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Sage Cheese
There is a kind of sage cheese which used to be, and perhaps still is, made by a few families in Gloucestershire for their private consumption: it is the most delicious of any of the green cheeses. It is intended for immediate use, and will not keep long. A quantity of young sage-leaves are bruised in a mortar, and the juice is extracted from them: the juice of a quantity of spinach is extracted by the same process and mixed with the sage-juice in equal proportions. Just before the rennet is put to the milk, a quantity of this juice, regulated by the colour and flavour desired in the cheese, is mixed with the milk. As the curd is being formed, it is gently broken, and in equal lumps as nearly as possible. The whey is then separated, and the curd put into the vat and submitted to gentle and gradual pressure during seven hours. It is next salted twice a day for three or four days, and afterwards turned every day during five weeks. It is then fit for use. This cheese is very little known, and deserves wider recognition; it may be made anywhere with rich and unsophisticated milk.
This is a working method for a raw-milk pressed cheese, but it is written in the shorthand of a dairy where everyone already knew the numbers. As given it cannot be followed safely, and the gaps are not incidental — they are exactly the details that determine whether the cheese is food or a hazard.
- No temperature anywhereRennet setting, curd handling and pressing all depend on holding the milk within a few degrees of a target, and the recipe names none. Without that, the acidity and moisture of the finished curd are unknown, and an unknown-acidity cheese is an unknown-safety cheese.
- "Rich and unsophisticated milk" means raw milk"Unsophisticated" here means unadulterated, and "rich" implies unskimmed: straight from the cow. Raw milk can carry Listeria, E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella and Campylobacter, and nothing in this process — no heating, no long acidification target, no measured salt — is designed to control them.
- Five weeks is not a safe-harbour ageWhere raw-milk cheese is permitted at all, it is generally hard cheese aged sixty days or more, and even that is not a guarantee against Listeria. This cheese is described as short-keeping and intended for immediate use, which puts it in the highest-risk category rather than the lowest.
- Salting is undefined"Salted twice a day for three or four days" gives no weight of salt and no brine strength. Salt concentration in the rind and body is one of the few real controls on surface pathogens in a young cheese, and here it is left entirely to the dairymaid's hand.
- The green juice adds water and plant matterPressed sage and spinach juice is unpasteurised, carries its own soil bacteria and spores, and dilutes the milk by an unrecorded amount. Field-grown leafy greens are a documented vehicle for E. coli; adding their raw juice to milk that will never be heated compounds the problem.
- Vat and pressFor reading rather than doing: the "vat" is the cylindrical cheese mould, not a bulk tank, and "gentle and gradual pressure during seven hours" implies a press whose weight is increased in stages. "Turned every day" means the whole cheese is inverted on its shelf so it dries evenly.
- If you want to make a sage cheeseWork from a current cheesemaking recipe with pasteurised milk, stated temperatures, a measured culture and a target pH. Sage Derby, the best-known sage cheese still made commercially, is made that way.
Green-marbled or wholly green cheeses were a Midlands and West Country speciality, and the two named here — Gloucestershire's private sage cheese and the better-known Sage Derby — belong to the same family. The tradition is often traced to the seventeenth century, when sage was credited with medicinal virtue and a herbed cheese counted as a wholesome one; spinach juice is usually said to have been added for colour rather than taste, sage alone giving a duller green. The recipe is recording a domestic practice that was already fading when the book appeared: the phrase "used to be, and perhaps still is" is the giveaway, and it marks the moment when farmhouse cheese was passing out of the household and into the creamery. Sage Derby survived that transition by becoming a factory cheese, its green now usually from chopped leaf or colouring rather than pressed juice, and it is still made in mottled and striped forms.