The trees around Nunhead: August 2021

Tuesday 17 August 2021

Mild Cheddar

Another of Ken's Writings has come to light...

Mild Cheddar

I was walking around Brighton with a grumpy 8-year-old. I wanted to eat - it was a hot day, I'd had no breakfast or lunch, and I hadn't recovered from the night before's hangover. She wanted to hang around on the beach and play slot machines. I wanted to eat something out of the ordinary. I she wanted to eat chips and tomato ketchup, washed down with chocolate cake.

She won. After I'd fell into the age-old parental trick of throwing my weight around and saying "because I told you so", and bought off the resulting tantrum with ice-cream and cola on a deck chair in the Pavilion gardens (which involved another tantrum over which tree the chair should be shaded under), we finally got into the most boring cafe on Sidney Street by about half-past six. I had some rubbery squid and chips, feeling as if I'd gone to all the way to Charing Cross Road and found only books by Lord Archer. She had a baked potato and cheese.

Except of course that they always call them jacket potatoes in places like that. Why on earth do they do that? What a stupid name. Do they have tie potatoes or waistcoat potatoes or T-shirt potatoes or skid-marked Y-front potatoes? Do we eat jacket bread or jacket pies? They are baked in an oven and they are baked potatoes.

And it has got to be a real oven. Every now and then some food illiterate claims to make great baked potatoes in a microwave oven. You can't bake anything in a microwave, they aren't baked potatoes they are badly-cooked boiled potatoes, overdone and dry in the middle and surrounded by a half-centimetre thick layer of dusty, grainy yellowing stuff that peels off the outside and won't absorb the butter. Even with the heater attachment they aren't remotely like baked potatoes. Maybe microradio-oveners (as a German might put it) don't actually like baked potatoes, and are quite glad to get away from the chore of eating all that crispy skin and the yellow chewy bits that form under it and the little air pockets that your butter and cheese soaks into.

Anyway this was a baked potato, as well-cooked as you have any rational expectation of in a place like that, and it came with loads of salad (which I ate of course, except for the cucumber which seems to be the only uncooked vegetable most kids can eat for some reason) and a huge heap of grated cheese.

She took one bite and her face fell.

"I was stupid to ask for this, Daddy" she said.

"I should have realised.

Mild Cheddar.

You always get mild Cheddar in places like this".

She ate as much as she could. But it wasn't much. She managed to scrape most of the cheese off and soak butter into some of the potato and eat it with salt. But the meal was ruined. There is only so much you can take. I had to buy her the chocalate cake in the end. We won't be going back.

Mild Cheddar. What the hell is it for? Why does anyone make it, sell it, buy it or eat it? It hardly tastes like cheese at all, more like slightly rancid surprisingly solidified over-salted unimaginitively bland butter. It is crap.

OK, it is cheap. But it's not the cheapest cheese - there are many common varieties of slightly less foul Dutch-style cheese that you can't buy in the Netherlands, which are at least marginally edible.

And yet half of all the cheese you see in shops in England is mild Cheddar. In the USA (which is a wonderful country in many ways but not a cheese-lovers paradise) all the cheese you see in most shops is one form or another of mild Cheddar, even though they give it silly names - "Monterey Jack" or "Colby" or even "Brick".

No wonder the French think we can't make cheese. Real Cheddar cheese (most of which seems to come from Canada or Australia these days - or even the USA, they can make good cheese over there but no-body ever seems to buy it except as a "gift idea" in little wooden boxes packed with artificial straw) is a heroic cheese, one of the world's greatest food experiences. So it costs twice as much - just buy half as much. It's worth it.

It's not just that I don't like mild Cheddar. I have no problem with food I don't like. If you want to eat chops or custard that's alright by me, as long as you don't expect me to watch you. My problem with mild Cheddar is as much intellectual as visceral. I don't understand the concept of it.

Why does anyone want to eat cheese that doesn't taste like cheese? Maybe it is like those microradioovened potatoes, cheese for people who don't like cheese. But why bother? Why not eat something you do like? No-one's forcing you to eat cheese.

And it's not just cheese. There is alcohol-free beer, which doesn't even taste like beer: If you don't want to drink beer, don't drink beer. But when you do drink it, enjoy the buzz. It's got alcohol in it. Alcohol is a drug. It is a drug that most people have a lot of fun with. There is decaffinated coffee for people who don't want to drink coffee, artifical sweeteners for people who don't want sugar, "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" (there's one born every minute) for people who don't like butter. These days there is even fat with molecules the wrong way round so you can't digest it and it goes straight through your gut - probably a plot by the laundromat owners of America.

It's not even just food. We have five-a-side football for people who don't like real football or or non-contact rugby for people who don't like even realler football. New Labour for people who don't like socialism, sunbathing for people who don't like sentience.

Ken Brown, May 1998