Followers

Tuesday 3 June 2008

Chapter 5: Just Kidding


“Tell me what you know about cheese, girls,” I cheerily ask my daughters as we head out to the Golden Cross Goats Cheese dairy. “It gives you nightmares?” suggests LouLou. “It smells,” says Ellie.

It’s two years since we left the supermarkets of Brighton for the butchers and fishing boats of rural Sussex, and I have carted the kids around most local farms to meet the meat keeping these verdant Downs neat and tidy. But with Ellie now a confirmed vegetarian and LouLou pulled equally by the lure of the animal activism of her big sister and the smell of a beef burger, I’m not quite sure what I’ve achieved.

I always thought that giving my children a little of my foodie childhood might inspire a lifelong love of the stuff. But I was used to the pigs’ trotters simmering gently on the hob as my father told us about the spit-roasted buffalo at the fairytale banquet of the Sultan of Perak and the monkey brains served live at the night-markets of my Malay early years. When Ellie makes her excuses at Sunday lunch these days, he looks crestfallen.

So I’m giving in. If this little experiment is about getting the kids to appreciate good food, then let them eat ice-cream (1 food mile) and goats’ cheese (3.3). After the pig farm, I owe it to Ellie to show her fluffy goats with years of frolicking ahead of them and no-one eying up their back end. I just won’t tell her about what happens to the boys.

Kevin and Alison Blunt have been making cheese at Golden Cross for the last twenty years and have come a long way since the bucket and ten goats they had back then. Pan-fried on a bed of local leaves, slightly spiced with a balsamic dressing, or, even better, soaking up the pink of a local beetroot, Golden Cross goats’ cheese is what a Sussex summer has come to taste like for me.

As we drive down the windy country lanes, I tell the tale of Grandpa and his home-made cheese, how he let the milk sour over a couple of days before stuffing the curd into Granny’s stocking and adding some garlic and olives until the mixture settled. I falter as I remember the ending, and quickly shift the story to his mother’s more successful efforts. The kids are too quick. “What happened to Grandpa’s cheese?” they demand, and as much as I energetically point out the enormous mansions and sweeping drives along our route, swearing that they belong to Robbie Williams and Madonna, their steely gaze is burning into my back. “Ok, so he ended up in hospital”, I finally admit.

I’m about to introduce them to cheese making and to Kevin Blunt who will tell them that it is bacteria that makes milk into cheese. They won’t differentiate between the hairy spores they regularly find in the back of my fridge (and what probably landed Grandpa in hospital) and the benign germs that have made the Blunts famous. How am I going to get them to taste the stuff now?

The girls inspect Kevin’s every move as he wipes the goats’ teats before attaching the pumping cups to their aching udders. Happily, as he takes them to see the curds and whey, Kevin dons a set of germ-free whites and insists that they too stuff their hair into nets, bag themselves in plastic and cover their shoes in sterile bags before they so much as sniff the air.

Kevin is bombarding my children with so much information that they can barely take it all in. While I had gone for the Little Miss Muffet route, he’s talking cheese starter, vegetarian rennet and penicillium mould, inadvertently muffling the message that this is bacteria city, that the only way milk can become cheese is something not far off what Grandpa did.

A tour of the eleven day process, through separating trays and drying rooms leads us to the tasting trays, and I stand back, one eye closed and watch as my children taste, savour, pause, taste some more and…. “I like it!” beams LouLou while Ellie politely nibbles an edge before putting it in her pocket. Apparently it smells of the little sweeties gambolling outside.

As we drive home, we pass a field full of young goats almost ready to give birth themselves, and the girls tell me that this has been the best of all the food trips. As this year of Food and Farming reaches midsummer, I am only just warming up. I dream of that goats’ cheese in the bottom of my handbag and our next trip and its booty. Hmm; Ridgeview Champagne is not that far away…