What’s in your kitchen?

We have a larder about the size of a small bathroom, which is unusual for a London house. It’s great coming back from our shops or Borough Market now. Before, I hated having to stuff all these lovely vegetables into a fridge.

Also, it changed the way we cook because you can go in and choose your ingredients differently. The larder functions really well for about ten months of the year, although it gets too hot in the summer.

Every February, we go to Auvergne in France to make salamis before bringing them back. There’s an auberge there (www.aubergedechassignolles.com) run by a friend of ours who used to cook at the Anchor & Hope along The Cut near Waterloo, London.

Harry Lester and his partner Ali bought the auberge in the middle of nowhere and they open it from May to October and then a couple of weekends in the winter people come, like us. Harry sets it all up, he brings in the pigs: we each have a side and butcher it and make our salamis. We’re only there for a few days. What else would you do if you’ve made six months’ worth of salami? Having the larder really changes the way you think about food. You can plan ahead.

We’re very lucky to have the larder; it’s great to be able to put the cheese in there. Prior to having the larder, we would keep our cheese near the front door, where it’s about ten to 15 degrees centigrade, which is perfect. Cardboard boxes, by the way, are very good to keep cheeses in. It keeps a nice microclimate. Cheese is prone to drying out, so temperature is one thing you need to think about when storing it and the other thing is humidity. For the most part, fridges are quite dry. Plus there’s also the fridge smells, so a cheese kept in the fridge is likely to absorb the smells of other food kept there.

I’m not saying the larder doesn’t smell, of course it does. You’ve got the salamis, the cheese; but it’s a wholesome smell.

As for the types of cheese I keep, there are too many to choose just the one favourite. When we talk of cheese, people often mention the seasonality and what’s happening with the cows, because it’s emotive and evokes a lovely image and at the other end there’s the question of how old the cheese is. But there are so many other factors to consider, like everything else in the middle and what the cheese maker is doing.

Cheese is something that’s made every day and therefore everyday a cheese can be slightly different. For example, one of my favourite cheeses is Montgomery’s Cheddar. There’ll be as much variation from Monday to Wednesday as there will be from summer to autumn.

There’s a certain cycle to the cheese that would make it different from one day to the next and that’s quite fascinating. With cheese we taste every batch and we try and encourage our customers to taste before they buy. Sometimes you’ll have someone come in and say “No, it’s OK, I’ve had that before” and we try and explain that we’ve just cut a new one. It’s something that people find difficult to understand, but if you think about it, it’s a bit like making a vintage wine every day. The milk is going to be different, the head cheese maker may be having a day off so someone different is making it and they’ll have their own style.

It’s like with restaurant reviewing. You don’t just say “These ingredients are great”, you say “There’s a great chef.” It’s the same with cheese making; you mustn’t forget the all-important cheese maker.

Stichelton I love because it’s a work in progress. My memory of raw-milk Stilton is of a cheese which was the finest cheese in the world, but it no longer exists, so remembering that flavour and trying to recapture that memory of texture, as much as the flavour, is always there. Of course, Stilton hasn’t been made with raw milk since 1989. It was an absolutely sublime cheese.