The Georgians - pies and cheese

Go back to The Georgians, See also Turnpikes and Canals.

Cheese is a good way of preserving milk.

In the days before fridges, milk went sour after one day in warm weather. By making milk into cheese, it could be kept for many months. Every farmer who kept cows made their own cheese, some for their own use, others to sell.

Stilton -

The King of Cheeses

The King of Cheeses is named after the village of Stilton which is in . . .

Cambridgeshire,

not Nottinghamshire or even nearby Leicestershire. So why are we looking at it on this website ???????

It's a strange tale. So read this carefully!

Stilton (50 miles south of Langar) is a village in Cambridgeshire on the Great North Road, a long-distance route from London (via Nottinghamshire) to York and Edinburgh.

The first tollgate at Stilton was set up in 1663. This was good news for the Bell Inn. Travellers stopped here to eat or to stay the night.

The innkeeper of the Bell, Cooper Thornhill, sold local cheese to travellers on the Great North Road and also to customers in London. But Cooper Thornhill had a problem.

He did not have enough cheese to sell.

So in 1743 he made a deal with a cheese-maker from Wymondham, Leicestershire (near Melton Mowbray), a woman by the name of Frances Pawlett.

She supplied cheese to Cooper Thornhill at The Bell Inn and she got other cheese makers in Leicestershire and south Nottinghamshire to make cheese to her recipe.

The blue-veined, unpressed, full-cream cheese made in Leicestershire and south Nottinghamshire, now became known as Stilton, because it was sold at Stilton, even though it was not made in the village of Stilton.

A slightly different story:

Samuel Butler (born 1835) was the son of the Rector of Langar. When he was a young boy, Rev Bradshaw of Granby told him that Stilton cheeses were made at Langar in the heart of the best Stilton country. The landlady of the inn at Stilton was a woman from the Vale of Belvoir and she always had a cheese from her own neighbourhood on the table. When travellers stopped at the inn, they wanted to buy some and so the cheeses from Langar and the Vale of Belvoir became famous. But got their name not from the place where they were made but from the place where they were sold.

NOW

there are now only 6 dairies in the world making Stilton cheese! - four of them are here in the Vale of Belvoir, in the villages of Cropwell Bishop, Colston Bassett and Long Clawson.

Pictures below from the Cropwell Bishop, Colston Bassett and Long Clawson cheesmakers' websites.

Find out more about the Georgian turnpikes here.

From cheese to pie:

The Melton Mowbray

Pork Pie

In the area around Melton Mowbray more and more cheese-makers began to make Stilton cheese.

Cheese is made from milk. When the cheese starts to go hard, a liquid called whey is drained off. This is good food for pigs.

Local people made the pork (pig meat) into pies. The pies were good for farm workers who could take them for their lunch on the farm; the pastry case protected the meat inside.

In the 1700s the area around Melton Mowbray was popular for local farmers and wealthy people to go fox hunting.

In the 1780s the local pork pies were discovered by visiting fox hunters, who saw local people eating pork pies. Melton Mowbray pork pies soon became popular across the country.

(See also Fox Hunting.)

Melton Mowbray pork pies are baked with fresh raw meat, in a free-standing pastry (not cooked in a mould) which gives them a belly-shape when they came out of the oven. When the pie is baked, pork jelly is added to preserve the meat and, by filling the gaps, to make sure that the pie does not crumble when carried.

Freshly baked Melton Mowbray pork pies - pinkish-grey meat, crunchy pastry, pork jelly and the belly-shape - famous because of cheese, pigs and fox hunting.

Click the pictures below to enlarge them. Photographs from Matt Wright's Great Food Club website.