One of Britain's artisan cheesemakers is battling to keep the tradition alive. James Aldridge tells Andrew Purvis of his plight. Portrait by Arthur Meehan.
Their names may be straight out of The Archers, but James and Pat Aldridge inhabit a world that is more of a Kafka-esque nightmare than a Radio 4 rural dream. A year ago, their future was bright. From their home near Godstone in Surrey, James ran a small business selling 'artisan' cheeses to restaurants, delis, airlines and country-house hotels. The most successful was Tornegus, a specially matured, unpasteurised caerphilly which James invented himself. "We'd arranged for a local company to buy the trademark," he says, "because we're both nearly 60 and can't physically do the work any more. We'd earn a royalty on every cheese sold - that was to be our pension. My plan was to turn the dairy into a school of cheesemaking, because cheese is my life. We'd just taken our first order from America, for 200 Tornegus at £15 each. Then, this case blew up."
The case concerned a 'rogue cheese' infected with E-coli 0157 - the deadly bacterium that had killed 20 people in a notorious outbreak in Lanarkshire. This time, a single case of diarrhoea had been traced back to a cheese bought from Ducketts - the Somerset producer which supplied Aldridge with his caerphilly, which he then matured and 'finished' to make Tornegus. Though not a single one of Aldridge's cheeses was infected, he was forced to close his business (the Eastside Cheese Company) for two months. By then, he had lost £81,000 of stock, his reputation and three-quarters of his business. Due to a legal loophole - the serving of an Emergency Control Order by public health minister Tessa Jowell - he didn't qualify for compensation. He took his case to court in November 1998 and won, although the Department of Health were granted leave to appeal. His case went to the High Court in mid-June.
Today, Aldridge's maturing-room is nearly empty. Racks that once groaned under the weight of 3,000 cheeses now boast a few dozen gnarled, dusty examples. Yet even these tell a story, that of James Aldridge's single-minded quest to keep the traditional cheesemaker's craft alive, and defend unpasteurised raw-milk cheeses against the railings of public-health bureaucrats. When I tasted the Celtic Promise he had given me as a present, I understood what he was fighting for. Creamy, aromatic and mouthwatering, it bore no resemblance to the pre-packed cheddar I was used to. They were chalk and cheese. What's more, I'm still alive to tell the tale.
"When I first got into the business," says Aldridge, "I didn't know the difference either - but there is a world of difference in the taste. You can make good pasteurised cheeses, but you cannot make great pasteurised cheeses. They are not as complex. It's the difference between an English wine, say, and an Alsace wine."
Scientifically, the difference is easier to explain. "You can start off with the same ingredients," says Aldridge, "the same milk, from the same cow, milked on the same day. What happens to that milk depends on the enzyme action, which creates flavours, aromas, different acidity levels, and so on. Those enzymes are from bacteria, and by pasteurising you kill off all the bacteria. With pasteurised milk, the enzymes just aren't there. It makes bland cheese."
Sceptics might argue that it is also safe cheese, that pasteurisation is a necessary evil to minimise risk. "In the case of raw milk," says Aldridge, "the risk is not genuine. If you look at the records of food poisoning, dairy products are at the bottom of the list."
He points out that lysteria monocytogenes (which, like E-coli, can cause miscarriages, liver failure and death in people with compromised immune systems) is a soil-based organism present everywhere. "Logically, you should boil your salads - but nobody would advocate that. With milk, there is this wonderful thing called pasteurisation, which everybody approves of. Yet the natural mechanism of cheesemaking restricts the multiplication of these organisms. If you make good cheese, neither E-coli nor lysteria will survive. It's not the organism that's at fault, it's the person."
Even as it ripens into a bacteriologically safe delicacy, an unpasteurised cheese needs a little help. That is where James Aldridge's skill as a cheese finisher comes in. "You're probably familiar," he says, "with rind-washed cheeses - orange, Continental cheeses like Chaumes. That pigment is produced by a bacterium which needs a specific moisture, a specific acidity, a specific humidity. It also creates enzymes which penetrate the cheese, as with a camembert; mould grows from the outside in. As well as giving it a different flavour, the enzymes break down proteins and soften the cheese.
"What we do here," Aldridge explains, "is technically called 'smear ripening'. For the bacteria to grow, it needs to be damp. It needs humidity and moisture. So you massage the cheese - by hand - to spread the bacteria evenly. You have to feel it. Every two days, over two months, this is done to every single cheese. You might do 1,000 in a day. What we have now is a bowl of water with a laboratory-bred culture in it, but it used to be done using wine or cider - often in monasteries. In those days, alcohol was the only liquid that was known to be reliably sterile."
As I listen to my lesson in chemistry, history, geography, microbiology, even spelling, all rolled into one, it comes as no surprise to learn that Aldridge teaches cheesemaking on the internet. In the early days, he drove around the country in a van, collecting artisan cheeses for his wife to sell in their delicatessen. "It just wasn't viable to buy only mature cheeses," he says, "so I started buying unripe ones and maturing them myself. Being so pedantic in everything I do, I wanted to understand the process.
I wanted to know everything." As well as developing his own recipes, he has worked as a cheesemaking troubleshooter, offering small producers advice on how to deal with scientific problems.
Despite all this erudition, it was chance rather than applied science that led to Aldridge's greatest triumph. "Tornegus," he says, "was a total accident. At Christmas time, we had thousands of cheeses on shelves all over the place. Our turnover then was £3,000 a week, but over the five days of Christmas we never took less than £22,000. We had a caerphilly stored on a shelf near some stiltons, and these had orange patches on them caused by bacteria. The bacteria from the stilton rind entered the caerphilly. When we cut it for a customer to sample, he asked 'Is this French?' It was wonderful. I found out what the bacterium was and bought the culture from a laboratory. It was fairly consistent right from the first batch. We didn't have a single failure."
In his time, Aldridge has developed a number of award-winning recipes. The cheese he gave me, Celtic Promise, is similar in style to the one he made into Tornegus. Another, Lord of the Hundreds, is available at Waitrose. "On this mound," says Aldridge, gesturing towards a slope at the back of his modest bungalow, "there's a stone cairn with a brass plaque on it. This is called Hundreds Knoll. It's where the first Saxon magistrates sat, and the Lord of the Hundreds collected the tithes from here."
The name is rather more inventive than that of the first unpasteurised cheese sold in British supermarkets. Yarg is simply the inventor's name, Gray, spelt backwards. "Today," says Aldridge, "most supermarkets stock something made from raw milk." Although this reflects a change of thinking on the safety of unpasteurised cheeses, the labour-intensive way in which they are made means they will never be widely available. "A soft or semi-soft raw-milk cheese will develop more quickly than a pasteurised cheese," says Aldridge. "Because of the daily variation, accelerated ripening, or cracking due to dehydration as it is refrigerated,
it is hard work for the retailer. Supermarkets just can't handle it."
When James Aldridge first started in 1980, there were a dozen people making traditional raw-milk cheshire cheese, about the same for lancashire, and one making caerphilly. These days, there are fewer, limiting most people's experience of cheese to rubbery, plastic-wrapped blocks. "You can live on basic food," says Aldridge, "but to me, enjoying your food is part of life. Some are happy with burgers, and that's fine. But once you appreciate good food, there's no going back. It's part of my quality of life. It cheers me up."
A year after the E-coli crash, James Aldridge's cheeses are selling well at specialist delis. But his turnover is a quarter of what it was in the halcyon days. "Who can blame people for not buying my cheese?" he asks. "If you're a major restaurant, it's not very good news if someone sees Tornegus on the plate and says 'Isn't that the one with E-coli?' But people should still have the choice. There cannot be zero risk in everything. There are acceptable levels of radiation, of contamination of the water supply. Having choice is what my business, my life, has been about. But the passion has gone out of me. Now, we just live in fear all the time."
Eastside Cheese Compan, East Lodge, Tandridge Hill Lane, Godstone, Surrey RH9 8DD. Tel 01883 743617.