The Stinking Bishop sandwich leads with its smell, because the cheese inside it is one of the most pungent made in Britain and there is no honest way to write around that. Stinking Bishop is a Gloucestershire cheese with a rind washed in perry, the pear cider its name comes from, and that washing cultivates a sticky orange surface and an aroma that fills a room before the wrapper is fully open. The defining fact of the sandwich is the contrast between that nose and the paste beneath it. The smell is barnyard and assertive to the point of confrontation; the cheese itself, under the rind, is mild, soft to the point of running, and almost sweet. The whole build is an exercise in carrying a near-liquid cheese with a fearsome reputation between two slices of bread.
The craft is containment and a deliberate plainness. At room temperature a ripe Stinking Bishop spreads rather than slices, closer to a thick paste than a sheet, so the bread's first job is structural: a sturdy white or a wholemeal with enough crumb to hold a soft, oozing layer without going to mush under it. Butter is spread firm and to the edge, less for flavour than as a barrier between a wet cheese and a slice that would otherwise soak through before lunch, the same waterproofing logic a paste sandwich runs on. The cheese goes on in a measured layer and not a thick one, because the flavour is already at full volume and a thinner spread is the only brake the sandwich has. Everything else is kept deliberately quiet, the bread plain and the additions few, so a cheese this loud is not also competing with the build around it.
The variations stay inside the strong, soft, washed-rind frame and mostly negotiate the intensity rather than escape it. A leaf of something peppery, watercress or rocket, cuts the richness with a green sharpness without arguing with the cheese. A sweet fruit chutney or a few slices of pear nod back to the perry in the rind and round the pungency toward something gentler. A different washed-rind cheese, an Epoisses-style or a Munster-style, runs the same logic at a different pitch, and the warmed, melted reading turns the spread into a sauce. Each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.