A RETURN TO CHEESE

I was travelling in Scotland last month, revelling in a long trek through the haunting beauty of the highlands, visiting old friends, and soaking up culture at the Edinburgh Festivals. These things I had anticipated with eagerness. The less expected pleasure of my trip was some good food.

Even the most ardent fans of Scotland, and I am one of them, have to admit that it has never been a center of gastronomy. Go to Scotland, I used to urge my friends, but take a lunch from home. What a surprise, this time, to find a fledgling movement towards fresh, local produce, and some very good restaurants.

In one of these, I rekindled my old love affair with cheese. I've scaled back my use of cheese over the years, in a general move toward a leaner diet, but since I had just walked about a hundred miles in the highlands, I was allowing myself some leeway. So I said yes to the cheese tray at Martin's, a tiny and excellent restaurant that's hidden away in a back alley in Edinburgh, and full every day.

Martin Irons, the proprietor, is a missionary. He loves real cheese, and wants to convert us all - to make us understand that these cheeses are vanishing, and must be saved. With his beautiful cheese trolley, he delivers an entertaining twenty minute lecture, describing his selection of Celtic cheeses (most are Scottish, and a few from Ireland), giving their pedigrees down to a show-and-tell photograph of a cow, and explaining in which order they should be tasted.

Sadly, traditional cheeses made by artisans from unpasteurized milk, cheeses from particular regions, with their unique taste and character, properly aged until that character is fully developed - these are an endangered species in Britain (and nearly extinct here). Martin laments the effects of big industry, and the EEC. He told me how the "cheese police" from Brussels descend on the small cheesemakers and saddle them with crippling testing requirements that are designed for huge, factory-style producers. The economics of it are daunting. For these artisans, making cheese is a labor of love. They struggle against the odds - and I am grateful to them because they gave me some mighty fine eating.

I ate six or seven delicious, very individual cheeses, including a wonderfully sharp Tobermory cheddar and a distinctive highland goat cheese. I ate them with home-made oat cakes, thin slices of apple, and a glass of vintage port. It was the best dessert in a week of great desserts.

Back home again, I found my newly wakened taste for cheese was persisting. Eat cheese! It seemed like a holy mission. The people who work hard to make good cheese must be supported.

I hankered for my favorite pub meal, the ploughman's lunch. It's the simplest peasant dish, and probably exactly what the ploughman would have carried into the field: a wedge of cheese, a hunk of bread, and some fruit or a pickle to go with it. (As well as the necessary ale, of course, and where did he get that?) I love this lunch. If the cheese is a tangy, aged, crumbly cheddar, and the bread is crusty and fresh, how could you ask for more? The fruit might be a crisp apple, a pear, or a small bunch of grapes. Pickled onions are a classic component, or a spoonful of chutney. On this trip, I noticed that a little salad was finding its way into the garnish.

But the quarter pound wedges of cheese that appeared on some of my ploughman's platters in Britain are out of the question as a daily regime. I had to invert the proportions; I took the garnish and ran with it. The salad became bigger, but it had to be a salad in which the tastes and textures showed off the cheese, and the cheese had to be great.

I decided to find the good local cheeses here, in California. I had tried a superb dried Jack cheese once, and looked it up on the internet - Vella Special Select Dry Monterey Jack. This is not the Jack cheese that you grate for quesadillas when your kids are yelling for a snack. It's the grown-up version, well aged, hard as a Parmesan, full flavored, with a mature, sharp bite. (order at www.vellacheese.com)

I made my salad from radicchio, endive, and just a few leaves of young arugula. It's nice to have a bit of peppery taste, but I didn't want to overwhelm the other flavors. The sweetness of endive and the subtle bitterness of radicchio were perfect. I added a sliced, chilled Asian pear to the salad, along with a small handful of lightly toasted walnut pieces. I tossed everything with the lightest possible dressing - just a whiff of my best pumpkinseed oil, a tiny bit of balsamic vinegar, and a dash of salt. If you're having walnuts and cheese with a salad, it doesn't need much oil.

I mounded the salad on a large plate, cut about an ounce and a half of the aged Jack cheese into thin, ragged slivers and scattered them over it. With a piece of dense sourdough bread, I had the delicious, very satisfying California version of a ploughman's lunch.

The variations on this theme are endless. Salad of curly endive with goat cheese, the salad sandwich with lots of arugula and a little P'tit Basque, and on and on... As the season turns, though, and the evenings become chilly, I want something hot. I want the big, lavish baked dishes we all remember from childhood, with the flavor of melted cheese, oozing out from between noodles.

To do that without going overboard was more of a challenge, but I think my gratin of broken lasagne with onions, spinach and cheese feels like an indulgence without breaking the caloric bank (see New Recipes). Once again, the secret is to use the best possible cheeses. I combined an aged, sharp Irish cheddar with a bit of excellent Parmesan, though you could certainly use the Special Dry Monterey Jack with fine results. I layered in a generous amount of browned onions to add body and a contrasting sweetness, and I made a stripped down béchamel sauce to hold it all together.

While this gratin was baking, my house smelled like heaven. Who knew that a return to old loves would be this much fun? But stop me if you hear me talk about going to high school reunions...

October 2000 recipe