We’ve been kicking around London since Wednesday. One of my main pilgrimages when I’m in town is to visit Neal’s Yard Dairy in my old neighborhood of Covent Garden. After a wide range of nibbles, we headed home with some Sleightlett, an unbearably soft tasting unpasteurized goats milk cheese and Westcombe, a slightly strong and peppery English cheddar, both made in Somerset. To those we added two Irish cheeses, a Crozier, a creamy bleu made from sheep’s milk made in Tipperary, and Ardrahan, a pungent smelling yet delicate tasting washed rind cow’s milk cheese from County Cork, Ireland. Not enough people think of cheese as a souvenir. I’m seriously contemplating how I can get a whole load of it into my suitcase.
I love Neals Yard- one of my saddest travel moments was having several pounds of cheese taken at customs ! I learned my lesson. Eat first.
We always stop at Neals Yard on the morning before we fly home to Seatle and have never had our cheese taken away at customs. It’s not meat and it’s not alive, so it shouldn’t be confiscated, and never has been for us. Neals Yard is truly a treasure. Some of their cheese is available in the US, but they told us once that they don’t send the same stuff here as is available in the UK–partly a travel/aging/care problem and partly because their sense of US tastes that we don’t appreciate the subtlety their UK customers have.