Ladies in Red

"I’ll never forget the way you looked tonight, the lady in red, the lady in red….my lady in red". Chris de Burgh.

I grew up making chimney stacks of kraft cheese slices. In fairness to me it was not a matter of taste, it was all about what was in the refrigerator and the fun of pulling back the clear plastic film and folding the cheese again and again until it was just that, a pliable red brick chimney stack of that substance that is not quite cheese. It was easy entertainment, it was edible play-dough.

I think that you look at the writing on the wall as something that is just there until you stop to read and think about it. I know a lot of people who buy orange-red cheese slices or supermarket red cheddar blocks. When children tell me that red cheddar is their favourite, I have been known to point out that cows produce creamy white milk. Red cheese is an artifice - or is that a blood moon I see on your milky cappuccino?

Red is a fabulous colour. I vividly recall, I have never forgotten a scene in Schindler’s List where a very young girl in a red coat makes her way through the grey distraught streets.

Then there is this stunner, the less tragic, more glamorous woman in a red dress in the Matrix; she catches the still novice Neo out.

And in case you are not convinced….then there was gold.

We like red. We like bright colours. In the shop the cheese that we most often have a request to taste on basis of looks alone are the Red Leicester, Mimolette, and for those brave mouldy souls, Shropshire Blue.

There was once a biological trigger for this love of colour in our cheese. In older precious times, when cows grazed on grass in fields, the spring and summer growth was rich and the milk the cows produced was full of beta-carotene from that abundance. When concentrated into the fats and proteins involved in cheese making, the milk gathered a golden hue, which was magnified to an even greater degree if the cream of the previous days milk was mixed with that day’s cheese. This resulted in such rich hues that it would attract the eyes of the greedy and the hungry – I imagine that there were many hungry and greedy eyes in the 17^th century.

As always, when there is a market there are short cuts and people found other ways to give colour to their cheese and convince people of the milk’s value without actually putting much into it. 

I have often wondered what was used to colour cheese before the Americas were discovered and steady trade routes established. One article I read put the importation of annatto (the natural miracle dye) as late as the 18^th century, two centuries after our cheeses was being tinted (or our products tainted). Carrots are an unlikely source. Prior to the Horn Carrot (from Hoorn, Netherlands), our modern orange carrot was absent. There were purple ones from Asia and red or white carrots in Europe; we owe our orange carrots to a dining conceit bred for the William of Orange of Holland. This root of orange only takes us back as far as 1721.

And so we do a little more digging, most likely in the garden or on dry banks near the sea. 

Marigold, a delightful flower, might have been used or there was our Lady’s Bedstraw, which also acted as a natural rennet.  Saffron has also been mentioned. These natural botanic dyes changed the colour of the cheese but the former two left a certain bitterness to the taste, and the latter to the pocket. However looks have matter and cheese makers wanted there cheese to matter more.                                                           

Cheese had to wait for annatto, made from the husks of the seeds of the achiote plant found in South American and in the Caribbean, to give the cheese a rich golden colour without that bit of a bitter flavour. Cheese makers coloured their cheeses to distinguish them from others, to make a particular creation and other times just to make them more attractive. 

But what is it about ladies in red? Those woman willing to stand out of the crowd.  Is it a declaration of vitality? of hot blood? or of something tasty to eat?

“The place was noisy, hot, smelled of sweat, and the beer wasn’t cold. I was ready to leave. Then I saw the woman in the red tailored suit.  

It wasn’t just a red suit, it was a created red suit. The woman lived up to it…. She looked as out of place in that smoky atmosphere as I would have looked in a Salinas lettuce-pickers’ camp…. I got up from the table and tapped her on the shoulder.”  High Priest of California by Charles Willeford.

My woman in a red dress? This evening I am going to try on a Red Leicester Toastie and on the other half, a Shropshire Blue Cheese Toastie –the latter with a  little apple & plum chutney on the side, sometimes you go wild.