Wandering around The English Market, a rambling indoor food hall in downtown Cork, it doesn’t take long to sense that the tightly packed stalls are a sort of dairy nirvana.
There are tangy, blue-laced cheeses stacked upon semi-firm varieties and age-worthy Cheddars. There are more unusual types containing slivers of local seaweed. Punctuating the displays are nubbins of sprightly goat cheeses. At this famous market in southern Ireland, whose current confines dates back to 1786, there seems to be a bit of everything to tempt cheese aficionados.
All of this cheesy abundance would have been near impossible until only recently. For all of Ireland’s much-publicized blessings in butter production, Irish cheeses—the likes of which are sold at The English Market—are not entirely known outside of Europe. United States-based chefs who serve Irish farmhouse cheeses including Cathal Armstrong, owner of Eve, Eamonn’s a Dublin Chipper and The Magestic in downtown Alexandria, Virginia, and Brad Farmerie, who heads the kitchens at Public, Double Crown, and Madame Geneva in New York City, grew to like the cheeses from experiences abroad (Armstrong grew up in Ireland, Farmerie, though American, worked in Europe for several years).
These cheeses’ under-the-radar nature is due in part to history: compared with storied English Stilton and French Roquefort, Irish farmhouse cheeses are relatively new. Artisanal cheese production took a backseat to butter production for much of modern Irish dairy history, and it wasn’t until recently that entrepreneurs with discriminating palates and a couple of cows (or goats) decided to try their hands at making hand-crafted cheeses.
In those early days, they settled in the south, primarily County Cork (the area north of the city of Cork is famous for its fertile farmland), but also Counties Tipperary and Kerry. Today, however, farmhouse cheeses are produced throughout the country.
Greener Pastures
That cheeses of high quality can be made here is not surprising. Ireland is something of a dairyman’s delight. Although it shares the same latitude as Massachusetts, the Emerald Isle is exactly that—green—year-round, at least in most areas. Consequently, the cows (mostly black-and-white Friesians) can grass-feed for the majority of the year.
Livestock fed on green (versus grain or corn) grass tend to produce creamy, off-white milk— directly impacting the flavor and texture of Ireland’s butter and cheeses.
“French cheeses tend to have a straw quality to them,” explains Armstrong, who still retains the soft brogue of his native land. While he appreciates European and domestic cheeses, he has a soft spot for Irish varieties even to the point that he admits to, on occasion, secreting in a ripe batch when he returns to the U.S. from a visit abroad. “Irish cheeses have a deeper, richer mouth-feel. The flavor is green grass, not straw.”
What to Try
With the right raw materials in place, this current generation of cheese makers looks beyond Ireland’s borders for production methods. The resulting styles borrow from the best of European cheese-making tradition, but at the same time they remain quite personal—with names and processes distinct to the makers themselves.
Generally speaking, the south of Ireland is best-known for cow’s milk cheeses. There are buttery, semi-soft washed rind varieties, natural-rind cheeses, Camembert styles, firmer, nuttier Gouda-like cultures, and even the rare Irish blue-veined wonder.
Fresh and aged goat’s milk cheeses also hail from the south, but they are more typical from the craggier west and north, where pastureland gives way to rocky hillsides and bogs, a terrain that is, essentially, better suited for goats (and sheep, but for all the sheep that are raised in Ireland, sheep’s milk cheeses are surprisingly uncommon).
A few cheeses are more universal. Ireland makes a large amount of Cheddar, and it’s this cheese, which is widely sold across the United States, that Armstrong selects when making a simple ham-and-cheese sandwich. He also likes a farmhouse cheese that’s relatively easy to find domestically: a soft-ripening cow’s milk cheese that he incorporates into a decadent bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich on Eve’s bistro menu.
It’s harder, though not impossible, to find Ireland’s more-obscure cheeses for sale in the United States. But like all agricultural products, there’s a season for them. “When the weather starts to cool down in September, we start to see a gloss of Irish cheeses in the states,” Armstrong says. And in a nod to holiday interest, St. Patrick’s Day finds a lot more Irish imports in the cheese case.
Butter Business
Its yellow hue is unmistakable. So is its sweet, creamy taste.
Such simple pleasures belie the historic significance of Irish butter. Once packed in baskets and stored in peat bogs (resulting in a nefarious substance historians call bog butter), and later transported in wooden barrels called firkins, Irish butter was a globally traded commodity as early as the 17th century.
With its busy port, the city of Cork became the center of the Irish butter trade. Instead of wine routes, as was common in France, the areas surrounding Cork had butter roads, pathways that enabled butter producers to bring their wares into the city.
Although the Cork butter market eventually floundered (the late 19th century was a tough period for Cork merchants, who faced competition from other European butters and a new substance—margarine), Irish butter remains among the world’s favored butters, sought out for its creamy texture by butter fans and chefs such as Elizabeth Falkner of Citizen Cake in San Francisco—she uses it when making laminated (butter-enriched) bread doughs.
At Eve, Chef Cathal Armstrong uses a creamy Irish cow’s milk culture in a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich.