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The history of Ashmore Cheese. 'Ashmore is emblematic of the random way in which most British cheeses have come in to being. It began as a recipe designed for smallholders published in a textbook by the North of Scotland College of Agriculture and has ended up on Lord Salisbury's estate at Cranborne Chase (prior to its move to Dargate!), having undergone enough twists and turns to fill a Trollope novel, Anthony or Joanna. Twenty-something years ago, David Doble, a Sussex dairy farmer, thought he would have to start making cheese when he woke up to the fact that he had ninety cows and a quota for sixty. Also a bee-keeper, he outlined his intentions with a fellow enthusiast who owned a copy of the Scottish book ans was making cheese as a hobby. She invited him to watch her. He accepted, observed her efforts with a saucepan and the kitchen range and decided that the process couldn't be much harder than agriculture and made his first attempt. He brought himself a length of plastic drainpipe that, sawn up, would be his moulds, and a four-gallon bucket for the milk. He borrowed his daughter's sterilised terry cloth nappies to drain the curd, hanging them from the ceiling in satsuma bags. At three months he had what passed for cheese. The next stage involved 'massive' expansion. He travelled to Wales to buy a second-hand fifty-gallon vat from a fellow farmer and took one of his cheeses to have it appraised by the vendor. Although it gathered polite approval from the Welshman, David gathered that he had not grasped the faintest inkling of what he had let himself in for. He hadn't kept records of the acidity of the curd. Nor had he realised how vulnerable a farmhouse cheese was to the most minute circumstance. The lessons were learnt the hard way. He had been maturing cheeses in his spare bedroom on a board placed across the bed. In winter, with the central heating on, the cheeses dried out and cracked. In summer flies managed to get into his making room. They laid their eggs in the curd, filling his cheeses with maggots. He was, though, making progress, winning a prize for the Best New Cheese at the International Food Exhibition (IFE) at Olympia. For eight years he continued making and selling. Growing more professional, he brought larger vats and increased the volume, but unfortunately it coincided with a time when he realised that his farm wasn't making money; that he would have to close down. At this point, Mrs Vigor, recently widowed, comes on the scene. She was running a neighbouring farm, across the Surrey border, which was larger and more economic. Her grown-up son wanted to join her. Having learnt from her sister, an employee of David's, that he was packing up, she thought she might be able to acquire the redundant cheese making equipment, borrow some of David's know-how, and fill the gap in the market that he would be leaving. |
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