Stilton
Cheese
Top 10 pairings
Stilton is England's classic blue cheese — a tall, cloth-bound cylinder of pasteurised cow's milk, its pale, slightly crumbly ivory paste shot through with blue-green veins of Penicillium roqueforti. Rich, savoury and tangy with a gentle peppery bite, it is famous as Christmas-table cheese and is often eaten with port. A separate, rarer White Stilton is the same cheese left un-inoculated, so it stays mild, crumbly and unveined.
Picking a good onedrag
Ivory paste, blue veins, natural brown crustMould that isn't the veining
Well wrappedEveryday bestPasteurised by PDO rule, yet the FSA lists blue-veined cheese as a listeria risk if pregnant, older or immunocompromised: cook it till steaming hot.
The cut faceSame colours, the face a touch dry where it met the air