A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles by Ned Palmer review – a miraculous resurgence

In the late 17th century, the cheese of Suffolk had a terrible reputation. Suffolk bang was said to have a meagre flavour and was so rock hard – “harder than the devil” – that it needed to be warmed up to become vaguely edible. This disappointing foodstuff was known as a “flotten” cheese because it was made from skimmed milk. But the cheesemakers of the county insisted that it wasn’t their fault their cheese, once highly regarded, had “grown into disrepute”. In 1690, they wrote a petition to parliament complaining that the cheesemongers of London had forced them to skim ever more cream off their milk to make butter, the result being that Suffolk’s cheeses had become “only fit for slaves”.

As this story illustrates, cheese in Britain has always been up and down. At the moment, happily, it is up, argues Ned Palmer, a former jazz pianist turned cheesemonger, in this delightful and informative romp through centuries of British cheesemaking.

Palmer suggests that the long history of cheese in Britain is not one of simple decline or progress but of cycles of excellence followed by periods of compromise and disappointment. The 15th century, for example, seems to have been a golden era for British cheese, when hard, Parmesan-like cheeses were sold in foreign markets on the back of the wool trade. An Italian expert wrote that Britain’s rich pastures made the country’s cheeses excellent and abundant. Some of those sold in late medieval England included nettle (equivalent to Cornish Yarg today), cream cheese, morning milk cheese (similar to single gloucester) and angelot cheese, a reblochon-style creation made from the very creamiest milk. Yet a few centuries later, with industrialisation, the abundance and diversity were waning. In November 1935, TS Eliot wrote a letter to the Times suggesting that good British cheese, from Stilton to “noble old cheshire”, was on the brink of extinction.

Now, according to Palmer, we are once again in an era of miraculous resurgence for British cheese. In the UK, there are perhaps 700 varieties, “from soft cheeses like the fresh and delicate goat’s milk Perroche to full-on, funky washed-rinds like the aptly named Renegade Monk”. The fact that this is so is largely due to two generations of inventive British cheesemakers and sellers including the late Mary Holbrook, creator of the lovely Tymsboro, which Palmer describes as “a salty-peppery ash-covered pyramid” made from goat’s milk. Palmer’s sensuous descriptions made me ravenous for cheese, from buttery lancashires to nutty Lincolnshire Poacher, a relatively recent British invention that occasionally tastes of pineapple. “Nobody knows why,” he writes.

The return of good British cheese is a surprise, given that for most of the 20th century, it looked as much of a dying commodity as shoes hand-stitched by cobblers. Palmer notes that in 1939 there were 333 British farms producing cheddar. By 1974, 300 of these farms had been lost and many of those that remained produced cheddars lacking the old character. The problems of British cheese were partly the problems of late 20th century food in general. Too much of it was mass-produced, globalised and dull. Factory cheese started being produced in the UK in the 1870s, but increasingly it could not compete with cheap imports from Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands. By 1929, New Zealand cheddar was “fourpence a pound cheaper than its British farmhouse equivalent”. In the 1930s, most British dairies switched from cheese production to liquid milk, which, strangely, gave bigger profits than butter or cheese. In 1933 the Milk Marketing Board was founded, whose mission was to stabilise the milk price rather than to protect cheese.

British cheese took a further hit during the second world war. Food historians sometimes note that in terms of pure nutrition, the British never ate as well on average as they did under wartime rationing, when the Ministry of Food ensured an adequate diet for all. True, but rationing was a disaster for cheese. Under the cheese ration, most civilians had an ounce per person (with an extra 3 oz if you were vegetarian). This favoured block cheeses that could be easily cut into tiny cubes, and militated against anything too creamy or crumbly. Government-approved cheeses during the war included cheddar, cheshire, dunlop, lancashire, leicester and derby, but in reality, whichever cheese you asked for, what you got was a chunk of nondescript mousetrap, and you were grateful for it. This legacy of mediocre cheese continued long after the war had ended. As Palmer writes: “By pruning cheese varieties and blurring the distinctions between them, the war not only wiped out some of our cheese but changed the very nature of those that survived.”

Related: What’s the best way to store cheese? | Kitchen Aide

For decades after the war, British cheese had a very low reputation compared with that of France or Italy. This only started to change during the period that Palmer calls “the great cheese renaissance of the 1980s”. In 1976, in a “rat-infested derelict bit of Covent Garden called Neal’s Yard”, entrepreneur Nicholas Saunders opened a warehouse selling wholefoods. After a few years, he added a cheese shop, which was managed by Randolph Hodgson. At first, Hodgson found he didn’t have much to sell, so he set off on a quest through Britain and Ireland, tracking down anyone who was still making farmhouse cheeses and encouraging others to start.

Almost all of the great cheeses of modern Britain have some connection with Randolph Hodgson and Neal’s Yard Dairy. One of Palmer’s favourites is Gorwydd Caerphilly, whose grey rind ripens the cheese “from the outside in, breaking its firm dry texture down into something almost liquid and softening the bright citric acidity of the young cheese into a rich, cabbage creaminess”. This cheese – so much more pleasing than a factory Caerphilly – was the creation of Todd Trethowan in the 1990s. Trethowan was planning to start a degree in archaeology when he happened to pass Neal’s Yard Dairy and had what Palmer calls a “cheese epiphany”. This book – which would make a fine Christmas present, along with a wedge of Sparkenhoe red leicester – is full of such cheese epiphanies. A critic might argue that in paying so much attention to artisans, Palmer is glossing over the fact that the average cheese-eater in Britain is still eating dull block cheddars. But I was cheered by his passion. In this world of grief and division, it is heartwarming to be reminded that not everything is getting worse. These days, they are even making good cheeses in Suffolk: the mushroomy baron bigod, made near Bungay. “Unlike the old Suffolk bang,” Palmer observes, “this is not a cheese you could sharpen knives on.”

• A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles by Ned Palmer is published by Profile (RRP £16.99) To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.