Say Cheese! (Part Two)

Right…the historical stuff related to this article all appeared in the first half, so if you’re more interested in Gornall and Lancashire cheese standardisation and stuff, you’d be better off reading that.
This section deals with pre-Gornall cheese making techniques. In the last episode we’d left you with a tub full of bacteria filled milk (yummy) to which we’d added some un-weaned calf’s stomach lining (otherwise known as rennet). After several days of that composition stewing away in the corner of your kitchen, you will probably be starting to experience a bit of a pong right about now.
Normally, of course, after about an hour (rather than the three days we left you in the lurch for) the milk would have coagulated. The liquid whey was then drawn off and fed to the pigs or calves…that is, the calves that had survived this far.
Once the whey had been removed the solid ‘Curd’ was left behind.
This was cut into shreds using a ‘Curd Cutter’, such as the one illustrated below (all of the originals of these cheese-making devices are available for viewing at the Fylde Country Life Museum, by the way…bet you never realised what a splendidly informative and educational local treasure you were missing out on by not visiting it, did you?) ensuring that any ‘whey’ left inside was able to drain out.


The particular brand of ‘Curd Knife’ above was designed by Joseph Gornall himself. In fact, Gornall was a dab hand with all sorts of cheese-related inventions, having also designed his own brand of ‘Curd Tins’. (Try saying that quickly after several pints of beer.)
Once the curd had been sliced it was left to solidify once more, sometimes being worked by hand. (Scenes of ‘sperm squashing’ from Moby Dick spring to mind, but as they were revolting enough in Herman Melville’s original long-winded fishing manual, it might be best not to repeat them here.)



When it was as solid as possible it was ground in a ‘Curd Mill’ similar to the one shown in the illustration above. (I’ve gone to a lot of trouble drawing and colouring in this rubbish for you lot…I hope you appreciate it. A bottle of Glen Fiddich in my Christmas stocking wouldn’t go amiss.) The roughly broken curd was tipped into the hopper and passed between sets of rotating teeth…which you can’t see on the picture, but they are there believe me.
At this stage salt was added, the milling process allowing the salt to be evenly distributed.
The process also helped the curd to cool, making it easier to pack, apparently.
Next the cheese was placed in a ‘Cheese Mould’ (shown below) also known as a ‘Vat’…or even a ‘Bucket’ amongst those farms that couldn’t be bothered buying brand label goods, which was probably most of them.



Originally cheese moulds were made from wood, but around the middle of the nineteenth century tinned-metal containers replaced these. Moulds were perforated with small holes, not to allow snorkelling mice to breathe, but to let the very last remnants of whey be drained during the pressing process.
The cloth-lined moulds were then placed on the ‘Cheese Press’.


That’s a cheese-press, look, all brightly painted (probably using lead based paint to give that little extra tweek to the cheese’s flavour). Pressure was applied by a series of weights and the cheese was left for one or two days.
(Any of our readers remember that cheese-weight we dug up on Bourne Hill back in 2003…or whenever it was? No, we didn’t think so. I don’t know why I bother writing this stuff up sometimes, I honestly don’t.)
Once the top was removed the cheese was stitched into a cloth and sealed with wax. This was to ensure that no air could penetrate the product. (No doubt the smell in some of these old Lancashire dairies was best kept to the farmhouse and not exported into customers’ homes.)
Finally the cheese was placed in a store. Lancashire cheese took from one to four months to mature (considerably shorter than most of the kids round here, believe me) before being sold to unsuspecting passers by.
So there you have it. So long as you’ve got all the relevant equipment (there’s probably a cheese press hanging around in your attic somewhere) and know how to slaughter an un-weaned calf correctly, you can now make your own cheese.
To make it Lancashire specific, of course, you’ll have to track down a copy of Gornall’s best-selling booklet “How to Use the Gornall Cheese-maker. Free Gornall Curd Knife and Curd Tin with every edition.”