According to romantic legend, love is powerful enough to turn milk sour. Cheese-lovers should rejoice that Veronica and Norman Steele believed the old wives' tales, says Kevin Gould.
Veronica and Norman Steele have been in love for nearly 30 years. Norman was the young, rakish (he wore corduroy!) lecturer at University College, Cork who specialised in philosophy. Teaching Wittgenstein was all about discipline, which left little time for romance (Hegel, don't bother me...), but Veronica, his sharp student with eyes of sea blue, had her mind on Norman. In time, their relationship developed beyond the platonic. And before Veronica started scoring 100 per cent in exams, Norman took a sabbatical.
He was living a self-sufficient life in the country, and although a Dublin girl herself, Veronica was happy to share his farm in West Cork, where the place names all sound like stolen kisses. And it was there, on the Beara Peninsula, that she fell in love with Milleens. Nestling on the side of the Slieve Miskish Mountains, overlooking the Bay of Coulagh and above the village of Eyeries, Milleens was a perfect place - Norman would grow vegetables and a beard, Veronica would milk their black cow, nourish their children and make cheese. The soft, northern light would feed the artist within, the changeable wind would stimulate them, and their philosophy would be the good life.
Three daughters and a son later, the Steeles knew they'd become serious about cheese. By way of using up the excess milk from their growing herd of Kerry and Friesian cows, Veronica learned the empirical art of cheesemaking and found that she excelled. Inspired by John Ehle's seminal book, The Cheeses and Wines of England and France, with Notes on Irish Whiskey, Veronica set about making an emmental-style cheese. She wasn't deterred by a besuited Dr D from the Ministry of Agriculture, who informed her that "farmhouse cheeses are best made away from a farm", nor by the fact that her first cheese looked and tasted nothing like the examples in the pages of Mr Ehle's book.
Real cheese evokes the place of its birth like no other food. Although the area is more famous for the fish of Castletown Harbour than for its dairy produce, the pastureland of the peninsula supports an amazing array of wild herbs and grasses, which imbued the Steele's milk with a taste and smell all of its own. By adapting the emmental recipe, and using disc-shaped moulds, Veronica invented a cheese which suited her cows' milk beautifully.
Her next trick was to encourage the cheese to grow a protective skin, and to persuade it to ripen to a soft squishiness. Using a time-honoured technique, Veronica employed a local virgin, whom she dressed in unbleached cotton, to caress each cheese with a light brine solution while whistling Dixie (she may have been having me on here). Actually, the brine solution, occasionally dosed up with a friendly bacteria called Brevibacterium linens, encourages the airborne bacteria with which the Steeles share their love nest to give each cheese its personal skin of mould.
This is the most fascinating part of making cheese and bread. At the ripening or proving stage, it is the bacteria which inhabit the place of manufacture that imbue the product with its individuality. Take Roquefort: it is the bacterial spores which live inside the Roquefort caves that cause the blue-green veining that has earned it Appellation d'Origine Contr�lée status. Robin Congdon took a few scrapings of the spores and removed them to his dairy in Totnes, Devon. But he found that Beenleigh Blue, his sheep's milk cheese made to a Roquefort recipe, while tasting absolutely delicious, developed different veining and a taste that was altogether Totnes. So if you try to make Milleens on Merseyside, you may get a good result, but it won't be Milleens.
Anyway, the Steeles sold their first cheese in 1978, after which time they were noticed by the redoubtable Myrtle Allen of Ballymaloe fame, who's been a loyal customer ever since. Here in the UK, we have Randolph Hodgson of Neal's Yard Dairy to thank for taking the trouble to seek out the Steeles, and buying their cheese for a British market more ready for factory-made Lymeswold and Austrian smoked in brown plastic tubes. Early Milleens cheeses were sent over by post to Randolph's tiny Covent Garden store and sold as 'GPO-matured'.
Cheesemaking still takes place six days a week at Milleens. Norman takes care of their 30 cows, does the accounts and is in charge of dispatching orders. Veronica runs the household and makes the cheese, assisted by their daughter Monica and Kate from the village. Try Milleens whenever you can, it changes with the seasons: summer cheeses being floral and fragrant; winter ones having a more salty, savoury taste. But whatever the time of year, you can always rely on Milleens to be soft and yielding, rich and unctuous, romantic and comforting. And do visit the Beara Peninsula. The wind may be blowing hard or soft, but the fish fresh off the boats and the milk from the farm make it foodie heaven. And with any luck, you'll bump into the affectionate Steeles.