The Pioneering Women who created Ireland's Farmhouse Cheese Revolution.

If you would like to listen to this article (approx 17 mins) please see our new Listen to Megabites: Ireland’s Pioneering Cheese Women. Read by Sally McKenna.

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, a revolution occurred in Irish food, and it happened in the most unlikely place, caused by a most unlikely group - women, working in agriculture, in rural Ireland.

The first Irish cheese pioneering revolutionary was Veronica Steele, of Milleens Cheese.

“Veronica wanted to get the women of Beara making cheese. So, she started classes in her kitchen, making a cheese called Beara, and I helped her,” recalls Jeffa Gill, the creator of Durrus Farmhouse Cheese. “I’d go along, and we’d all make cheese together.”

This was how Veronica Steele brought together a group of women to begin the Irish Farmhouse Cheese movement, on the remote Beara peninsula, in remote West Cork, back in the late 70s.

Giana Ferguson, of Schull’s Gubbeen Cheese, remembers that “Veronica’s vision was what was most inspiring. She had a vision, which I don’t think any of the rest of us had.”

Olivia Goodwillie, creator of Kilkenny’s Lavistown cheese, recalls that “The first meeting of CAIS – The Irish Association of Cheesemakers – happened in Lavistown. Veronica came with a big pot of milk and did a demo on making cheese. And the second day, we discussed how to start a cheese society.”

Veronica’s one-horned cow, Brisket. Veronica’s classes. Veronica’s vision. And, above all, Veronica’s big pot of milk. That’s all you need to foment a cheese revolution amongst Irish women.

Because it was amongst women that the farmhouse cheese culture began in Ireland. “You were at home on your farm. You had children to be looked after, and here was something you could do in your own yard,” explains Breda Maher, of Tipperary’s Cooleeney Cheese. It was family friendly.

Olivia Goodwillie argues that the cheese revolution has even deeper roots: “Women have an instinct to cook and nurture. And making cheese is a nurturing profession, it’s about providing food, following a recipe.”

Silke Cropp began making Corleggy cheese in the late seventies, using the milk from a wild mountain goat, acquired through a travelling community. The goat gave 4L milk every day, and like many farming women before her, Silke made cheese from the leftovers.

But talk to the pioneer cheesemakers nearly half a century after the movement began, and you realise that it was a miracle that the cheesemaking initiative ever got anywhere. 

“There was never a business plan. You just woke up one day to discover you had a little business on your hands,” says Olivia.

“I remember taking some cheese to O’Keeffe’s shop in the village” said Giana Ferguson, “it was an early Gubbeen-type cheese. I thought it would just sit on the counter. Quarter of an hour later she rang up and said ‘It’s gone!’ A penny did drop then. I wasn’t sure that people would want to eat a local cheese, but I was wrong. They did.” 

Silke Cropp began making Corleggy cheese in the late seventies, using the milk from a wild mountain goat, acquired through a traveling community. The goat gave 4L milk every day, and like many farming women before her, Silke made cheese from the leftovers. “I was hooked, and soon I got five goats and made a bucket every day, straight from the animal, into the bucket, and made the cheese in the kitchen.

Silke talks about her commercial turning point in a tiger-who-came-to-tea moment where some French tourists turned up and “when they opened their wallet, money fell out onto the floor, that’s how rich they were!” The visitors bought “every single piece of cheese I had, even the piece that was cut in the fridge”.

At this point we must emphasise the terrain that these women were working in: open a map of Ireland from 1985 and you will note that there are no motorways. None. Northern Ireland had one motorway, the M1, which effectively went nowhere.

So, consider what it meant to drive down the Beara Peninsula to Milleens Cheese, to learn from Veronica. It wasn’t a journey: it was an expedition, and the last part of the expedition, down to Eyeries, was the longest and windingest of Ireland’s long and winding roads. 

Irish cheesemakers were like lonely stars in the vast galaxy of the Irish countryside. Yet, somehow, this cohort of women would become united in CAIS, and united in their desire to create world-class cheeses. How did they do it?

Serendipity. And luck. Consider this: in 1978 in Sneem, on the Ring of Kerry – no motorways, remember – Annie Goulding of the Blue Bull Restaurant gets some Milleens and puts it on her menu. Declan Ryan, who will go on to win Ireland’s first ever Michelin Star for his restaurant, Arbutus Lodge, tries it and likes it. Myrtle Allen of Ballymaloe House tries it and likes it. Both restaurants want it. So, how did they get it?

The answer is that the cheese was bussed up to Cork city. In Eyeries, Milleens was put on the bus heading to Cork city. From Cork city it was put on the Midleton bus so it could get to Ballymaloe. Ryan and Allen could create a cheeseboard featuring Milleens, using a transportation system one step up from a donkey and cart.

Every cheesemaker has a serendipity story. “In 1981 we were in Macroom one day, and we had 30-40 cheeses in storage,” remembers Helene Willems, of Coolea Cheese. “We saw a van and it had ‘Horgan’s’ written on it. I said to Dick: Go and talk to your man. The next day, Michael Horgan came here. He was the first to buy the cheese.”

“Randolph Hodgson, of Neal’s Yard, came to Ireland on holiday, met Veronica, and totally fell in love with the Irish cheese story.” says Giana Ferguson. Hodgson would be the greatest champion of Irish cheeses in the U.K.

“I had worked at the Cashel Palace when I was younger,” says Breda Maher. “And various comments lay dormant in my head: “Why doesn’t Ireland have a decent camembert or brie?” At the time, there was just Calvita, Galtee cheese triangles, and some cheddar, but tourists expected something different. So, we decided to make brie/camembert style cheeses.”

Some of the cheeses we have lost: Tara; Derrynaflan: Gigginstown; Claire Coogan’s Cheese; Capparoe. Even iconic cheeses, such as Mary Burn’s Ardrahan, are no longer in production.

The model of Irish cheese artisanship that we have outlined has a weakness: If anything happens to the creator of the cheese, then what happens to the cheese?

If the recipe and the work is embodied in one person, or maybe two, then any problem shatters the superstructure.

The best way to explain this fragility is to tell an ironic story. Seamus Sheridan, of Sheridan’s Cheesemongers, is at the Slow Food cheese fair in Bra, Italy. The Italians are loving the Cashel Blue, a cheese for which the Sheridan brothers always exhibited a particular genius when affining it to perfection.

“We love the Cashel Blue,” the Italian cheese merchants tell Seamus. “We could take maybe a dozen types.”

“You don’t understand, ” says Seamus. “There is only one Cashel Blue cheese, made by one woman, in one place. That’s it.”

The Italians didn’t understand. How can you make cheese in that way?

But making cheeses that way has meant that some of Ireland’s best farmhouse cheeses have been lost. One of the most highly regarded was Poulcoin cheese, made by Anneliese Bartelink, a revered cheesemaker who worked near Kilnaboy, in County Clare, using both goat’s and cow’s milk.

To get to Anneliese’s house, it helped to be a goat: once you had left the car, you managed the last trek on foot, down the slopes. The house was a Mitteleuropean wooden farmhouse that belonged in a Grimms Brothers fairy tale. A few stories high, and perched against the mountain, the roof and each of the window bays were all thatched.

This pilgrim’s trail didn't deter cheese wannabes from making their way to the house and farm to learn from a gifted cheesemaker and bio-dynamic farmer. Anneliese’s aged hard cheese was Ireland’s answer to a Pecorino Romano: it was magnificent. 

But one day, Anneliese posted on early social media - “I’m sitting in the garden, watching my house burn down”. That beautiful house was raised to the ground, and Poulcoin cheese is no more.

And we lost other cheeses too: Tara; Derrynaflan: Gigginstown; Claire Coogan’s Cheese; Capparoe. Even iconic cheeses, such as Mary Burn’s Ardrahan, are no longer in production.

“I went with Veronica. We had a large group of very young children with us, and we sat in the lounge drinking gin and tonic! They were looking for ideas and we went home with a grant. 

But it is wrong to think that the cheesemakers only ever worked alone: they didn’t. They supported one another, of course, but help came from other directions, most especially from the small cohort of retailers who had got bitten by the cheese bug. 

In 1989, for example, we wrote that you could find Poulcoin Cheese in Hylands of Ballyvaughan, in Country Lane of Ennistymon, in McMahon’s of Kinvarra and – even this far North  – in the Iona Wholefood Shop in Holywood, County Down.

Some of the retailers were of pivotal importance: Monica Murphy of Dublin’s The Cheeseboard; Val Manning of Manning’s Emporium, West Cork; Peter Ward of Tipperary’s Country Choice, Fergal Quinn of Superquinn.

On the distribution side there was Eugene’s Carr’s Traditional Cheese, and Michael Horgan’s company, which played a pivotal role. On the academic side, Professor Charlie Daly at UCC, Professor Pat Fox in Teagasc, and Tim Coogan at Moorepark who “were the people you went to,” says Breda Maher.

The cheesemakers also received help from Local Government and Enterprise Boards. Jeffa Gill recalls one such expedition: “I went with Veronica. We had a large group of very young children with us, and we sat in the lounge drinking gin and tonic! They were looking for ideas and we went home with a grant.  It wasn’t a big grant, but it seemed like a huge amount of money to us. Enough to buy a larger pan.”

Some cheesemakers even became their own retailers: Anne Brodie of Ryefield in County Cavan would drive down to Dublin’s Christchurch Market, beside Mother Redcap’s Tavern, at weekends to sell her, and other’s, cheeses, at the first new era market in Dublin. Anne also sold her cheese north of the border, and eventually created Boilie Cheese, which was bought, along with Ryefield, by Fivemiletown Creamery. What a business woman!

So then, unconventional routes to market came the way of the cheesemakers. The farmer’s market wave washed conventional retail into the ditch.  Silke Cropp would be up at 4am to drive her old Morris Minor to Dublin every Saturday to take part in the Dublin Food Co-Op. “This was my first time making proper money”.

Silke was also at the first Saturday morning of Dublin’s Temple Bar market, selling her Corleggy cheeses, as was Kevin Sheridan, and Sheridan’s were also in the Saturday Galway market. Farmer’s markets, it turned out, were the perfect place to sell farmhouse cheese. For the dithering shopper, you only needed to proffer a slice of cheese, and you made the sale. The Markets worked because of their informality, and intimacy: Irish shoppers learnt to linger, to have the chat, to enquire from the cheesemakers. In Westport, at the weekly market at the Octagon, Irma Van Baalen’s Carrowholly Cheeses were the trophy objects to bring back to Dublin. Maya Binder sold her seaweed Diliskus cheese in Dingle, before establishing the superb Little Cheese Shop, now run by Mark Murphy.

“We moved from Dublin with a plan to live a John Seymour-influenced life”, says Olivia Goodwillie, and in addition to their pigs and their study centre at Lavistown, the Goodwillies “recognised that the cow was a very wonderful thing.”

If you want to be a cheesemaker, you need a cow. Or a goat. A sheep or two will do.

But before you get an animal on whom you will likely bestow an embarrassing name, you need a book. For very many people in the 1970’s and 1980’s that book was Self-Sufficiency, by John and Sally Seymour. 

The sub-title of the original book was The Science & Art of Producing and Preserving your own Food. The book sold more than a million copies, and fifty years later is still in print, though that sub-title has changed to The Classic Guide for Realists and Dreamers.

“We moved from Dublin with a plan to live a John Seymour-influenced life”, says Olivia Goodwillie, and in addition to their pigs and their study centre at Lavistown, the Goodwillies “recognised that the cow was a very wonderful thing.”

“I had a little Dutch book called Make your own Cheese and Butter,” explains Helene Willems. “It came with a kit, a small press, and a porcelain mould. It made 1 pound of cheese. It went well. And Dick was going to buy some cows. We got 5-7 Fresians and made the cheese for friends.”

Cashel Blue began life being made in a beer vat. To introduce the penicillium roqueforti, Jane Grubb used her knitting needles. Giana Ferguson found that her pantry “was nice and damp; the cheese flourished in there.” Jeffa Gill recalls that “We hardly had enough money for a pair of tights then, let alone a cheese vat. But bit by bit I invested everything back into the place, we went from pan to bigger pan, to small vat to larger vat, and eventually we built the wing where we work today.”

The cheesemakers may have had books, but their story is one of Improvisation, of fashioning enterprises out of hard work and inspiration. “In the beginning we used to make the boxes for the cheese, little wooden boxes,” remembers Breda Maher. “We weren’t able to buy them, so we learned how to make boxes! It was fun learning.”

“I didn’t learn from a book, I learned cheesemaking from Meg Gordon”, explains Siobhan Ni Ghairbhith, who pioneered the first transition of a farmhouse cheese, when she moved the cheese room of Meg Gordon’s St Tola to her family farm about three miles away.

“I gave up a paid and pensionable job to make St Tola, but my parents were very supportive at the time, because I was doing something with the family farm that my grandmother and grandfather had put together. We were always brought up as being very aware of where we came from, with a sense of place and the importance of looking after our culture, our values.

“We were very apprehensive, when we began to make St Tola, would we have the right flora and fauna? We built the cheese house from scratch, so it was a sterile environment. Meg and Derrick only made cheese seasonally, so I worked with Meg for a year, and then that October we moved every stainless steel bucket, every stool, every churn and every bit of thing that we could find, and left it to settle in our new cheese house. 

“We made the cheese and then we waited. Our cheese has a very natural rind, naturally forming because of atmosphere, temperature and humidity. Making cheese is very much about the place, not just the milk itself, and we were so pleased when the cheese developed naturally in our new cheese house.”

“Veronica had shown Jeffa what happens when you wash the cheeses with salt and water, and I’d heard in Spain what happens if you wash rinds with wine,” says Giana Ferguson, explaining how the classic West Cork washed-rind cheeses came to be created.

The Irish farmhouse cheese revolution was a women’s revolution. At a time when women played only a very minor part in Irish public life – only 1% of the female population went to college; women couldn’t even collect the children’s allowance, which had to be paid to the man of the household – this unlikely revolt began in the most conservative place – the Irish farm. 

The cheesemaking initiative was one of the first times that Irish agriculture and farming looked outwards, importing into Irish farms the European culture of cheesemaking, and then remaking that culture in its own image. Suddenly, into this cautious world, a hive mind of female creativity invented an industry no-one had thought could even happen. 

The obstacles were formidable: when these cheeses were created in West Cork, the region had only had electricity in several areas for 10 or 15 years. The farmhouse cheeses were created using raw milk – “a highly complex and recalcitrant substance” in the words of Pierre Boisard –  yet the women mastered this quixotic substance without a degree in microbiology. The women were undaunted, testament to their outsize personalities.

The revolution was feminism in action, modernism in action, culinary aesthetics in action. 

Their inventiveness is usually only understood or discussed as a culinary event. But it was more than that: these women created a radical new mode of expression, of artistic imagination. Milk was their tabula rasa, their blank slate, and on this blank slate they birthed something extraordinary, something unique.

“Veronica had shown Jeffa what happens when you wash the cheeses with salt and water, and I’d heard in Spain what happens if you wash rinds with wine,” says Giana Ferguson, explaining how the classic West Cork washed-rind cheeses came to be created. “The rind washing was, in my mind, a way to finish the cheese.” 

For Ireland, the result was a unique series of handmade cheeses, made with the women’s hands. “If you think of the larger cheeses, the Parmigianos, they are all made by men,” says Jeffa Gill. But look at the many small dotes of Irish cheese that now proliferate in Ireland.

These are cheeses that suit the size of a woman’s hand.