Why does cheese feel like a cuddle? Well, it’s because it just does. It’s because an almost empty fridge containing a small slab of ageing cheddar harbours at least a glimmer of hope – and even if that cheddar has a tiny speck of mould, you can just scrape it off and turn a blind eye (I won’t tell anyone). Find that toasty loaf you’ve got for emergencies in the bottom drawer of the fridge, add a dollop of something runny like brown sauce or some sort of chutney, and there you go: now you have dinner.
Cheese, in all its salty, fatty majesty, could well be the king of comfort foods. We have all at some point found ourselves standing in the light of the chiller cabinet, scooping grated red leicester from the bag, head back, mouth open, pushing those slivers of loveliness down our throats and somehow feeling instantly better. And, in the same vein, after a hard day we have all leaned on that slightly fearsome chunk of apricot-laced wensleydale that we panic-bought before Christmas before promptly forgetting about it – now, doesn’t it taste good on cream crackers with a big cup of tea and EastEnders? Suddenly, your overdue car MOT seems marginally less upsetting.
I’ve thought about the transformative powers of cheese a lot over the years. Cows and farmers and dairy technicians and cheesemakers have perfected it, using techniques older than time to make something intense, pungent and sating that always hits the spot; they’ve done all the hard work, and now it’s just sitting there in my fridge, available to me at any time. How does this magic happen? Why is it so unique to cheese? Why do some vegans – who have managed to dodge all other animal products – go on a lifelong quest to find the most pungent nut-based cheeses? And why do many would-be vegans name cheese as the one thing they cannot let go?
My theory about cheese is that it is special to British palates because it’s so, well, completely weird. It’s so unlike everything else we love, so unique both in flavour and in the sticky way it feels in our mouths. The British were never a nation who embraced stinky or slimy things, and we’ve never been ones for fermented nibbles or stuff covered with mildew or fungus. Some people have even called our food boring. Cheese, however, has always been the exception: a flirtation with the extremities of taste that we somehow took to our hearts. We may never show much passion for fermented bean curd, stinky herring or decaying vegetable stalks, but we will have a lovely, wobbly piece of whiffy brie smeared on oatcakes. Cheese also has staying power; milky, fatty things linger in your mouth. They have a persistent aftertaste. You’ll still know about that piece of brie long after it has slipped down your gullet. It’s still there as you get undressed and head for the toothbrush, and even in your dreams.
***
The cheese I ate in my childhood lacked variety. It certainly lacked glamour, too. It would be a long road until I found myself eating fancy French reblochon or Swedish västerbotten or any other of those cheeses you might see on a board in a fancy gastropub, accompanied by some of those black, tasteless charcoal wafers that mean you’re somewhere posh. In the 80s, my family only ever ate cheddar, or, if we were branching out, red leicester. Maybe Gran had the smallest chunk of stilton at Christmas. We knew nothing better and we never got bored. Forty years later, I am still not bored by cheddar.
Nor can I ever be sniffy about heavily processed cheese, like the stuff that comes in squares wrapped in plastic, or the squeezy stuff in metal tubes. To me, this is the taste of the summer holidays of my childhood. I so vividly remember opening the fridge door and finding Kraft Singles, feeling as though I had hit the jackpot – they were so perfect for sneaking up your sleeve, with an extra one for your mate, and then eating down on the old abandoned allotments, or wherever we’d made our latest den. Or the Primula cheese and chive that I squeezed on to Ritz crackers when Mam was watching Dynasty with Joan Collins on Friday nights – so very satisfying, so very chic.
And that’s not to mention “spready cheese”, which to my mind is a vastly underrated pleasure, one far too déclassé to ever be cited in “proper” food writing. A Dairylea cheese triangle, released from its foil and then sucked from the silver was one of my fledgling food critic experiences. Eating that squidgy, semi-liquefied factory-refined cheese goo takes the eater almost to the very limits of “ick”. It leapfrogs decadent and plants its boots firmly in wanton. And yet, somehow, it’s bloody delicious.
My father, however, always had aspirations. He was a scouser, held hostage by fortune in Carlisle, but this didn’t stop him behaving like an international man of mystery. He had dark skin but claimed his family was Irish and sometimes sported a Burt Reynolds-style moustache. He also claimed to be able to speak German, although he only really knew a few words, like sehr gut and Liebfraumilch, learned while stationed in Hamburg in the army.
It perhaps isn’t a surprise then that my dad was responsible for the first exotic turn in my cheese journey. In the mid-80s, a local supermarket called Walter Willson began stocking Bavarian smoked cheese, which he remembered from his time in Germany. He popped it in the basket and from then on Mam bought him it as a treat. This cheese came in an actual shape and it had a brown plastic cover – unheard of! It was creamy and smoky and irresistible. Me and my brother drove Dad mad by taking it from the fridge and eating it with a knife while watching The Fall Guy and Blockbusters. I still buy that Bavarian cheese, but nowadays in pre-packed round slices from M&S, which is perfect for literally posting into your mouth like a love letter to yourself at the end of a horrible day.
While my dad may have won us round to experiencing Germany, he certainly didn’t have any love for France. It wasn’t until the 90s, almost a decade on, that we bought anything from that far-flung land and, goodness me, did we miss out. All sticky, stinky, soft-rinded French cheeses are the epitome of comfort eating.
But for so long the Dents simply did not “do France”. Like many northern working-class Brits in the 90s, we found France a rather unsettling and unknowable place. No one we knew went on holiday there, aside from our doctor, who spent three weeks each summer in a tent in Brittany, which we thought sounded like hell. Apparently the people insisted on speaking French to him the whole time. The only person I knew who went was my friend’s dad Ronnie, who had a Transit van. Sometimes he used to drive to Boulogne on a day trip to stock up on Rothmans fags and cut-price frizzante, and when he got back he’d be greeted like Phileas Fogg.
So, France: we didn’t trust it, and we didn’t trust the brie that they had started stocking in our flashy new Asda which opened in 1987, turning our gastronomical lives upside down. For a start, this brie didn’t act like normal cheese. It wasn’t stiff and it wasn’t even orange. It was, instead, pale and gelatinous. And it had a skin that none of us knew if we could eat without it killing us, and we couldn’t even check: the instructions were in foreign.
I can still remember the breakthrough, though: a TV advert for a French soft cheese called Boursin. It began playing in every ad break, showing closeup shots of creamy garlicky cheesy pulp, encrusted with dried herbs. The French folk on the ads would lap it up on bread with a glass of wine – “Du pain, du vin, du Boursin”, went the catchphrase. It was all so sophisticated. Yes, Boursin was made by Unilever, probably in an industrial park in Hounslow, and yes, it left you with breath so lively it might get you kicked off public transport, but our horizons were suddenly so much wider.
***
In the early 90s, I moved to Stirling in Scotland, to study English literature. Aged 18, I saw Carlisle and my mam’s house as a prison, but soon enough I realised that I’d kill to grump moodily up our back lane wearing a Smiths T-shirt, fractal leggings and baseball boots, juggling files of A-level history papers while letting myself in, heading for the fridge, swinging open the door and to find it heaving with reduced-sticker treasure.
I call these years the cheese years. Cheese was my saviour at university. For instance: take an anaemic 24-hour Esso garage frozen pizza bought on the way home from the Fubar nightclub in Stirling, scatter a handful of cheap lancashire crumbly on top, add a pinch of mixed herbs if you can steal some from Helga from Norway’s cupboard, along with a scooch of black pepper, and suddenly you have a feast. Or sling a layer of edam on to a Findus beefburger, melt it, then slather mayo across the bun, and you’ve got something quite delicious. Best of all was the uni canteen where large stodgy bowls of macaroni cheese were 22p – these would be eaten while moaning to your friends about that boy you snogged at the Balls Up juggling party and how he didn’t leave a written message on your uni room door asking you out. Even if dating before phones proved to be arduous, the filling, sating, comforting power of cheese never lost its strength.
***
Cheese does not have to be expensive. Yes, fancy stilton is what people talk about in posh food magazines, but deep down we all know the restorative properties of a bag of Babybels. Here’s to peeling the red wax off those tiny spheres of happiness as the bus trundles home from a terrible date, popping them into your mouth whole, gob open like an upright anaconda. And three cheers for adding a large dollop of pale, sticky Dairylea to buttered pasta. No, you won’t see this on cookery shows, but you’re behind closed doors now. You’re eating like nobody’s watching. This is self-care 101.
It was only when I began mixing with more “worldly” people in London, however, that I understood the significance of cheese to the posh. We are all, at some level, cheese obsessives, or “turophiles”, as they might say. If you have seen the queues at cheese stalls at the city’s Borough market on a Saturday morning, you’ll know that they are full of men called Rufus who were sent to Ludgrove aged eight and had mothers who loved their labradors more than them. The posh might not be big on physical hugging and affection, but if a Rufus rises at 5am to source you a truffled baron bigod or a rich, oozing tunworth, well, you know you’re high in their esteem.
Beginning my career in the media in 1996 certainly opened my eyes to how unposh I was, with my silver fillings, dropped Ts, Kookaï bootcut trousers and lack of conversational Latin. This got to me so much that I began adding my middle name to my byline on Marie Claire to make me sound more glamorous: I was Grace Georgina Dent, not regular Grace Dent. The name Grace Dent, I thought, was two short grunts, a bit like being barked at by a pitbull with kennel cough. Grace Georgina Dent, on the other hand, sounds as if she’s summered in Martha’s Vineyard, can get out of an Aston Martin without flashing pant elastic and, most importantly, knows her way round a cheeseboard when posh folk are in the vicinity.
I can clearly recall my first trip, at 26, to a country house in Suffolk where the hosts served cheeses (please note: posh people pluralise cheese as “cheeses”). Eating cheese in front of people with trust funds and names like Blaise and Romulus is nerve-racking, and realising that the Dent family had lived all this time without our own “cheese cave” was humbling. No, I didn’t know these existed, either. A cheese cave is a very cold room underneath one’s grade II-listed former Elizabethan monastery country retreat where posh people store precious things that need a specific ambience: spaniel kibble, artillery for their blunderbusses and, of course, stilton. I learned that by serving cheeses at room temperature, their stinky richness is ramped up to the max and all the fattiness comes into its own. The flavours in cold cheese are all tangled up and stunted; good cheese needs to be removed from your cave at least three hours pre-dinner party, which is about the time when I start sticking cheddar cubes on cocktail sticks and make a cheese and pineapple porcupine – but that’s just me.
Anyway. In this grand house, I’m sitting in front of an enormous board filled with strange oddities and one of the other guests asks for a “cheese harp”, which I’m told is used to cut the comte and not to perform an impromptu version of Wonderwall. Someone else is brandishing a limited-edition Fortnum & Mason silver-plated cheese fork, which I don’t like the look of. I decide to pick up a knife and tread precariously towards something that resembles a cheddar, helping myself to the lovely pointy end bit. This is, in fact, a grave error. You never cut the “nose” off the cheese. Posh people get tremendously agitated about this. They believe that something round like a brie should be served in slices, like a cake, so everyone gets a little bit of the middle and some of the rind. Also, if anything has blue veins in it then good luck, as one needs to slice it so that everyone can get a little of the pungent mould. Yes, you are expected to basically divide up something that already looks like an Ordnance Survey map so that everyone at the table gets a little of the most lush territories. Oh, and, yes, you can eat the rind. But only if it’s younger than 24 months. And you should never eat the rind if the cheese is wrapped in bark, like I did, unless you want someone doing the Heimlich manoeuvre while other men stand about frowning about the British comprehensive system.
Regardless, despite all the secret rules and fancy instruments, I’m very glad to say that the familiar sense of cheese-fug happiness did set in. There you have it. Cheese is the great leveller, uniting people from across the social classes. Until I asked for some Branston pickle and maybe a couple of Tuc crackers. I was never asked back.
***
My father, who as you remember spoke fluent German, had various Teutonic-style nicknames for my mother. Mein Führer was his favoured one, which came up any time Mam was laying down the odds about his half-done DIY jobs, his inability to pay any bill until the angry red one arrived, or his hogging of the TV remote to play endless episodes of Inspector Morse.
Dad lived in Germany with the army in the 50s and again in the 60s, and when he spoke about it he’d talk glowingly of the breakfast, or frühstück. There would be groaning tables of bread rolls, 10 types of jam, butter and honey, boiled eggs, fruits and, of course, cheese.
When I was small, I can remember him making Mam cheese and jam on toast, a quirk he’d picked up in Düsseldorf. I imagine it was something they roughly cobbled together in an army barracks before running out of the door. Dad had about four recipes in his entire repertoire and Mam loved this one: thick slabs of cheddar on buttered toast with a thick layer of some of Gran’s bramble jam.
My parents were not a massively lovey-dovey couple. Public displays of affection were unthinkable. I can still hear them in peals of laughter in our kitchen in the 70s as they’d seen a married couple they knew holding hands in the street. My parents had spotted them from their car and could hardly contain their mirth. Holding hands! Normal folk just didn’t act like that.
But despite bickering almost every day for the best part of 45 years, and despite the fact they spent their evenings in front of the telly, sitting on different sofas, never cuddled up together, I knew they were passionately in love – even if she cried much more over our cat Sooty dying of old age than over any of the times Dad threatened to leave. She knew he’d always come back.
“Take this to the German,” he would say, as I passed him one day in the 80s, thrusting into my hands her special silver jubilee mug filled with white tea and a cheese and jam toasted sandwich for her. The German. Another of his nicknames. Really, that is all a long-term relationship is: perseverance, companionship, nicknames and in-jokes. I would transport the cheesy jammy sandwich from his hands by the toaster to her on the sofa, with a message from him:
“Dad says he loves you very much,” I’d say.
“Pshhht. He must be after something.”
Sometimes I try to pinpoint the last time they set eyes on each other. It is so muddled in my head: an overgrown forest filled with care homes in lockdown, cancer appointments, the rot of dementia and goodbyes that never mattered to him as he didn’t even know she’d been there. There was no great goodbye, just a fizzling out and half a year of no contact at all.
In the last weeks of her life, I made her a cheese and pickle sandwich, in the dark, exhausted by sleepless nights. This was one of the only “proper” meal things I could still feed her. I cut the sandwich into four small squares like you’d feed a child, and sat on the edge of the hospital bed the council had delivered. I passed her the sandwich. She took a small bite and swallowed. Then another.
“Cheese and pickle,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You don’t have to eat all of it.”
“I like it.” We sat in silence. “This isn’t pickle,” she whispered.
“Yes, it is,” I said, scrunching up my nose. She carried on chewing and swallowed.
“This is jam,” she replied. I picked up the sandwich and sniffed it. I thought it must be the drugs talking, but when I held it up to a sliver of light coming through the curtains from a streetlight, I knew she was absolutely right. She was in fact holding a cheddar and jam sandwich. In my haze of tiredness, I’d mixed up the jars.
She ate a little more of the sandwich before passing me the plate and closing her eyes.
“Just like Dad used to make,” I said.
“Yes, for the German.”
“For the German.” Wherever he was, he was still with her. •
Grace Dent is on tour throughout October. She will also take part in a series of Guardian Live events where she will be discussing her book; tickets for the events in London, Manchester or via livestream are available here.
This is an extract from Comfort Eating by Grace Dent, published on 5 October by Guardian Faber. To save 20% for a limited time, pre-order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
All episodes of Grace Dent’s Comfort Eating podcast are available here.
