When someone shows a particular affinity for, or skill in a chosen hobby or trade, they are often said to have it ‘in their blood’, especially if the same interest can be traced back through their recent ancestry. We have all known of artists, musicians, writers, sportsmen and even politicians who are adept at their chosen art as a result of genes passed down through the generations. Family elders might watch a youngster play the piano or kick a football and sagely comment ‘it’s in his blood you know’. And though it’s common comment for many professions and activities, there are times when the saying just sounds odd. For example to say that George Streatfeild, of Denhay Farms in West Dorset, has cheese in his blood might be a bit of a conversation stopper, but in one sense it is true.

If you go back into the history of cheesemaking at Denhay you will find that ancestral hands were at work long before the current family business was set up by Commander Streatfeild (‘the Commander’) and Alexander Hood in 1952.

In 1927 Major Davies of Leigh House, Chard, the Commander’s father-in-law, started making cheddar and joined the newly formed English Cheddar Cheesemakers’ Federation (ECCF). He made 50 gallons a day into cheddar and was paid 118 shillings a cwt for it at three months of age. This was sold to Sainsburys, who were buying around 30 tons a month at the time.

When in 1952 Streatfeild Hood and Co. sought to set up a farming business, the farm was 250 acres of corn, beef and sheep but mainly bogs, brambles and rabbits. Recognising that West Dorset grows good grass for dairying, three herds of cows were soon up and running and they expanded into Farmhouse Cheddar production, with pigs being kept to use whey, the by-product. It was very much a traditional West Country farming cycle.

Two prefabricated bungalows were bought from London, together with a coal fired boiler. One bungalow was the cheese room and the other the store. All the equipment was found second-hand from around the West Country, and Ken Corbin, their first cheese maker, was employed. Production started on 12th June 1959 with 120 gallons of milk – the whey being fed to the sows outside in arks. Once under way, they made 400 gallons a day, seven days a week. The milk was collected in churns from Denhay’s three herds, together with four neighbouring farms’ milk.

George Streatfield explains how the business was run. “The cheesemaking day was a long one” he says. “Someone – usually the farm student – had to get up at 2.30am to light the coal boiler in order to get the steam ready for Ken Corbin when he arrived at 4.30am. The churns were then tipped into a balance tank before being pumped direct into the vat. Initially there was no pasteurisation. We used the same starter culture (bacteria) every day called Ethel. Ethel would perform well for 6 months. Then she would die – this was caused by a small microbe called a phage. The Commander would have to get into the Landrover and beg, borrow and steal starter of all types from other cheese makers such as Coombe Farm and Horlicks. After a week of this, Ethel would come to life and things returned to normal for another six months.” By-products of the cheese were Farmhouse butter and clotted cream. George says “These were sold locally to shops and caravan sites in and around Bridport, delivered by my mother in the back of her Austin A30 van.”

As the business grew, more herds of cows were started, more pigs fattened to drink the whey and more cheese sold. The Commander died in 1977 and his role was replaced by Philip Crawford, who had already been at Denhay for twelve years, and was previously the pre-college student who lit the boiler at 2.30am! George and his wife Amanda joined the business and he became Philip’s assistant. “1983 was a very poor year for the cheddar market” remembers George. And although Denhay then found itself the largest maker of Traditional Cheese in a shrinking market, the business, now known as Denhay Farms Ltd, has won a raft of awards over the years and become synonymous with the true flavour of Farmhouse Cheddar cheese.

However that is a flavour that George and Amanda Streatfeild, along with many other traditional farmhouse cheddar makers, feel is under threat. As George explains, “Cheddar making has been traced back to 1170. However the father of modern cheddar making was Somerset dairy farmer, Joseph Harding. In 1864 he described the ideal quality of Cheddar as ‘close and firm in texture, yet mellow in character or quality; it is rich with a tendency to melt in the mouth, the flavour full and fine, approaching to that of a hazelnut’.” Expanding on the description George says, “Cheddar, made in the classical way, tends to have a sharp, pungent flavour, often slightly earthy. Its texture is firm, with farmhouse traditional Cheddar being slightly crumbly. Real Cheddar is never ‘soapy’, in texture or mouth-feel.”

George is aware that over the last 30 years there has been a shift in the recipe used by the majority of cheddar makers (large factories); they have included new Helveticus strains of starters. He points out that it has been convenient for large scale creameries to make a different sort of cheddar with distinct flavour notes. Also, these cheeses are softer and more pliable, allowing for efficient cutting and accurate weighing of fixed weight blocks. The result is an instant flavour sometimes called ‘sweet’ and often described as burnt caramel.

It’s a subtle change that is not noticed by all cheese eaters. Using words such as ‘strong’ and ‘vintage’ the average cheese buyer’s palette is being slowly retrained to adapt to a different flavour – a flavour with an instant hit. And although the majority of cheese eaters may not care either way, some prefer and miss the traditional savoury flavour of true cheddar – the slow development in the mouth and the long lingering creamy flavour. “They have not the time to hunt out on the shelf what is what, and are confused by all the claims made on the packaging about provenance and flavour” says George. “They give up and just pick up what easily comes to hand – usually what is on promotion.”

The result is that there is a real danger that we are losing the uniqueness of British Cheddars with their traditional flavours. The remaining makers will either stop production (as did Tower Farms in 2009) or make the same flavour change themselves, to fall in line with new consumer expectations.

However, to try to combat this and create awareness of the subtle differences of flavour and production a group of makers has banded together to launch a brand stamp to help consumers make a more educated choice. They hope to highlight the differences between this classic taste and the modern style of cheddars. Both are good, but the classic style has a savoury emphasis compared to the modern sweeter taste.

Until now, consumers have not had any information as to which style of cheddar they are purchasing and therefore no way of consistently buying the style and flavour they prefer. With the launch of “Protecting the Authentic Taste of Cheddar” stamp, it will be easier to chose between the authentic savoury flavour and the modern style by looking for the stamp or reading the makers’ labels. Other cheese makers that are supporting the stamp are: Bakers of Haselbury Plucknett, Brue Valley Farm, Montgomery’s Cheddar, Westcombe Dairy, Parkham Farms, Quickes’ Traditional, WH Longman and Son (Vale of Camelot) and Farmhouse Cheesemakers Ltd.

It’s early days yet and it may be a while before the stamp has filtered out to packaging, but the concept that the original flavour of an artisan product is being eroded from public consciousness is not new. Neither is the concept of a group of producers gathering together to protect their product. Like his ancestor before him who joined the English Cheddar Cheesemakers’ Federation, George Streatfeild is standing up for a piece of his industry’s history.

To find out about protecting the flavour of farmhouse cheddar visit www.authenticcheddar.co.uk.

Clarissa Dickson Wright talks to Fergus Byrne

According to Clarissa Dickson Wright, the trouble with cooking and cookery books in this country is the chefs. “People either do things which are totally banal or over complicate things,” she says. “Chefs are rather like lawyers, I mean they complicate things for the sake of complicating – to make themselves appear rather more important than they really are.” As someone who passed her bar exams aged 21, becoming the country’s youngest female barrister, she should know. She is currently ensconced in London’s Goring Hotel talking about her new book Potty: Clarissa’s One Pot Cookbook. I suggest that the title is very her, to which she readily agrees but points out that it is also dedicated to her two and a half-year-old goddaughter and therefore doubly relevant.

After her last two books: Spilling the Beans, a very detailed account of her extraordinary life and, Rifling Through My Drawers, an account of a journey around Britain with yet more stories and anecdotes from her life, Potty, is simply a cookbook. It contains over 100 of her favourite recipes. The hook, for those that aren’t already fans of Clarissa’s no-nonsense style, is that all the recipes in the book can be made in one pot. Its simplicity is what elicits the comments that chefs are the root of the problem with cookery. In Michael Ball’s current TV show Clarissa is cooking from the book and teaching Michael how simple cooking can be. “He’s going ‘it’s so easy’ and I’m going ‘well that’s what cooking should be, really’”.

Clarissa speaks well of Marco Pierre White and Shawn Hill and although perhaps not over enamoured with this country’s chefs in general, she is nonetheless a fan of British food. “It’s excellent!” she says. “In 1748 you had the Venetian ambassador writing about how good English food is and you don’t get much more hedonistic than Venice really, do you?” The ambassador is quoted as saying at the time, ‘The food of the inns of England is the stuff of which Heaven is made’. She remembers how during filming of her very successful TV show, Two Fat Ladies, she and the late Jennifer Paterson went to visit Jamie Oliver’s pub before he became a national name. Having heard that Jennifer loved suckling pig he had gone out and found one and cooked them a magnificent meal. Although she reiterates her disappointment with Jamie for “wasting his opportunity to become a force for good”, she believes he is a good cook and she also has a lot of time for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, though suggests that “the thing with Tesco and the chickens was at best naïve”.

Anyone who has read her autobiography will know her life has been a roller coaster. Brought up in a well to do family with servants and all the trappings of a privileged background, she was nonetheless beaten horribly by an abusive alcoholic father who had been chief surgeon to the royal family. She remembers boarding school and her mother as two refuges from his violent temper. To spite her father, who hated lawyers, she decided to choose that profession and became the youngest woman to be called to the bar. Years later on hearing of her mother’s death, she turned to alcohol and herself became an alcoholic, quickly frittering away her massive inheritance on a lavish lifestyle. She attended a recovery clinic at the end of the eighties and for a time carved a hugely successful career in television. She made three series of Two Fat Ladies with Jennifer Paterson, who died in 1999 while filming the fourth series. It was the kind of scenario that could so easily have plunged her back into alcoholism but instead, she has wonderful memories that she uses to brighten the bad days. For example when the series was dubbed into Japanese the company used a male voiceover for her part. “To make myself laugh when things seem really black” she tells me. “I just go and put on the video of Jennifer and I in Japanese. It is so ridiculous.”

Clarissa Dickson Wright is not one to pull her punches in any situation and over the years her political opinions and support for the Countryside Alliance have put her in the firing line. She was beset with numerous death threats for her stance on hunting and received an absolute discharge when she when taken to court accused of hare coursing in 2009. However, she believes the recent change of government must be good for the country. “I think there are a lot of good people,” she says, referring to the current crop of politicians. “The overall whole seems to be so much better from the countryside point of view and from the British food point of view – and the British farmer’s point of view.” She was never a fan of the Labour party, knowing Tony Blair as ‘Miranda’ during her days at the bar and was not a fan of Jack Straw’s ‘passionate communism’, however, the new government may also change her career. She is currently doing a one-off television programme called The Great British Food Revival and has a few other things in the pipeline. She laughs saying, “I always said when there was a change of government I would get back on the television, and it looks like I was right.”

Though there is a smattering of British classics in Potty, the book carries recipes with a wide range of influences from all around the world. Omelette Stephanie, for example, is credited to Crown Princess Stephanie, the wife of the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolph. Clarissa points out that there have been plays, films, novels and even a ballet written on the theme of the Crown Prince and his role in starting the First World War, but his wife’s recipe for an omelette with raspberries is little known – shocking. Mexican Corn Pudding, Romanian Pork and Puerto Rican Rice sit happily alongside Steak and Kidney Pie and Stuffed Vegetable Marrow and they are complemented by a new twist on the great British breakfast – Bacon and Eggs in a Mug. Potty will be fantastically useful for those dull British winter days when energy levels are low and simplicity is needed to produce a good meal. Clarissa’s wealth of recipe knowledge, combined with a touch of ingenuity in the kitchen, has produced a cookbook that could so easily become more than well-thumbed.