste of Stilton sits at the back of the throat the way it does off a cheeseboard, insistent and slightly sweet.

This is leftover food in the best sense, the sandwich of the days between Christmas and New Year when a wedge of Stilton bought for the table still sits in the fridge and the celery from the cheeseboard has gone soft in its glass. Britain has paired celery with cheese on the table since the Victorians, when celery was a luxury grown with difficulty and displayed upright in tall cut-glass vases, the centrepiece of a dinner and, in middle-class homes, brought out chiefly for the end of a holiday meal. The cheese and the celery met on that table, and the sandwich is the thrifty morning-after of it, the grand cheeseboard reduced to a packed lunch.

Its kin run along the cheeseboard and answer the blue with different partners. Stilton with pear or grape meets the salt with sweet fruit instead of a watery vegetable; Stilton with walnut alone drops the celery for a dry bitter crunch; a milder blue softens the whole pitch for a gentler eater; Stilton and beef carries the same cheese into a proper meat sandwich entirely. What marks this one out among them is the celery specifically, the cold watery snap chosen over sweetness or nuttiness to cut a cheese this loud.

The Blue Stilton Record

The cheese has a precise and slightly contrary history. A recipe for a Stilton cheese was printed in 1726 by Richard Bradley, the first Professor of Botany at Cambridge, and two years earlier Daniel Defoe, passing the village on his tour of Britain in 1724, called it England's Parmesan and described it brought to the table so full of mites that a spoon came with it. Frances Pawlett, a dairywoman of Wymondham in Leicestershire, is traditionally credited with standardising the cheese's shape and style in the 1720s, and Cooper Thornhill, who kept the Bell Inn beside the Great North Road in the village of Stilton, is said to have begun selling it to coach passengers around 1730, which is how a Leicestershire cheese took the name of a Cambridgeshire village.

That name is now legally fixed and full of paradox. Blue Stilton won a protected designation of origin in 1996, a status that restricts the name to cheese made in just three counties, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, and Nottinghamshire. The village of Stilton sits in none of them, which leaves the very place the cheese is named after, and where Thornhill first sold it, unable by law to make it.

Stilton cannot be made in Stilton. The protected name belongs to three counties that do not include the village on the Great North Road where Cooper Thornhill sold the cheese to passing coaches in the 1730s.