During the festive season, no table is complete without a cheese board. As part of our series of inspiring Christmas and New Year cookery ideas in Brixton, we talk to Nicholas Balfe and Lydia Savage at Salon about creating the perfect cheese board. Interview by Claudia Moselhi.
Is a good cheese board a must-have for you over the festive period?
Cheese is synonymous with Christmas. It feels both dependable and indulgent. Plan your Christmas cheeses right and they’ll see you through any ad hoc entertaining that may be landed upon you, help punctuate the leftovers and fulfil all your mid-movie fridge foraging needs. You might even manage a few mouthfuls after your Christmas dinner if you’re lucky too.
We surround ourselves with the finest farmhouse British cheeses year round at Salon so our own personal picks for the festive period are of paramount importance and are a well-worn topic for us at this time of year. For Lydia, our resident cheese expert, five cheeses on a board are simply not enough. She’d have ten, or more! Of course, you want enough of a selection not only to please the palates of your guests, but to counter – and complement – the rich, bold flavours that share the stage in our Christmas eating extravaganzas.
What is on your perfect cheeseboard?
It’s customary to have a hard cheese, a soft cheese, and a blue cheese, which will cover the bases of texture, colour, flavour to much satisfaction. But this is the perfect cheese board; one to outshine even the most dazzling of geese. So if, like us, you’re a bona fide cheese freak, planning a particularly special Christmas spread, or just plain gluttons, we recommend the following:
- A tangy and mature cheddar, such as Montgomery’s
- A buttery, full bodied blue – our favourite is the mighty Stichelton
- A milder ‘territorial’ cheese such as Mrs Kirkham’s Lancashire
- A full flavoured, slightly pongy soft cheese such as St Jude
- And something really, really gooey, like a very ripe Wigmore, which will ooze all over the place once cut
What would you accompany the cheese with?
For accompaniments, we recommend a mixture of sourdough crackers and oatcakes, perhaps a few water biscuits too. And of course a delicately spiced apple, date and cranberry chutney will never go amiss. We also love to serve our Salon-made quince cheese alongside our Christmas cheeses. It is made the Spanish way with nothing more than whole quince, sugar and lots of gentle cooking. Just ask our staff for advice on choosing cheese and accompaniments.
For a very British take on eating cheese, don’t forget about our Brixmas Beer cakes. These rich fruit cakes are flavoured with Brixton Brewery beers and are excellent served with some cheese on the side as many in Yorkshire and Lancashire do. With 48 hours, we can even personalise the decoration of the cake with the initials of your choice.
What makes a good drink accompaniment here?
When it comes to drinks to accompany the cheese, you can be as creative as your taste buds allow. If you dare to leave the port in the sideboard this year, there are plenty of other drinks pairings to experiment with. Try lighter dessert wines with blue cheeses; a German Riesling or Hungarian Tokaji for example, or a classic Sauternes if you’re feeling flash. Malty ales and porters go brilliantly with tangy hard cheeses. Or if you have a clean-flavoured goat’s cheese on the board, it might even be worth cracking open another bottle of bubbly, as long as it’s not too dry.
In a salute to cheese, Salon is holding a special event, The Perfect Cheese Board, on Sunday 7th December, with Cheese Monger extraordinaire and all-round Cheese Brain, Ned Palmer. Final tickets available here. Come hungry, and feeling festive!
Claudia tweets @ClaudiaMoselhi
