Martin Fone's Blog, page 129

Stilton Cheese and Stilton (2)

Stilton itself was a centre of cheese manufacturing. Daniel Defoe on his travels was less than complimentary about its wares in A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain (1725). “It is”, he wrote, “a town famous for cheese, which is call’d our English Parmesan, and is brought to the table with the mites, or maggots round it, so thick, that they bring a spoon with them for you to eat the mites with, as you do the cheese”.

It was clearly not a plain cheese that was served to Defoe, a self-avowed Cheddar man. His reference to Parmesan is ambiguous; it could be taken literally to refer to a hard, pressed cheese or figuratively to suggest its pre-eminence as a cheese, just as Parmesan was the acknowledged King of Cheeses.

Richard Bradley in 1726[1] published a receipt (recipe), for a cream cheese which he said was the “famous” Stilton cheese. “At the Sign of the Bell”, he wrote, “is much the best Cheese in Town the man of that House keeping strictly to the old Receipt. While others thereabouts seem to leave out a great part of the Cream which is the chief ingredient but for all this the Name this sort of Cheeses has got above others makes it sell for 12d per Pound upon the Spot”.

The cheese was pressed implying that it was hard. Bradley, though, was at pains to refute this in 1732 when he described the cheese as so soft “one may spread it upon Bread like Butter”[2]. Clearly, Bradley infers that John Brownell, the then proprietor of the Bell, was following an old recipe, a point reiterated in the testimony of John Pitts, one of Brownell’s successors, in William Marshall’s A General View of the Agriculture of the County of Huntingdonshire (1811).

Pitts asserted that Stilton was originally made in the village, basing his claim on the reminiscences of Croxton Bray, who, as a boy, was sent out with his three sisters and two brothers to collect cream in the neighbouring villages “for the purpose of making what is called Stilton cheese”. Parish records show that Bray was baptised in 1714 suggesting that this cream-based cheese must have been made in the early 1700s, well before Frances Pawlett and Mrs Orton started making theirs in Leicestershire.

Indeed, Leicestershire’s claim to be the home of Stilton was not asserted with any vigour until the close of the 18th century. William Marshall in The Rural Economy of the Midland Counties (1790) announced that “Leicestershire is, at present, celebrated for its “cream cheese” – known by the name of Stilton Cheese”.

Accounts from the early 19th century suggest that cheese was still produced in Stilton, but that the farmers were slapdash, resulting in “so many faulty and unsound cheeses”. Even in the early 1830s when William Cobbett was compiling his A Geographical Dictionary of England and Wales (1832) Stilton was still manufacturing cheese. He observed that Leicestershire’s cheese “so much resembles in quality that which is made at Stilton…that it is also called Stilton Cheese”.

As the quantity and quality of cheese produced in Stilton waned, the superior dairies in the Vale of Belvoir were quick to fill the vacuum and feed the demand for the tasty cheese. What we know today as Stilton is almost certainly the version developed by Frances Pawlett. To clarify the point, in the 1930s it was suggested that it should be renamed Meltonian Cream Cheese, but the name never caught on, leaving the pickle we have today.

Whether the village of Stilton was the first to make the type of cheese which bears its name may never be settled conclusively. What is clear, though, is that any attempt to revive Bradley’s recipe in the village will have to go by any name but Stilton.

If you enjoyed this, check out More Curious Questions by following the link below:

[1] A general treatise of husbandry and gardening

[2] The Gentleman and Farmer’s Guide for the Increase and Improvement of Cattle

Conundrum Of The Week (2)

A question that has troubled Classicists for many a decade is how to rescue the study and appreciation of the culture, history of the Romans and ancient Greeks from being condemned to the marginalia of the educational curriculum. Take Ancient History. Fewer than 1,000 students take the subject at GCSE each year, and a small proportion of those are from state schools.

In an attempt to find out why, some academics from the University of Cambridge, according to the Curriculum Journal, surveyed students from three comprehensive schools who were studying the subject. Their findings are both revealing and worrying. Some said that the subject was viewed as “posh”, “academic”, “boring”, “elitist”, and “snobby”, views even shared by members of their own family. They opined that they would feel more comfortable if more people were studying it, a classic Catch-22 if there ever was one.

The fortunes of the Classics were on the wane even when I was studying the subjects – I even have an A level in Ancient History, my state school did not bother with it at O level, an elitist statement in its own right – and will continue to do so as fewer study the subjects and, so, fewer are qualified to teach them.

To me, history is history and reserving the study of a specific era as the preserve of Classics is probably doing the subject no favours. Just a thought.

Theft Of The Week (10)

Police in Denver, Colorado, are on an extensive head hunt, it was revealed last week. A person or persons unknown broke into a lorry parked in the 7700 block of E. 23rd Avenue and stole a blue and white box.

The thieves might have had a bit of a surprise when they opened it up because it contained a consignment of human heads that were destined to be used for medical research purposes. The box did have a bit of a giveaway as it was marked “Exempt Human Specimen”.

Neither hide nor hair of the box has been found, but if someone sidles up to you offering a perfectly preserved human head going cheap, the Denver police would be delighted to hear from you.

Seventeen Of The Gang

Living from hand to mouth was a fact of life for many in the 19th century. The system of tick, an abbreviation of ticket, allowed the borrower to buy goods on a form of credit, often in return for an extortionate level of interest. A moment of dread was when the clock stopped, a phrase James Ware notes in his Passing English of the Victorian Era used to describe the moment when tick was denied. As there was no tick, the clock must have stopped went the mordant logic.

Another way to raise some cash was to climb the mountain of Piety, a rather flowery way to describe the act of pawning something. It was an Anglicisation of Monte di Pietà, which is where the first government sanctioned pawn shop was situated in Rome.

Cock-sure is a term that has survived to this day, used to denote someone who is absolutely certain of something, perhaps even overly confident. The origins of the term derive from the world of cockfighting. The bird that had won would crow when it was absolutely certain that its opponent was either dead or insensible.

It is a bot of a shock to associate Queen Victoria with slang, but she introduced her subjects to the phrase Collie shangles, of Scottish origin, when she wrote in More Leaves (1884) “at five minutes to eleven rode off with Beatrice, good Sharp going with us, and having occasional Collie shangles with collies when we came near cottages”. It meant a quarrel, usually between dogs. Time for a revival, methinks.     

Miss Silver Intervenes

A review of Miss Silver Intervenes by Patricia Wentworth

I must confess I have struggled with Patricia Wentworth at times. This book, though, her sixth in the Miss Silver series, originally published in 1943 and also going by the alternative title of Miss Silver Deals with Death, is one of her better ones. There is a welcome return for two of her stalwart police officers, Lamb, now Chief Inspector, and Abbott and a namecheck for Frank Garrett, surely enough for the taxonomists to claim it as belonging to his series.

It falls to Miss Silver, though, to work out what is going on at Vandeleur House, a once great London mansion but now converted into eight flats. Conveniently it has a ledge running around the exterior of each of the floors and a fire escape connecting each ledge. It also, conveniently, has a caretaker who regulates his life like clockwork, leaving his post at 8.30 pm each night for a pint and a game of darts, and the spare keys to the apartments unguarded in his room. Such seemingly mundane pieces of information acquire increasing importance as the tale unfolds.

It would not be a Patricia Wentworth tale without a damsel in distress, in this case Maude, Mrs Underwood’s niece, who was torpedoed whilst crossing the Atlantic with her fiancé, Giles. Giles is presumed dead but Maude spots him in London where he tells her that, conveniently, he has lost his short-term memory. Maude takes him back but is mortified when Carola invites her into her flat and shows her a photograph of Giles taking pride of place. Maude assumes that Carola’s story that Giles is her husband at face value. She goes from despair to ecstasy to despair in double quick time.       

The sleuth is consulted, rather hesitantly, by Mrs Underwood who eventually reveals that she is being blackmailed. The woman she suspects that is behind the blackmailing, Carola Roland, is found dead, bludgeoned to death with a statuette which has been cleaned but left near the body. One of her diamond rings has been switched, replaced by one with a stone made of paste. One of the residents who has fallen on hard times suddenly comes into some money. It emerges that she had switched the gems and sold the ring. Giles, conveniently, recovers part of his memory and sets Maude’s mind at rest but goes up to Carola’s flat.

Did he kill Carola or was her murder Mrs Underwood’s attempt to stop the blackmail or the consequence of the gem switch or was there more going on?

There are some wonderful characters in the story, not least Mrs Smollett, the charlady who “does for” many of the tenants and is an inexhaustible source of information about the characteristics, foibles, and backgrounds of her clientele. Time spent helping her doing the washing up provides Miss Silver with invaluable information. She is convinced that blackmail is behind the murders and that Carola, far from being the blackmailer, was a victim herself of a much larger blackmail ring.

Miss Silver becomes increasingly interested in the exterior fittings of Vandeleur House, the night-time somnambulism of Mrs Underwood’s maid, and the backgrounds of some of the other helpers employed by the tenants. A trip to Tunbridge Wells clarifies matters in her mind and in a set piece she calls all the residents of the apartments to a meeting in which she reveals both the whodunit and the howdunit elements of the story. Sergeant Abbott is in awe of her masterly resolution of a problem which seemed to be beyond the police who fell hook line and sinker for the obvious.

It is not the most complex of plots, for sure, but the book is an engaging and entertaining read. The character and style of Miss Silver is now settled. If only Wentworth would lose the love interest.

Come Away, Death

A review of Come Away, Death by Gladys Mitchell

On the spectrum of crime writers from the so-called Golden Age Gladys Mitchell, by the time this, her eighth novel in her Mrs Bradley series, saw the light of day in 1937, had firmly established herself a spot on the outer reaches. She seemed determined to push the boundaries, challenge the reader and produce stories like no other.

Like a 1930s Pausanias Mitchell takes her reader by the hand on a tour of some of the wonders of ancient Greece, principally Eleusis, Mycenae, and Ephesus, to re-enact some of the rituals of the time. Her travelling companions are a motley crew, assembled by the slightly deranged Sir Rudri Hopkinson, who still feels sore after being humiliated academically by his rival, Alexander Currie. As well as the two academic rivals and their children, the party includes a photographer, Armstrong, the rather effete Ronald Dick, and, of course, Mrs Bradley. Other characters, including Ian who has secretly married Currie’s daughter, Cathleen, and a Greek driver flit in and out of the narrative.

The book’s principal strength is its ability to build up and sustain tension and atmosphere. The reader shares Cathleen’s sense that some tragedy is to befall the party. Jealousies and rivalries emerge, the two academics cannot help winding each other up, while Armstrong gets on the wrong side of the younger men with the attention he pays to the women and often wears the bruises to prove it.

At each of the principal sites the party visits, Hopkinson attempts to recreate a ritual appropriate to the god worshipped there, but his plans are bedevilled with strange occurrences. Mysterious figures flit in and out of sight, a figure dressed in white and the reincarnation of Artemis, and someone has switched the snakes that Hopkinson has brought for poisonous vipers. While these sinister events occur, the boys in the party, as boys will, see the ancient ruins as a form of playground to be explored, to play minor pranks and for ever fall and scrape their knees. Mrs Bradley acts as an unofficial tour manager, trying to hold the party together.

Inevitably, tragedy strikes the party, when Mrs Bradley discovers the severed head of Armstrong in the box which contained the snakes. How did he die? Where is the rest of the body, and who killed him? Considering the length of the book, the answers to these questions are wrapped up quickly by Mrs Bradley, using a mix of what we would now call psychological profiling and good old-fashioned deductive powers.

Once again, Mrs Bradley’s wonky moral compass is on display. Like a Fury she pursues the truth but is content to become an accessory after the fact, to allow the culprit to get away with it – Armstrong was an odious character, after all. The authorities are conspicuous by their absence in the narrative.

Appropriately enough the way the murder was committed had Homeric overtones, but took place off stage, leaving the trip in some senses as little more than an enormous red herring.   

It is more than that, of course, because the trip allows Mitchell the luxury of her developing her characters and to explore the underlying currents of tension between her protagonists. There is also something of a Greek tragedy in the book’s structure, where the writer is interested in the interplay of characters and emotions that build up to and react to a major event rather than the event itself. There is much more to Mitchell’s books than a simple whodunit.

Mitchell is not afraid to wear her knowledge of the Greeks, their literature, and their mythology on her sleeve. The book is peppered with references to the likes of Aristophanes, quotations from his Frogs preface each chapter, and Homer and to talk about the excavations of Schliemann. Knowledge of the classics, rightly or wrongly, formed part of the educational curriculum and as with the scriptures and the works of Shakespeare, writers like Mitchell felt at ease in making casual references to these in the certain knowledge that some of her readership would identify them. Sadly, this is not the case today, making the book an even denser and challenging read for the modern reader.

I enjoyed the book, but unless you are a Mitchell fan, this is not the one to start with.

The Case Of The Chinese Gong

A review of The Case of the Chinese Gong by Christopher Bush

Thirteen, lucky for some, unlucky for others. Fortunately, the thirteenth novel in Christopher Bush’s Ludovic Travers series, originally published in 1935 and now reissued by Dean Street Press, sees the author on top form. The result is a cracking story, one of the best I have read so far.

The setup is conventional, a story set in a country house and the murder victim, Hubert Greeve, a rich man who takes delight in humiliating and taunting his nephews, all of whom in their different ways, have financial difficulties and would welcome some assistance. As far as it is known, all four would profit by way of inheritance from the death of their uncle.  

Bush takes time and care in painting the plight of the nephews. They are not spendthrifts, living to excess on the prospect of an inheritance but rather victims of the economic downturn that blighted the economy in the early 1930s. One of the four, Martin, is so desperate that he attempts to gas himself, saved only by the timely intervention of one of his cousins, Tom Bypass. Unusually for stories of the genre which seem to take place in an alternative universe, Bush is alive to the financial turmoil of the age and sees it, rightly, as a suitable backdrop for a murder mystery.

Martin’s problems seem to bring the nephews’ plight into sharp focus and Tom ominously asks Martin whether he had tried to kill the wrong man. The seeds are sown in the reader’s mind that the only way to improve their financial lot is to murder the old man. A suitable occasion, the annual gathering to celebrate Greeve’s birthday, soon presents itself. On the scene, as well as the nephews, are Greeve’s solicitor and the butler.

As the butler strikes the gong – curiously it is in the room where the guests are congregated, except for one who is a summer house in the garden – Greeve falls down dead, apparently shot although no one was quite clear or saw what exactly had happened. Did the shot come from inside the room or from outside? Who fired the fatal shot?

Ludovic Travers accompanies the local Chief Constable, Major Tempest, to investigate. They soon discover motive aplenty, but also seemingly cast-iron alibis. The scene in the drawing room is recreated several times with the principal actors standing or seated in the precise spots they occupied when Greeve was killed. Curiously, on the evening before the murder just as the butler beat the gong, all the participants are in precisely the same positions and Martin dropped a card just as he did when Greeve was shot. Was this a dress rehearsal for the murder itself?

What could have descended into a routine investigation of alibis in a desperate attempt to solve an impossible murder becomes something altogether more convoluted and ingenious, firstly with the emergence of Greeve’s sister and the suggestion that her husband is blackmailing Greeve to recognise her in the will. This leads to the discovery that there is a second, later, will and another solicitor who was acting for Greeve.

However, Bush has another, greater, trick up his sleeve when Travers, following up some recollections that butler had and some theatrical lines of enquiry, realised how the murder was committed and, therefore, who the killer was. So ingenious is the method, although I remain to be convinced it could be carried out successfully in the heat of the moment, that it is a surprise that Bush did not make more of it. We are all suckers for a spot of legerdemain. Then again, he is not as flashy a writer as some of his contemporaries, a reason, perhaps, why he fell into obscurity.

If you like a well-written, well-constructed murder mystery, this excellent book should be at the top of your to be read pile.

Stilton Cheese and Stilton (1)

There are over 700 named British cheeses produced in the United Kingdom. In 2020 sales increased by 15% in volume and seventeen percent in value with Cheddar, the nation’s favourite, accounting for just under half of all cheese sales. Stilton, though, saw sales drop by 30%, the loss of the all-important hospitality sector and the reduction in the number of dinner parties due to the pandemic hitting it hard. A temporary blip, perhaps, as this most social of cheeses makes the perfect finale to a dinner party, its blue-veined creaminess the ideal accompaniment to a glass of port.

Stilton is one of 255 cheese-based products protected under European Union law by its Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) legislation, a status achieved in 1996, which post Brexit was replaced by the far from catchy Designated Origin UK Protected” or GI, Geographical Interest mark. For a cheese to bear the name “Stilton” it must be made in one of three counties, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, and Nottinghamshire, from locally produced pasteurised milk. Currently, there are only six dairies licensed to manufacture the cheese, centred around the Vale of Belvoir, producing around a million full Stilton cheeses a year.

It comes in two forms, the familiar blue and the white which does not have the blue mould added and is less mature. White Stilton may be a rarity today, with five dairies making it and one under licence, but it was not always so. Brian Flynn’s murder mystery, The Padded Door (1932), partly turns on a judge’s predilection for the blue-veined variety over the white which was the standard restaurant fare at the time.    

Seventy miles north of London as the crow flies and strategically positioned alongside the Great North Road, the village of Stilton may have moved administratively from Huntingdonshire to Cambridgeshire in the 1970s, but it has never been in one of the three counties named in the PDO. Why does the cheese bear its name if it cannot be made there?

Frances Pawlett (or Paulet) from Wymondham near Melton Mowbray produced a cheese in the early 1740s which boasted several innovations; she changed the way the curd was crumbled to produce a more open texture, introduced ceramic pipes with holes in them so that the unpressed cheese could drain and mature, pierced it with stainless steel needles to allow the mould to develop, standardised its weight and size to a sixteen pound drum, and extended the cheese-making season from beyond its traditional summer months.

A relative of Pawlett’s, Cooper Thornhill, was proprietor of the Bell Hotel in Stilton in the 1740s, a popular staging post for travellers journeying between London and the north. She supplied the inn with her cheese, and it was so well received that Thornhill was soon operating as a small-scale wholesaler, selling it at half a crown a pound. Other coaching inns followed suit and the fame of the cheese soon spread far and wide. Not having a name, it was referred to as that cheese from Stilton.

Alternatively, Elizabeth Orton from Little Dalby, near Melton Mowbray, may have been the first to make the cheese, using a secret family recipe. It was known as Quenby, but her activities are not documented before 1730. Perhaps, more fancifully, credit is given to its creation to a Mrs Stilton, head dairymaid to the 5th Duchess of Rutland at Belvoir, although there is no documentary evidence to support this.

There will be another helping of this story next week. In the meantime, if you enjoyed this, check out More Curious Questions by following the link below:

Perfume Of The Week

Idaho, famed for its rich volcanic soil fed by mountain spring water, boasts that its spuds are the best in the world. Charged with promoting them, the Idaho Potato Commission has a range of goodies aimed at the potato lover including a holder for chips, Idaho potato playing cards, a miniature potato-hauling lorry and, the pièce de resistance, a 3-foot-tall Spuddy Buddy. No home is complete without one.

Now they have gone one better, capturing the irresistible smell of chips in a bottle. Made from distilled Idaho potatoes and essential oils, Frites by Idaho, dubbed as a “limited-edition fragrance” was released by the Commission ahead of Valentine’s Day. According to their website it sold out.

I just wonder what type of man would be attracted by the distinctive aroma of chips in all their salty, greasy splendour and whether the wearer would be ultimately disappointed. Perhaps it will just be an alternative to vinegar.

The creativity of desperate marketeers knows no bounds.

Corvids Of The Week

Some time ago when I was reflecting on the wisdom of owls, doubts raised by their unwillingness to engage in scientific experiments unlike the more eager crows, I wondered whether Alfred Lord Tennyson had hit the nail on the head when he wrote in Locksley Hall “knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers”. Perhaps not troubling to pander to the wishes of those who want to change its ways is the true sign of wisdom.

It may be that corvids have finally got tired of being forced to jump through metaphorical and literal hoops if the results of an experiment conducted by a team from the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland is anything to go by.

In an attempt to discover how magpies co-operate in the wild, the researchers trained them to come to a feeding station, captured them, and then fitted them with lightweight tracking devices to see where they went and interacted with each other. Within minutes PhD student, Joel Crampton, and research leader, Dr Dominique Potvin noticed one of the adult female birds pecking at the harness of a younger bird and managing to free it.

It took only a few hours for the magpies, showing ingenuity and teamwork, to remove most of the trackers and within three days there were none remaining.

The experiment may have been a failure, but it shed a fascinating insight into their mental and social abilities and, perhaps, shone a new light on wisdom and intelligence.