Food - Bee Wilson on how a great cheesemaker was ruined by politicians
Tessa Jowell, the new minister for culture (or "Minister of Free Time", as she likes to call herself), says she wants to improve the quality of people's lives. Good luck to her. She should know something about quality of life, having been responsible for destroying that of at least one man in her earlier role as public health minister.
James Aldridge, who died of cancer in February this year, was a cheesemaker of singular passion, energy and talent. His success was all the more remarkable, considering he spent the first 20 years of his career as a garage mechanic and scaffolder. Yet, along with Randolph Hodgson of Neal's Yard and Patrick Rance, the author of The Great British Cheese Book, he became one of the three titans of the renaissance in British cheese. I regret to say that I never tasted any of the goodies he made. Now, none of us can.
Aldridge embarked on cheese as a career when he damaged his back in an accident; he had to abandon scaffolding and look around for a new source of income. His partner, Pat Robinson, was already running a cheese shop, but a modest one, selling cheap mousetrap Cheddar and Danish feta. Now Aldridge and Robinson set up business together, in Beckenham, Kent. They sold small farmhouse cheeses, rare Stiltons and Cheshires, and local delicacies such as Beenleigh Blue and Bonchester. Aldridge had found his calling. He read every scientific paper he could find on cheese, immersing himself in the finer points of microbiology. He surrendered himself to what he called "the art, the science and the politics" of fine cheese.
In 1989, Aldridge decided to experiment with making and maturing his own cheeses. He bought an unpasteurised Caerphilly from Duckett's in Somerset, and introduced a bacterium, R lincus, as a maturing agent. His Times obituary remarked: "The techniques of ripening a cheese, known as affinage by French cheesemakers, were so little practised in Britain that he had to rely on intuition. With characteristic precision he treated the Caerphilly with the agent and a Kentish white wine brine every few days for seven weeks. The result was a silky, spicy washed-rind cheese, strikingly pungent and soft enough to spread with a knife. He added herbs, lemon verbena and mint, and named it Tornegus (from the Somerset word 'tor' and 'negus' to signify flavoured wine). At his first attempt, he created a masterpiece, often compared to Pont l'Eveque."
Tornegus was by no means Aldridge's only achievement. He produced light, lemony goat's cheeses, rich dark cow's milk cheeses, a sheep's milk cheese called Lord of the Hundreds, a Caerphilly treated with cider called Celtic Promise, and many more, all made with unpasteurised milk. He was meticulous in his work. "A good cheese needs to be handled by the same person all down the line," he said. By 1996, Aldridge's hands were producing more than 35 cheeses.
If there were any justice, the government would have given him a knighthood. Instead, it saw fit to ruin his career. In May 1998, after a single case of E coli poisoning resulted from a batch of Duckett's Caerphilly, Tessa Jowell signed an emergency control order, banning all cheeses produced by Duckett's. This included seven tons of Tornegus belonging to Aldridge, even though they had been checked and found safe by council health officials. In June, Jowell mistakenly told the House of Commons that Aldridge's Tornegus came from the same batch of Caerphilly as the infected cheese.
Aldridge was left in the terrible position of watching £50,000 worth of unsaleable cheese, his livelihood, slowly rot in the late summer heat, unable to destroy it without a judicial order to do so. Eventually, he took his case to the High Court, and won. The court ruled that Jowell had acted for no better reason than "fears of administrative inconvenience". Justice, it appeared, had been done.
Yet, in a final twist of the bureaucratic knife, the Court of Appeal overturned the decision in 1999, and ruled that although the decision to destroy the Tornegus was mistaken, Jowell and her officials had been motivated by a genuine concern for public health. Aldridge, once a combative man, was broken. "The passion has gone out of me," he said.
Aldridge has been posthumously honoured by the Radio 4 Food Programme, which awarded him the annual Derek Cooper Prize in a broadcast on Saturday 16 June. Cooper remarked, in his wonderfully sonorous tones, that Aldridge was a true "affineur" who had "no time for industrial cheeses made for accountants".
I hope Tessa Jowell was listening. James Aldridge knew more about culture, in at least one sense, than she ever will.
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