Stilton is famous and manufactured exclusively in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Blue Stilton is a protected trademark.
Cheddar is the most famous cheese in England and a huge variety is made.
The oldest reference to cheddar cheese in England can be found in an official account of crown expenditure that’s kept in the British Exchequer – here we can see that in the year 1170, King Henry II bought a little over 10,000 pounds of cheddar cheese for the royal household.
Eliza Smith, in her famous book, ‘The Compleat Housewife’, was the first person to give written instructions on how to make the cheese at home.
It was Joseph Harding who, in the 1800’s, invented a new way of making cheese and developed the Harding Method where, by using his new machine to cut the curds during the cheese making process, the process was shortened considerably.
During World War II the English government created a single type of cheddar, called ‘government cheddar’ and it almost destroyed the cheddar industry because it was so awful that nobody wanted to eat it after that.
Today the cheddar made only in Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Dorset is considered to be true cheddar.
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