Truckling With Joy

As Quicke’s Cheese launches a groundbreaking partnership with a Cornish food producer, CATHERINE COURTENAY heads to the farm to meet its inspirational figurehead

- Catherine Courtenay

I’M SUPPOSED TO be at Quicke’s Farm to talk about sea salt and cheese, but conversation starts on a roll with discussions on the best places to surf in Devon and how intriguing people’s tummies look when they’re swimming.

Mary Quicke MBE enjoys a good surf, and if she can’t do that then she’s in the local pool, “keeping her upper body strength”, she says. She mentions that while swimming up and down she’ll notice everyone’s disembodied stomachs, bobbing in the water.

She finds it intriguing; which is an intriguing response in itself.

Sixty-two-year-old Mary is a sunshine person; happy, active, full of energy and taking detailed delight in both people and the natural world around her – tummies included.

Just a few weeks ago she was hiking along the Northumberland coast with a 78-year-old cheese maker. “We were finding lady’s bedstraw which it’s said can be used as a rennet,” she enthuses.

Her companion, Val Bines, is a legend in the world of cheese, a walking encyclopaedia says Mary, who is all too aware of how crucial this knowledge is.

Over the last three decades cheese making knowledge and the ability to put that knowledge into practice has been lost she says, citing the closure of Seale-Hayne and other agricultural colleges as one factor. Then there was the very near loss of all the West Country’s traditional cheese culture starters as producers opted for industrially made alternatives.

But we’re getting back on track, it seems. The starters were saved at the last minute and are safe in the care of Somerset cheese maker Barber’s; there’s a growing public interest in artisan cheeses and Mary has launched an Academy of Cheese, inspired by what she’s seen happening across the Atlantic.