Create a delicious Christmas cheeseboard
You don’t have to stick to stilton this year – there are plenty of other choices for your festive cheeseboard
The time for stilton, traditionalists insist, is just after Christmas lunch when you are already ridiculously replete. But because you’re wallowing in that supremely contented post-Christmas feast feeling you can still manage a hunk or two of this finest of cheeses, especially when partnered with an extraordinarily fine vintage port.
At its best stilton is impossible to beat: rich and tangy, velvety, close-textured with a pale ivory hue melding into amber at the edges and marbled with a greenish-blue vein and a crusty rind with white powdery patches. But buyers beware. Such quality cheese is rarely squashed into those tempting stilton jars peddled almost everywhere at this time of year.
Colsten Bassett, a small farmers’ co-operative dairy who arguably make the finest stilton in the country – of great creaminess and fruity mellowness – advise against buying even a small truckle which will dry out too quickly and not have such well-developed flavour. They suggest buying a piece off a large stilton or their so-called baby, a whopping six-pounder.
Visually, the best stilton has evenly distributed veins with a marked contrast between the paste and veins. Despite the pretensions of many a grand restaurant dining room, scooping out of the middle of a stilton will only dry it out. It is wiser to cut it crosswise with a knife or wire and simply work through the cheese.
Next page: other Christmas cheeses
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