In conversation with: Ned Palmer

We don’t doubt it’s been hard work, but cheesemonger Ned Palmer’s whirlwind life over the last few years sounds like an absolute dream.

Most recently it’s involved traversing France, from the Brie-loving North, to the vast, mountainous Alps, unearthing the history and people behind some of the country’s finest fromages, culiminating in his latest book – A Cheesemonger’s Tour De France.

It’s a life far-removed from what Ned imagined in his youth. “I thought I was going to save the world,” he laughs. 

Foodie beginnings

There weren’t ‘foodies’ in the 70s and 80s when Ned was growing up. “It just wasn’t a word…wasn’t a ‘thing’,” he says. What he did appreciate, though, was his parents’ love of food. They were brave, adventurous cooks, who filled the familial kitchen with the scent of exotic spices and global cuisine. “My mum learned to cook from an Indian family in London. She’d buy all the spices in Southwell and roast them off at home,” he recalls. “They taught me really young how to handle a knife. Yeah…they were really into cooking. But it wasn’t like they thought about provenance. They weren’t thinking ‘is this beef grass-fed?’ or ‘does this come from a small farm?’, but they were very into flavours.”

Interestingly, one of Ned’s earliest food memories involves cheese. “I took this piece of Norwegian Gjetost to school, and the dinner lady said we’re not allowed to have sweets. I gave her a piece to try and got sent to the head teacher because she thought it was toffee!”

Food was peripheral in Ned’s life at this point. Something joyful, delicious and sustaining. But his sights were set on philosophy. “I had various theories around how to make things good for humans. It seemed, for me, philosophy was a way to have a broad enough view of everything to be able to fix it. I thought I would be an academic and write useful tomes, but by the end of my degree I was really frustrated. I didn’t feel it was useful and practical enough. I said to much teacher, ‘what can I do with this subject?’ and they told me it wasn’t a real question.”

Disenchanted, Ned went on to work as a builder’s labourer (which he loved), and later found a way to nourish his political, sociological and philosophical leanings, carving out a successful stint in political theatre Down Under.

“I thought I could save the world with theatre,” Ned says. “But I missed London, so I came back. I was sleeping on people’s floors, not sure what to do with myself, then Todd [Trethowan of Trethowan Brothers] asked if I wanted to come and sell cheese at Borough Market.”

Ned had gone to school with Todd’s now-wife and thought, ‘why the hell not?’.

It was an odd start to his career in cheese though, he admits. One that began with Todd…cutting his hair! “He was a sheep farmer and was very insistent and persuasive. He said, ‘I’m going to give you a haircut. I cut lots of sheep, it’ll be good’. We were 20 or 21 at the time.”

Ned spent time selling with Todd at Borough Market, working for an NGO, and even as a hospital porter before he took on a job at Neal’s Yard Dairy, turning down a PhD to fully immerse himself in the world of cheese.

A life-changing moment

“My first day [at Neal’s Yard Dairy] was 2nd December, 2002. I remember my first customer. So, they give you a knife and say ‘go and serve’. I’d just started and a chap asked which was better, Keen’s or Montgomery’s. I didn’t know what he meant. I said, ‘no idea, but let’s try them shall we?’

“We tried them together and my manager looked on very approvingly because I was so honest.”

The training at Neal’s Yard, he embellishes, is “amazing - the best I’ve ever had”.

“The first thing they do is get a knife and walk along the counter with you, tasting a lot of cheese. You’ll be thinking ‘can I eat 50 cheeses in a row?’ and ‘have I got something interesting to say about them all?’.  I only knew about Gorwydd Caerphilly and I liked that, so it was a start.

“The next thing is you’d wash some racks. They wanted to see if you could do the menial jobs with good grace too. I loved that idea. We all washed the racks – I saw the financial manager doing it!”

“I learnt everything. How to wrap cheese beautifully, glass wrapping the face of cheese to make it perfect. It was quite brutal at times, there would be a man standing behind me saying ‘awful, do it again’, but it was worth it. There was a feeling of respect and pride.”

Ned considers himself lucky to have spent time with co-founder Randolph Hodgson in the early days. “He would say you can change the world through cheese, supporting small producers with high animal welfare.” Naturally, this appealed to the activist in Ned. “I realised I could live my politics but through really delicious cheese and making people happy. I loved the interaction with customers and how they would shake your hand because they were having such a lovely time.”

The whole ethos of the place was around fostering a welcoming, friendly environment that didn’t intimidate shoppers, and that’s something that’s stuck with Ned. “It was hammered into us when someone walks in you shouldn’t say ‘hello’ or ‘welcome’, just ‘try some cheese’. I loved building those connections with people.”

A new generation of makers

Ned cut his teeth in the cheese industry just as a new wave of makers stepped into the limelight - those invested in expressing the beauty of British dairy in ever innovative, transformative ways, beyond block Cheddar. “It was fascinating to me the fact that all of these cheeses, their flavours, textures and colours, came from the same basic method, using starter culture, milk and salt. I was encouraged very early on in my journey by Randolph because I showed so much enthusiasm for cheesemaking. He sent me off to Mary Holbrook. It was incredible to see behind the scenes and the labels saying ‘Made by Mary Holbrook in Somerset’. To me the cheesemakers were, and still are, like rock stars. When I meet them I feel really proud to be a part of the community.”

After Neal’s Yard Ned ran the Caerphilly stall at Borough Market which led him into cheese tastings, ad hoc, at people’s homes. “I had a moustache and looked quite louche back then. One time two boys hired me for their mum’s birthday. She answered the door looking quite nervous. I said, ‘I’ll go get my kit’. When I started unpacking the cheese and wine she revealed they’d told her I was a strippagram!”

Not every tasting, thankfully, was so eventful! Ned would later offer corporate tasting events, alongside tutored tastings at Neal’s Yard until “one day a chap came up to me and said ‘you should write a book’. At the time I was writing ideas on the back of packets. This guy told me he was an agent and suggested we meet up.

“We met for lunch at Soho House – where all the staff knew him by his first name! We had a lovely chat, and got on really well. My original idea was for a manual to answer all the questions you get asked as a cheesemonger. David and I had a few meetings and massively boozy lunches and he’d tell me it needed a narrative. I came up with telling the story of British history through the medium of cheese.”

Ned landed the deal for A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles with an independent publisher in 2017. “They wanted the book in a year, and I was like ‘yeah’. I was really excited. When I was a kid I thought I’d write the next Lord of the Rings – I am quite egotistical! It’s funny I ended up writing a cheese book.”

A journey through cheese

What was fortuitous for this project was the fact Ned already had relationships with many of Britain’s cheesemakers, including Mary Holbrook, who he says is one of its biggest inspirations. “I would think about the way she made cheese, and the fact it hadn’t changed at all. If a prehistoric cheesemonger turned up at her dairy, they would know exactly what she was making. The small, mixed, traditional farm Mary ran is a vanishingly rare thing. The pigs were fattened on the whey, there were goats, and some geese running around. I loved the connection with history I got from her.”

Through writing the book Ned was able to see parts of the UK he’d never stumbled upon before. Something that struck him, as he travelled from North to West, was the lack of variation Britain has in cheese compared to, say, France. Just after publication (he says, annoyed) he discovered that many of the cheese farms in Britain are mapped over limestone soils. “It starts in the bottom left down in the West Country, and curves up to the Northeast in a big diagonal line. There’s a thing about limestone soil and cheesemaking which is so cool. It’s one of the reasons England is amazing at making hard, fairly simple cheeses, and for that commonality. We have Stilton, which is very different, but I also suspect there were more small, soft, local cheeses that disappeared with the agricultural revolution and industrialisation and wars. We really might have had more variety before. 

“I learnt a huge amount about British history through doing this book. Cheese is so intertwined into our culture in a way I don’t think anyone’s documented before.” Researching was frustrating, though, Ned admits. “Most historical text focused on grain and wool. They had a real contempt for livestock farming. They called it ‘dog and stick farming’. It was tough. When I found a pamphlet about the cheese war of 1766 in Nottingham I yelled with delight!”

A guide to British cheese

Book two was meant to be a jaunt across France, signed and sealed in January 2020, just before Covid reared its ugly head. “I obviously couldn’t travel then, and the agent’s legal person was super excited because they got to use the ‘force majeure’ clause that I wouldn’t be able to deliver it on time. My editor, who’s a nice chap, rang me up and said ‘listen, do you want to write a book in lockdown?’. He gave me until that night to come up with an idea!”

This culminated in A Cheese monger’s Compendium of British & Irish Cheese – a delightfully illustrated guide to 150 varieties, their makers and flavour profiles. A lot of cheese was eaten, Ned laughs…a lot! “I had to eat all this cheese, delivered to me in lockdown. That’s one I want them to reprint. Some of the cheeses have disappeared and there are some new ones I think we should include.”

And off to France

As soon as he was able, Ned jumped back on the French project, which he calls a ‘no-brainer’. “For a cheesemonger France has a justifiable position as arguably one of the most famous cheesemaking nations. I don’t play favourites, I think all cheese is lovely, but take any human and ask them which country is famous for its cheese, and they’ll say France.”

Ever inquisitive, Ned was attracted too by the vast terroirs and sheer variety and volume of cheeses Frances has to offer. “I also don’t think they developed a pride in their national food scene until the 19th Century with the railways. People started to think about the ‘national treasures’ of their cuisine.”

Having said that, “Brie has a venerable history. People were talking about it as far back as the Medieval period. The Duke of Orleans sent loads of Valentine’s and poems and each girlfriend got a Brie!”

Ned travelled all around France, from Normandy, to the Alsace, Comte, the Jura, Haute-Savoie and the Auvergne.

He spent six months hurtling along on the adventure, travelling with cheese expert Emma Young’s partner Sam. “In Britain you can get anywhere in a taxi. I looked at Brie produced in Donge, in the middle of a big part of green, and the thought I could tootle about there by taxi was hilarious! It turned out Sam, who is French, was free and was used to doing tours with wine, so it was perfect. We had the most amazing time, and the book is dedicated to him.”

The premise of the tome is to delve into the magic behind the cheeses each region of France. “I suffered the most dreadful ‘second album syndrome’ writing this,” Ned admits. “My first book did very well, to my great surprise. I thought I would be giving it out to people for Christmas for years. I thought the second would be easier, but it was even worse – probably because I spent 18 years learning about British cheeses and didn’t have the same ground of knowledge. I felt like a bit of an imposter.”

To be a decent writer sometimes though, he says, you “have to entertain the possibility you’re not going to be an expert on everything.”

Certainly his preconceptions of French cheese were challenged along the way. “I thought that France was very much a bastion of tradition, and the French people would be proud of their cheese culture, and protective of it, and I’d meet loads of family cheesemakers. I very much did meet those people yet, at the same time, most of the cheeses are made in factories, pasteurised and sold in the supermarkets. I met cheesemakers who were concerned about whether they could continue. Everything was more nuanced than you’d think.”

Ned’s first stop was Seine et Marne, where multi-millionaire cheese enthusiast Baron Edmond de Rothschild, dismayed at the dying out of fermier Brie in the 80s, set out to revive the product in the heart of Brie country. “It was all ladled by hand, and the head cheesemaker was quite young. I was fascinated by how he used his senses to do everything.”

Over in Comte was the other side of the scale. “The make had a mechanised system. I thought it was a bit intense, a kind of hoover sucking the curd out of the vat. I’ve always been told things should be hand ladled – but it’s a really good cheese. Something I realised on this trip is we only have to hold onto tradition if it’s the best way of doing things. Cheesemaking is back breaking work by nature. If there’s an easier, better way to make it, that’s not a bad thing if the end result is the same.”

A part of the trip that pulled on Ned’s heart strings was the Loire Valley. “It was a wine producing area, famous for Sauvignon Blanc, but the region was absolutely decimated by a mite that ruined the European wine industry as a whole. So many people were badly hit, and it was their main industry.”

Something the Loire WAS left with was goats – looked down on for generations by the vintners. “They hated them. They ate everything – the vines, and produce in market gardens – and some people had a movement to exterminate the goats.”

It’s a good thing this didn’t happen, because when agricultural workers needed a new source of income, those with access to a few animals could begin to churn out cheese – largely in the Crottin style. “It became a really imporant product. One of the Crottins won a gold medal in a Parisian agriculture show and that really put it on the map. It became an incredible success story, and now the region is famous for this little goats’ cheese because of that disaster.”

Of all the (many) cheeses Ned ate and learnt about along the way, it’s Salers from the Auvergne that most captured his heart both for its flavour and the staunchly traditional way it’s made. “It’s an intense cheese. A mighty cheese,” Ned says. “It can be very animal and sulphuric which interests me because it’s made in a volcanic region, so it’s possible those mineral tastes come through from the soil.”

Ned felt an instant affinity for this place, where the rugged landscapes and hard-working farming folk reminded him of home, in North Yorkshire. “The people in this cheesemaking area have to be pretty tough to live there. They’re uncompromising about the way they produce it, so the cheese really represents them as much as it does the land.”

The Salers family of cheeses, Ned explains, are made in wooden vats without a starter. “The vats have a culture in them – they clean them out with the whey. And the cows are a local breed. They look like a Highland cow, all shaggy with massive horns. They are super grumpy and won’t let you milk them unless you have the calf there. The calf gets a bit of the milk first, then they put salt on the calf’s back and the mum gets distracted licking it off!”

Seeing cheeses made in such an exacting way that’s barely changed for thousands of years, was humbling for Ned. “It’s intense. The season for Salers is really limited. The cows have to be pasture fed. The farmers are up at 4am and in bed at 10pm!”

When asking people, along the journey, ‘what is France?’ and ‘how do you define France and its food?’ affineur Laurent Mons told Ned he things the Auvergne is ‘Frenchiest’ bit of France. “It’s furthest away from the borders, and everywhere else was invaded. It holds its own a bit,” Ned says.

 

What’s next?

Spending so much time travelling and writing, it’s no surprise Ned now has perennial itchy feet. But where will his cheese exploration take him next? The obvious choice, he says, is Italy. “I think they might have more PDO cheeses than France! I did go to visit a Robiola producer. They just use the whey and don’t even keep a mother culture in case it fails. I asked what happens if it fails and they just shrugged! I would love to go and find more stories like that. But I’m also fascinated with Spain. There’s so much more to Spanish cheese than Manchego. And the fact Franco effectively banned artisan cheese, so people kept cheesemaking alive secretly and illegally, until he died…that’s an incredibly exciting story.”

American cheese is on Ned’s wish list as well. “Everything thinks American cheese is rubbish, but there’s a lot of good stuff coming out over there. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next!”

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