The great cheese bazaar

When I was very young and abysmally ignorant, I would eat a strange concoction made with cheese powder mixed with milk or water, spread thickly on a piece of packaged white bread, dotted with butter and grilled speckled brown. It may sound disgusting to my rather better educated sensibilities today, but it was, in essence, a perfect cheese toast, more or less deconstructed from its sophisticated cousin, if you are willing to be polite. Soon after, I learned what cheese is actually about, and developed a passion for it that shows in my refrigerator, my shopping lists and my jeans size. Stints in Europe and the United States made names like Brie, Camembert, Ricotta, Stilton, Colby and Maytag Blue familiar additions to my vocabulary. And the hunt for the Indian equivalents began when we came back home. With a cheese-making tradition that went back so many hundreds of years, we must have progressed, was the logic. Unfortunately, for the most part, we have stayed mired in a holding pond of the curdy white stuff called paneer. Do an Internet search for ‘Indian cheese’ or ‘cheese made in India’ and the first zillion entries are paneer, with its myriad spellings.

But there has always been a slice of hope in this seemingly bleak scenario where mera Bharat is far from mahaan. About the best cooking cheese that was locally made and available was the red-rind 250-gram segments sold by Aarey dairy at their stalls around the city. Sadly, these packets soon faded out of existence, and from just walking down the road to get them to driving across from Malabar Hill where we lived then to the stall on Nariman Point, to finally never seeing the stuff again, it was a journey into a vast and cheeseless wasteland. A few years down that road, with memories of ‘Kalimpong cheese’ dancing in our deprived heads, I demanded that a friend posted with the army in Bhutan source and acquire the stuff for us. She did, with many complaints that it was smelly – which it was – too strong – ditto – and extremely sharp – halleluyah! Along the way, we also discovered a wonderfully hard and sharp Himalayan yak cheese, perfect for a sauce to smother your cauliflower with or to bake as a kind of raclette; but a reunion with the milk-food some years later from Dorabjee’s in Pune made it clear that the mind can glorify aspects of childhood.

So when I found I could explore the world of Indian-made cheeses to write this, I was pleased. In the intervening years between local produce and a rather better fed budget that could stretch to imports that did not deprive me of shoes or diamonds, I had almost forgotten to look at my own country. One day, at a small but well-stocked store in a tony part of Delhi, that awareness was awakened again. I stood at the counter at the Steak House in Jor Bagh and tasted my way through a panoply of cheese, a lot of it produced within our own borders. Kuldip Shenker, who runs the store, introduced me to Cheddar and a wonderful Gouda from Sikkim, as well as a small but significant range of products from Himachal and Delhi. I became a regular customer there for cheese, buying and bringing back to Mumbai kilos of the stuff, but all happily made in India. That is when I decided that if I could find it, I would buy local rather than foreign.

The problem is to find it in Mumbai. A quick sampler of well known cheese counters in the city showed me that imported is still an haute favourite. At the Indigo Delicatessen, for instance, a wonderfully sharp Double Gloucester rubs wax with a delicate Emmental from Germany, but Indian-made cheese “does not sell”, I was told. They did once have a cheese roll, but not too many takers. I got the same story at Hypercity, Vashi, which does have a decent cheese counter, where the salesperson told me that the cumin-spotted Gouda was from Sikkim and they also had a cheese roll from that state, though it was not in stock at that moment. At Food Bazaar in Phoenix Mills, I sometimes see small packets of cheeses from Kodai, rather pricey and perhaps not attracting too many buyers. Amul had a halfway decent Emmental, but it is close on impossible to find it these days and the website order I placed four years ago has not yet arrived – maybe I should send a reminder? ABC Farms in Pune makes a fabulous selection that is stashed in the boot of my car within minutes of my arrival there, from a tangy sharp Cheddar to a mellow smoked Scamorza to a fragrant Gouda to small tubs of delicious fresh feta. A phone call to Dairy Craft’s office in Mumbai proved hopeless, though it did show me just what most of India uses cheese for “You want it for pizza, no, madam?” was the response when I asked what cheese is available.

But the great cheese bazaar is not a distant dream any more. Various dairy companies, from the unresponsive Amul to the interestingly responsive Dairy Craft to the Delhi-based Flanders Dairy Products to Modern Dairies to the familiar ABC Farms, La Ferme Cheese in Auroville (which delivers by courier for special orders only) and so many others have started making delicious cheeses, from the red-ball Edam to the sweeter Emmental to the multi-purpose Mozarella and so many more. I am waiting for the day when I can wander down to the corner store and indulge my passion for cheese, with joy in my heart and Jana Gana Mana floating in my mind.