The Menu: The legacy of Veronica Steele

One recent evening, towards the tail end of his annual Christmas sojourn in West Cork, The Menu purchased a little ‘dote’ of his favourite of all cheeses, Milleens, to enjoy by the fire with a fine vino, still intent on staving off the return to reality for another few days. 

But the following morning reality came knocking loudly on the door with the very sad news of the death, in Castletownbere, on January 4, of Veronica Steele, creator of the aforementioned internationally renowned, multiple award-winning Irish farmhouse cheese.

For such a small country, we now have a national ‘cheeseboard’ of Irish farmhouse cheeses fit to hold its own with any of the great cheese-producing nations of the world but without Veronica Steele and her original experimentation in the 1970s with the excess milk of a cow called Brisket, it is entirely possible this modern cheese revolution would never have come to pass for such a venture was entirely at odds with then-State agricultural policy and, furthermore, a domestic market was almost non-existent for such a cheese, a soft, washed-rind cheese sporting a high, pungent aroma, extremely challenging for those only used to the bland, sweaty, plastic-wrapped offerings, the fruits of the rapidly industrialising national dairy sector.