Stinking Bishop Sandwich

Hunts Court Farm sits on the edge of Dymock, an orchard village in north Gloucestershire, and the cheese it puts in this sandwich is washed every few days in perry pressed from a single local pear. The pear is the Stinking Bishop, an old Gloucestershire variety named for Frederick Bishop, the nineteenth-century farmer who grew it. Charles Martell began making the cheese on his farm in 1972, dipping each pale disc in the perry as it aged so a sticky orange bloom would settle on its skin. That wash is where the name and the sandwich both come from, because the rind it produces is one of the most assertive smells in British cheesemaking, and the build is the test of what to do with it.

The paste inside is mild. The rind is loud. The flavour is two arguments stacked on top of each other, and what defines the sandwich is keeping them legible in the same bite. The wash carries a barnyard, cured-meat, faintly ammoniac note. The paste under it is sweet, soft, almost milky. Plain bread is the referee. A loud cheese on a loud loaf becomes a shout, and a quiet one is the only way to hear both registers separately on the tongue.

Each part has a way it fails. A young wheel cut cold from the fridge clamps tight and reads of dull salt rather than the long fermented depth a ripened one carries, so the cheese has to come out an hour ahead. A ripe disc spreads under its own weight rather than slicing, so a thin loose loaf collapses to paste under it and a brittle baguette splinters across the soft layer instead of giving with it. Strip the rind and most of what the build was for goes with it. Pile the cheese on thick and the wash turns from depth into a single suffocating volume that no amount of bread can buffer back into balance.

Unwrap a ripe one at the counter and the kitchen smells of damp cellar and warm hay before the knife is even out. The disc gives under the blade, the rind tacky to the touch and a deep orange where the paper has clung to it, the paste underneath pale yellow and beading slightly with butterfat. Spread on cool brown bread the cheese flattens slowly, the rind warming and going faintly molten while the centre stays cooler. The first bite is soft crumb, then the meaty depth of the wash, then a delayed sweetness from the paste that arrives behind it like a second voice. A square of quince paste laid against it would push that sweetness forward; a leaf of watercress would cut it back with peppery green. Either is the right second move; nothing is the wrong one.

The Stinking Bishop has its own brief grammar at a cheese counter. Asked for whole or by the wedge, it is sold rind-on and is supposed to be eaten rind-on, the wash being the thing the maker spent two months building. A good cheesemonger keeps it at fifteen degrees rather than four, and will say so. In Gloucestershire it turns up beside a chunk of Single Gloucester or a Double on a slate at a pub like The Beauchamp Arms in Dymock, the village a few miles from the farm. Outside Gloucestershire it became a cult ask after the Aardman animators put a wheel into Wallace and Gromit's 2008 short A Matter of Loaf and Death, in which the cheese revives Wallace in the third act. The film's joke is the smell. This build uses it.

Close cousins stay near the same wheel and rearrange what is set against it. A pear added to the bread closes the loop back to the perry the cheese was washed in. A celery sandwich filled with the same paste turns it into a savoury spread for crisp stalks. The melted reading slid under a grill takes the soft paste to a sauce; a related version with Charles Martell's other Gloucestershire cheese, Hereford Hop, runs the same logic at a lower volume. None of these displaces the plain build, which is the form the wash was made to carry.

The cheese, the pear, and the farm

Charles Martell founded the dairy at Hunts Court Farm in 1972, the same year he made the first Stinking Bishop, and the cheese was registered as one of the early new British farmhouse cheeses of the postwar revival. The recipe sets a soft, washed-rind cheese in the style of an Epoisses and bathes it in perry rather than the wine or brandy a French dairyman would have used. Martell took the name from the pear, the pear from Frederick Bishop, and the wash from the cider press already on the farm. The cheese is not a protected designation; the name and the recipe belong to Martell and his son Hugh, who took over the dairy in the 2000s and still make every wheel on the farm.

Its public moment came on Christmas Day 2008, when the BBC aired the Aardman half-hour Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death. Stinking Bishop is the cheese that revives Wallace at the close. Martell's farm had a quiet local trade until the broadcast, and reported in the British and trade press the following week that demand the next morning had run roughly five times its usual weekly orders. The dairy now ships across the United Kingdom and into a small export trade, and Stinking Bishop is one of the few British farmhouse cheeses with name recognition outside the country.

The pear itself is the older record. The Stinking Bishop is documented in Gloucestershire fruit registers as a perry pear grown by Frederick Bishop in the nineteenth century, valued not for eating but for its acid pressing juice. The dairy's other principal cheese, Single Gloucester, secured a European protected designation of origin in 1997 under Charles Martell's leadership of its application. Charles Martell was appointed MBE in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to British cheesemaking.