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.