Gin n' Cheese

In Ireland we get dairy and we get alcohol. 

borrowed-pic includes Bertha (see note at end)

We have an understanding with it and of it.... Not to say that we are mad alcoholics and herders, though maybe some are, but the drinking culture is lively and the love of butter endemic.

by Eoin Holland...really do the coincidences stop?

In late 2019, which feels world away, I was asked to help at a gin n’ cheese tasting. I’ve done wine and cheese, beer and cheese, sherry and cheese, even whiskey and cheese, and been delighted with some of the discoveries. However I was resistant to gin and cheese. Why does everything have to follow fashion? When I started drinking gin & tonics, thanks to afternoons with my father, it was considered a grandmother’s drink. Some marketing genius introduced a fish goblet and flowers, they even made a gin for the sweet toothed, and suddenly the whole island raises a toast.

However I do love a gin. I love cheese. I enjoy a good adventure, so I said okay. The gin, Bonac 24, was provided by a delightful father and son operation. Their pink gin was an authentic-ish pink gin in that the pinking was through natural products. While the gin was floral it was not sweetened (which I was horrified to realise what the current main models of pink gin are). No longer angostura bitters just bitterly poor taste.

Preparation for the evening proved fun, fascinating, nearly inebriating and there were some immensely interesting parallel – particularly easy to grasp after you’ve attempted several pairings.

Gin and (sheep and goat) cheese can trace their origins back to the area of the Levant, the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of life and many of its essentials. It was there that sheep and goats were first domesticated over 10,000 years ago. While China of course independently discovery the art of distillation, it also began in Mesopotamia & Egypt where they distilled to make perfumes and balms (for embalming), and medicine – records can be traced as far back at 1800 BC. I cannot help but wonder if there was a little partaking on the side.

A French born Irish man, Aneas Coffer,
 invented an improved version of the still
 which refined the gin making process.

Ireland takes up the vat and then the still.

Just as Ireland had to relearn farmhouse cheese making they are also had to figure out the mastery of the gin still, though again the curd had the advance on the gin. In Ireland in the 1990’s one could get Gordon's Gin, Cork Gin, or if you were very cheap – nameless supermarket Gin. Gin making came along when whiskey makers discovered that they could make a little cash crop with a quick gin while they waited for their whiskey to mature. Even beyond that, it offered entrepreneurs, often in rural areas or villages, a way of diversifying their income through the production of an excellent gin. I like anything that allows the people who love the country and its villages to continue to make living in the country and those villages viable and vibrant.  We have the excellent Dingle Gin, Bertha’s Revenge, Bonac Gin, etc. I am sure that some will jostle their way in while others are jostled out but it is one hell of a party.

Cheese in Ireland reminds me a little of gins beginning. Before the late 1970’s much of the cheese in Ireland was industrial or very very cheap imports, gurriers of gruyere and the (in)famous Calveeta. It was the free spirits moving to the country side and the farmers wondering how to get value for their milk who realised that cheese making might be a possibility.

Furthermore with the Irish traveling abroad and increasing attention to food (fashion has its uses) we saw a rise in demand and an increasing interest in cheese….. similarly with gin.

Ah the Dutch….

Gin has a rather fun history. It was when English soldiers, stationed in Antwerp during the Eighty Years War, encountered and likely imbibed ‘Dutch Courage’ or ‘genever’ that it began it's way west 'Genever' was a distillation of malt wine, wheat or corn etc, infused with juniper. Gin made it back with the English but got into a little trouble when William of Orange III in 1688 banned the import of French wine and brandy, and simultaneously loosened the monopoly of the London Guild of Distillers by lowering the taxes on distilling and removing the need for a license. Yes suree, it was a free for all. Water was dangerous to drink and a pint of beer was more expensive than a pint of gin. It was a dark time for Gin, also known as the Gin Craze.

Some dirty tricks were played during the Gin craze. Distillers grabbed whatever was about to flavour

their gin, turpentine (for woody notes), saw dust, and sulphuric acid (which gave it a sweetness amongst other things). This reminds me of some slight of hands played by cheese makers and dairy suppliers. Some would colour their cheese to disguise the poor quality of the milk (though other did that to distinguish it). In the booming US in the 1900’s there were some horror stories of what milk suppliers would dilute the milk with. Sometimes I am rather grateful for health inspectors and tests.

In Ireland the cheese industry owes a great deal to our Dutch gone native. They have brought their expertise, their energy and their generosity to Ireland: the Willems family from Rotterdam established Coolea, Marion Roeleveld and Haske are Killeen Farmhouse, Geurt van Dikkenburg is master cheese maker at Cashel Blue, the Van Kampan’s who made a gorgeous goat cheese, Mine Gabhar, in the 1990’s, the list, the gifts and the goudas go on.

Don’t touch a man’s faith or his gin.

Could we say gin and cheese helped in the War efforts? The French soldiers in WWI were rationed with 1 Camembert and 25 centilitres of wine per day. In WWIi, when the Germans bombed Plymouth, home of the English Devonport Naval Base, and their beloved Plymouth Gin, it was said, ‘that’s it, now Hitler’s lost the war’. 

I enjoyed researching into what gin was and where it came from, thinking of the parallels and making very loose connection with cheese. It was however when I started thinking about what and how to pair gin and cheese that I was really won over.

Gin is made with infusions of spices and herbs (and fruit occasionally). The alcohol is either distilled and passes through a basket of infusions or the infusions are actually marinated in the alcohol. Cheese also gains many of its flavours from the outside. The milk and its future flavours are affected by the land that the animals or graze on and what they eat. Further more people like to add herbs and spices to cheese, fenugreek, chives, cumin etc (again often in Dutch Gouda style cheese). Some cheese makers will wash a cheese in a spice bath giving it interesting aromatics, Appenzeller etc, or cultures from the outside, like washed rinds. Cheese can be quite fatty and rich, the spirit of the gin can cut through that and clean the palate. I was ready.

I hope that I have persuaded you to try gin with cheese, or cheese with gin or to at least no put up your nose at it (like I did at first). Have a sniff, have a sip, have a taste.

• Sometimes you can try to create ‘a bridge’ or a ‘caress’ between gin and cheese. Pair an accompaniment with either the gin or the cheese to help bring them together. I think of it as cooking in your mouth. I tried a blackcurrant and sloe gin jam (just a little), with a lactic milky cheese and the pink (not sweet) Bonac 24.
• Just because a cheese or a gin did not go together doesn’t mean that the gin or the cheese will not work with another one. Tinder dates.
• Washed rinds might be better left with beer and wine. It may hark back to the monkish history of washed rinds and the fallen nature of gin, but a few of the combinations I tried really did not work.
• Herbaceous sheep cheese, like local Italian Pecorinos, manchego, are often recommended. The herbal background of the cheeses echoing the herbal background of the gin.
• Blue sheep cheese, Cool Mary, did not go well with the ordinary Bonac 24 but it was delightful with the pink Bonac 24 (again not sweet). Blue cheeses pair very nicely with fruit rich jams and I think that the fruitiness of pink gins could be similar - worth a shot?
• Youngish goat cheeses with fudgy textures and strong herbal notes are interesting companions. The gin balanced nicely with the rich paste and the herbal notes harmonized. St. Tola Log was what we tried with the regular Bonac 24.
• Lastly and rather importantly, on the night of the tasting they drowned the gin with so much tonic you could not taste the gin, or the pairing. It was like eating fine cheese with a tipsy soda pop. While you may not want to go as far as I did – gin with a dash of soda water or the tiniest tipple of tonic, please don’t dilute the gin so much that cannot taste it. It is like drowning a good cheese is chutney.

The perfect cocktail. Gin made a return to grace with… the colonies, okay maybe not quite. It was noticed that gin was easier to ship and transport whereas beer was inclined to spoil. Many of the

colonists in warmer countries had to take quinine, which is quite bitter, against malaria. They mixed it with sweet tonic. 
Fancy a tipple Charlie? Gin slipped very nicely into the mix. The final slice of lemon or lime came from the ships. Sailors or limeys as they were known, kept limes on board for their vitamin C to prevent scurvy.

Bertha’s Revenge, an Irish gin made at Ballyvolane, is made from a distillation of Milk whey (don’t ask me how) and named after Ireland’s oldest cow – Bertha, of the native Dromieann breed. It is

lovely with just a little tonic and a slice of orange. I am not sure what cheese I would try it with - perhaps Valdeon or St. Tola.

1. The picture at the top is Bertha in a pub receiving a congratulatory drink with the farmer who kept good care of her.

My Bomb Shelter Cheese.

Or, it is a time for Terroir, 

not Terror.

Courtesy of Sheridans (who sell Gubbeen)

A simple ‘i’ can change it all.

There are some cheeses that I learned to love better through the assistance of what and who was behind them.  We've all had those experiences where we meet someone or hear something that draws our attention to what we have not appreciated appropriately before. Gubbeen was one such cheese for me. I have always described it as my bomb shelter cheese. It seems appropriate to turn to it in this time of quarantine.

Gubbeen is made by Giana Ferguson on the family farm in Schull, Co. Cork.  It is a truly a farmhouse cheese, redolent of the clean air and cared for earth of West Cork. 

In cheese shops, where one is nearly overwhelmed with scents and flavours from around the world, it can get overlooked.  Gubbeen does not grab you by the collar and shake your taste buds though it does hold its own. Bomb shelter, not bomb shell. 

Gubbeen is a good friend, there for you when you need it. Going away for a weekend in the country? Grab a small wheel of Gubbeen just to have. Need some cheese for a toastie or a pizza, a few slices of it will more than do. A gift for someone and you are not sure what cheese they like - perfect! It is a safe and sound bet.                          

                                                                                             

George Goodwin Kilbride, The Picnic.

Their Smoked Gubbeen adds an elegant tone to the world of smoked cheeses with its light sweet kiss from smoking oak chips. 

The right accompaniments can make Gubbeen sing. This is a cheese that knows how to get along. Try it with a buttery white wine, or a light floral red, or wild rose syrup from Prunotto and you might fall in love over a picnic.

Sure, it is an all rounder but that is not the only reason I love Gubbeen. Growing up with tales of Swiss Family Robinson, I found the Irish equivalent in the Ferguson family: Tom, Giana, Clovisse and Fingal (now extended to a next generation).

The Ferguson family farm is the first farm, certainly the first creamery in Ireland each year to welcome spring, and it is the last to say goodbye to autumn, perched as it is on the most southern westerly tip of Ireland. The farm has been in the family for generations.  Ireland, still famous for its butter, was once famous for its butter market too. Tom's ancestors would once have traveled Ireland’s butter roads from the farm to the Cork market to deliver their portion of butter. From there it was shipped out to the world.  It was only in the time of Tom’s father, William that electricity came. William, as with his father before him, had been raised in a world that worked with horses to yield up the gifts of the land, and with neighbours to mill and thresh the grain.

Moving on to the present day. It is still, but in a different way, about community and markets and, always tending to the land. As the present global pandemic highlights, it is not a good idea to focus all your resources on one product, made elsewhere, or rely on one country to supply the world’s demands for particular item. Diversify. Work together. We do not live in isolation and it does not benefit ourselves to act as if we do. 

The Ferguson family embody the antidote for me. Their farm sings with diversity, locality and creativity.

From the Gubbeen website

Tom Ferguson, the father continues to farm the land that has been in his family for generations. The herd of cows that they keep is both practical and companionable.  Bred and refined over thirty years, it is a 'cheese makers' herd. Holstein-Friesian of course, but Kerry Blacks and an odd Jersey- they have a palette of colours in their fields and on their farm, because they like it and it is good.  

Geese, poultry and pigs are also present. It is a farm after all. They still make them like that (sometimes).

Giana and Tom’s children did not fall far from the farm. Their green fingered daughter Clovisse follows biodynamic practices and grows vegetables for the local farmer’s markets. Their son Fingal reminds me why many artists become chefs. They create with food. Fingal learned how to make and run a smokehouse from a neighbour, how to make salami’s on the continent. I don’t know where he learned to make knives but the waiting list is long and the knives apparently excellent. He also smokes the cheese his mother makes.  

Independent.ie

The pigs on the farm, which I call happy pigs but other calls high-welfare pigs, feed on the whey leftover from the cheese making, in the eternal practice of internal farm economy.  Gubbeen bacon is legendary and the sweet spicy chorizo a delight to cook with. As I write, I know what a lunch soon will be. 

Giana herself is a remarkable woman, as with so many of Ireland’s early cheese makers. She did not have a plan to make cheese, she was living in the west of Ireland with a dog and her tent when she met Tom and Tom met her. We are lucky to have them, their family and their cheese.

It was a conversation with Giana (/Jayn-na/) that taught me to smile every time I unfold the wrapper of a wheel of Gubbeen and see its perfect pinkish-red rind beaming at me. I asked her how she did not tire of making the same cheese after all these years. They began making it in 1976, it was 2018. She forgave my short attention spanned ignorance and said that it was like a gardening. Every time she makes the cheese, she is creating a cheese and growing again the unique cultures on it. 

Washed rinds, of all the soft cheeses, are the most permeable to the influence of their world where they are made.  The cultures on the rind of Gubbeen and the other west cork washed rinds cheeses, Durrus and Milleens, are not added, painted or sprayed on to the cheese. They are complete manifestations of the cultures of the air around them, the water they are washed with and the hands that bathe and nurse them. 

Gubbeen’s rind cultures are so unique to the cheese that a dairy scientist, who was studying the life of rinds discovered a pinkish-white bloom organism they had not seen before on the cheese and named it after the farm, microbacterium Gubbeenense.

Lovely Pic. (not mine)

It is not just the cheese and a family however that Giana helped create. When we think of West Cork now, it echoes of Italy’s Emiglio-Romano, U.S.’ food basket of California or France’s Lyon... at more modest scale.  Its reputation was not always this way. Giana, with the help of others, changed that over the years. She told me that she went to every single market in the area, be it food orientated or not, to sell the cheese. It was not just for the cheese and the farm, but for the wonderful food markets she had known in Andalucia, in London and from her travels. She wanted to see that culture come alive where she lived in Cork. 

In the 1980's, there was little demand for farmhouse Irish cheeses and products. Remember avocados were unknown. Irish breakfast and Guinness was just about it. Calveeta was nearly the local cheese.  When we walk into shops and farmer’s market now, and see an array of Irish goodies, we are enjoying the results of years of farmers and artisan makers at markets enduring wet Saturdays and quiet Sundays, managing tight cash flows and household needs, and uncertain times, to educate and support the growth of public that would understand and love a diversity of foods and flavours.

Thanks to these frontline families of artisan and farmhouse goods, meals, and Ireland's food landscapes became interesting.

Farmer's market Schull (from Gubbeen website)

The Gubbeen family are still present every weekend at their local farmer’s market (outside times of quarantine).  Stop there and at other markets when the halt on travel is lifted. In Dublin look out for Silke Croppe and her son Tom of Corleggy. In Carlow look out for Pete McDonald with his blues, and Elizabeth Bradley with her lovely tommes. Make sure to have an empty basket and an appetite with you. Sheridans in Meath have a lovely Saturday offering. They all generally offer coffee too.

In this time of quarantine when the farmer’s markets and restaurants are closed, we eat at home by ourselves or with our inmates. The supermarkets may be selling fortunes of food but the local goods are not the first or even the second thing being snapped off the shelves. I try to remember the cheese makers, the farmers and the small producers when I shop online or in a place of sale. 

Gian, Tom and possibly grandson?

Ireland’s farms do not make toilet paper or hair dye. The cows, the sheep, the goats, the water buffalo are still producing their milk. The vegetables continue to grow. The cheese makers must continue making cheese, particularly in the hope that when we go back to our lives, soon, their cheese will be waiting there, ripe and ready, for us.

One does not make cheese to become wealthy, one does it to make life. As we sit at home we have the opportunity to work toward the world that we want on the other side. As you buy your goods please think of the good you can do for others, and yourself in what and how you purchase.

As I wrote at the beginning, it is one letter difference between terroir and terror. Lets not make this virus which shall not be named a terror for the Irish producers.

I can do it, I can help make and support our terroir. So can you. 

Please Take care and take care of the local that you love.