Vintage Cheddar

The first thing a long-aged block does in the mouth is crunch before it gives. Those are crystals, not grit blown in from somewhere: free amino acids, tyrosine loudest among them, that gather and set into a fine sand the molars meet a beat before the paste yields. A twelve-month Cheddar has none of it. A thirty-six-month one is full of it, and the crunch is the plainest sign that the truckle has spent a third year in the cloth. The vintage Cheddar sandwich is built on the difference between the same cheese young and old, and on honouring what those extra months put into the paste rather than fighting it.

What the cellar does over those years can be measured. Moisture leaves as the truckle breathes out through its bandage. The salt does not leave with it, so as the water goes the sodium reads heavier on the tongue. The tyrosine accumulates and crystallises into the gritty sand the teeth find first; calcium lactate sets up a second kind of crystal, white flecks gathering toward the rind. The protein matrix lets go of the give a young Cheddar has and turns dry and brittle, near flaky at the edge of a knife. A 2.5-kilo West Country truckle goes down to the cellar in July, gets turned and rebandaged on a schedule, and comes out the next autumn as a mature cheese; held another year it is extra mature; held into a third, the same block is vintage, the bandage darker and the rind drawn tight.

That dried-out paste sets the terms for the build, and most of them are refusals. Vintage Cheddar wants slicing rather than grating and a thick cut, three to four millimetres, since a thin shaving parches on the tongue and the crystals come over as gravel instead of crunch. A young Cheddar takes a generous chutney and is glad of it; the same spoon on a vintage block erases everything past the sweetness, the long savoury length vanishing into vinegar and sugar. So the pickle goes sparing or goes away: half a teaspoon of quince paste, a thin pass of unsalted butter, a plain cracker set beside it. Butter still reaches the edges, as much to seal the crumb as to add any fat. And the block sits out of the fridge ten minutes before the bread meets it, because cold paste shuts down the volatiles the aging made and the cheese reads merely sharp.

Set a wedge on a wooden board and the paste and the rind look like two different cheeses. The inside is straw-coloured and dry-looking, a faint sheen across it and the white speckle of crystal through it. The rind runs darker, amber where the cloth has pulled away, the salt soaked inward in a band a few millimetres deep. Tilt the slice toward the light and a crystal edge catches it. The bite delivers that brief grit between the molars, then the paste lets go, then a slow climb of salt, then the long meaty umami the years have built, holding at the back of the tongue for several seconds past the swallow. The whole thing moves slowly; nothing about eating it is quick.

At the cheesemonger the wedges carry the age on the ticket, two years, twenty-eight months, three years, and buying one is a matter of naming the date rather than the strength. The trade names are each producer's own rung: Westcombe's three-year-old, Quicke's vintage, Montgomery's reserve, a Keen's kept past its usual release. Cracker boards and meal-deal triangles printed "vintage Cheddar" tend to use the word loosely, often for a sharper block of twelve to fifteen months, which is exactly why the named-producer ticket carries weight: a long-aged truckle and a strong supermarket block sit a long way apart.

The branches run along the age ladder and the chutney decision. A reserve or three-year block pushes the savoury length and the crystal harder; a younger mature is the everyday rung where a chutney earns its place. Cheese and pickle is the form built around a sweeter Cheddar under Branston. A cracker-and-cheese plate keeps the wedge bare beside a glass of port and is a different object on a different occasion. The cheese ploughman's sandwich folds the whole pub plate of Cheddar, ham, pickle and leaf into the bread, and at that point the long umami of a vintage block goes under the rest of the plate; that build wants a mature wedge instead. None of those four is the vintage sandwich, and each gets its own write-up.

The twelfth-century record, the thirty-six-month block

Cheddar enters the documentary record by name in the pipe rolls of King Henry II in 1170, which note the purchase of 10,240 pounds of cheese from the village of Cheddar in Somerset at a farthing the pound. By then the cheese was already a serious commercial product. What the rolls do not record is how long any of it had been kept, and the length of the keep is the one fact that separates a vintage Cheddar from any other. Long-aged cloth-bound Cheddar in its modern form, a heavy truckle wrapped in muslin and lard and stored cool, is documented from the early seventeenth century onward, the method settled by the time Joseph Harding standardised the cheesemaking in the mid-nineteenth.

The modern protected term is both exact and recent. West Country Farmhouse Cheddar took European PDO protection in June 1996; the rule holds the name to Cheddars made on farms in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset or Somerset, from those farms' own milk, cloth-bound and matured at least nine months. Vintage stays a trade word rather than a legal one, with no statute fixing a minimum age behind it; convention runs twelve months for mature, eighteen for extra-mature, and twenty-four upward for vintage, with reserves now and then carried to thirty-six.

The roll of named PDO farms turning out cloth-bound truckles is short. Montgomery's at North Cadbury, Keen's at Wincanton, Westcombe Dairy at Evercreech and Quicke's at Newton St Cyres are the producers a cheesemonger most often labels as the source of a vintage cut. Not one of them sits in the village of Cheddar; under the June 1996 designation that protects the name, the cheese called after the Somerset village can no longer legally be made in the place it is named for.