102 BRITISH DAIRYING. 



Leicestershire Cheese. 



The damp, marly, and in some places rushy soil of this 

 Midland county produces a cheese whose mellowness and 

 richness of flavour are somewhat out of the common. The best 

 of it is said to be made on land which, not having been under 

 the plough for generations or perhaps for centuries, possesses 

 an established and indigenous herbage. That the quality of 

 cheese depends a good deal on the character of the herbage 

 and soil which produce it, is sufficiently evident when we com- 

 pare a Leicester cheese with, for instance, one of Derby or 

 Stafford, above which it usually commands some IDS. per cwt. 

 in price. There is no vital difference in the method of making, 

 and yet the cheese is superior. 



It would be interesting to have a first-rate Cheddar maker 

 go for a day to a farm in the one county and then for a day to 

 a farm in another, five or six in succession, with an off day 

 between, taking with him his own apparatus, and making a 

 cheese in each place in an identically similar manner, from, say, 

 40 gallons of milk. He should then ripen the several cheeses 

 in the same room, under exactly similar conditions, and at six 

 months' end a test of merit could be made. I have an im- 

 pression that the Leicester cheese would come out equal or 

 even superior to any of the others ; this, however, is merely an 

 unsupported opinion. 



Stilton Cheese. 



This is, or was originally, a Leicestershire cheese, it is be- 

 lieved, and was first made by a Mrs. Paulet, of Wymondham, 

 in the Melton Mowbray district. So, at all events, we are told 

 in Pitt's " Agriculture of the County of Leicester," published 

 by order of the Board of Agriculture in 1809. 



Mrs. Paulet was a relative of the well-known Cooper Thorn- 

 hill who was landlord of " The Bell," at Stilton, Huntingdon- 

 shire. Stilton is on the great north road, and " The Bell " was 

 one of the most famous coaching houses of its time ; it is still 



