Stilton and Pear

The cheese in this sandwich is named for a village that is now forbidden by law to make it. Blue Stilton takes its name from a coaching settlement on the Great North Road where, by the cheesemakers' own account, the landlord of the Bell Inn began selling a veined cheese to travellers in the early eighteenth century. The village never made the cheese; it sold it, to a stream of passengers breaking the London-to-York journey. Three centuries later that accident of marketing is fossilised in European food law, and a sandwich built on Stilton is built on a name that has come loose from its place.

What the law reserves is precise. Since 1996 the word Stilton has been a protected designation of origin, and only pasteurised-milk blue cheese made in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, or Derbyshire may carry it. The village of Stilton sits just outside that triangle, in Cambridgeshire, so the cheese you crumble onto walnut bread comes from dairies forty-odd miles from the place on its label. A handful of creameries make the protected cheese; the one near Melton Mowbray, in the Vale of Belvoir country where the trade began, is making it in roughly the spot where the original farm dairies stood.

The pear is there to answer the salt. Stilton is brined and sharp, with a barnyard-and-mineral note off the blue veins, and ripe pear meets it with sugar and a wet, perfumed grain that an apple's clean snap does not give. The fruit has to be soft enough to bleed, because an underripe pear is hard and flat and brings nothing the cheese wants, and it is sliced thin and cut at the last moment, since exposed pear browns and weeps within the hour. The pairing is not invented for the sandwich. Pears, celery, and walnuts are Stilton's standing companions on the cheeseboard, and port is what the British pour beside it after dinner; the sandwich simply folds that plate between two slices of bread.

The build is mostly a problem of holding soft things in place. The Stilton goes on as crumble pressed into firm butter, the butter tacking the loose rubble down and rounding the brine, because crumbs left bare scatter and let the bread soak. Walnut bread does the structural work a white loaf cannot: its tannin echoes the nut note the cheese-and-fruit pairing reaches for anyway, and its chew gives the yielding filling a crust to push against, so the bite has some spine under all that give. Salt off the cheese, sugar off the pear, a faint bitterness off the nuts and the crust, butter binding the three, walnut crumb keeping the soft middle from spreading sideways.

It belongs to the dressed-up end of the British cheese counter rather than the lunch one. A wedge of Cheddar with pickle is the rustic version of the same impulse; this is the Christmas-cheeseboard version, the blue-and-fruit pairing of an after-dinner plate made portable. It is eaten as a small deliberate pleasure rather than as fuel, cold from the fridge, the last note left in the mouth the long salt of the cheese after the sweetness has gone.

Stilton, the cheese named for a village that cannot make it…

The pairing of Stilton with pear has no inventor; it is a cheese-course convention, and the firm history belongs to the cheese itself, which is one of the better-documented in Britain. Daniel Defoe, passing through on his tour of Great Britain published in 1724, recorded Stilton as already famous, sold so ripe that it came to the table with the mites round it. Two years later Richard Bradley, soon to be the first Professor of Botany at Cambridge, printed a recipe for it. The cheese was named not for where it was made but for where it was sold: the coaching village of Stilton, a stop along the Great North Road, where tradition credits Cooper Thornhill of the Bell Inn with first marketing a blue cheese sourced from the dairies of the Vale of Belvoir.

That origin story is convention more than record. The cheesemakers' association tells of Thornhill, landlord of the Bell between 1730 and 1759, tasting the cheese at a farm near Melton Mowbray and securing exclusive rights to sell it, though the documentary trail is thin and the shape and style of the cheese were standardised by other hands. The styling is traditionally credited to Frances Pawlett of Wymondham in Leicestershire in the 1720s, with other names appearing in the record alongside hers. What is solid is the protection: Stilton became the only British cheese to hold a certification trade mark, granted in 1966, and was awarded European protected designation of origin status in 1996.

The protection produced the cheese's defining oddity. The village of Stilton lies in Cambridgeshire, outside the three permitted counties, so the cheese that carries the village's name cannot legally be made there. When a local company applied to amend the designation and let the village produce its own namesake, the application was rejected in 2013, leaving the one place in Britain barred from making Stilton the very village that gave the cheese its name.