You have to hand it to Ann-Marie Dyas of the Fine Cheese Company: she regularly comes up with clever and delicious ideas to make eating cheese an even better experience than it already is. Now she has brought out a collection of four different fruit purées with the same purpose. Her inspiration was the quince cheese (cheese here means a cross between a jam and a jelly or, as she puts it, a fruit pâté) which the Spanish always serve with Manchego cheese and, indeed, one of the four English Fruits for Cheese in the Fine Cheese Company’s collection is quince that is recommended to go with hard cheeses.
The other three are Lime and Chilli, a delicious tangy, sweet and hot purée, which is for blue cheeses such as Stilton and Roquefort; Damson, ideal with strong soft cheeses such as Camembert and Brie; and Fig, which is best with mild, delicate cheese, probably made of ewe or goat milk. All four come in 113g jars, with the firm’s usual attention to good design, and all are made in small batches in the West Country. They have just come on the market and sell for £3.25 a jar (01225 448748; www.finecheese.co.uk).
The company has also launched three ‘neutral’ cheese biscuits, which are extra to the popular crackers, flavoured with fennel, rosemary, chives, celery, basil and chilli. There is a wholemeal cracker for such strong cheeses as Cheddar, Stilton or Camembert; a natural, buttery cracker for goats’ and ewes’ milk cheeses and a black, charcoal cracker that is perfect for design freaks like me. A black cracker with white Wensleydale and a red radish on a blue plate what a stylish idea.
This article was originally published in Country Life magazine, . To subscribe clickhere.
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