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10/08/10 - Stilton toastie suppers and no cheese dreams for our blue-veined blogger, Neil Sowerby

I DON’T often dip into Australian Men’s Health Magazine. I sympathise with any guy who’s recovering from croc or shark bite (or who’s contracted something nasty Down Under), but I suspect if I wrote in with my minor ailments I’d be dismissed as a whingeing Pom.
 
But cheese dreams, now that’s a universal trouble to mind and body. Little did I think Men’s Health would trouble itself with the nightmare effects of a post-dinner cheeseboard.
 
Yet here they are recently quoting research commissioned by the British Cheese Board and qualified by Neil Stanley, director of sleep research at the University of Surrey.

 

It was based upon 200 volunteers scoffing 20 grams of cheese 30 minutes before bed. Some 75 per cent of male Stilton eaters apparently experience quite bizarre dreams – a typical one involved a vegetarian crocodile (sic) upset because it could not eat children.

Meanwhile two-thirds of cheddar-lovers have celebrity-based dreams. Not about Paris Stilton, obviously. Red Leicester stimulates nostalgia and poor mellow Cheshire is the least dream-inducing.
Meanwhile, a study by researchers at Laval University in Canada found people who slept more than nine hours a night were 25 per cent more likely to gain five kilograms over six years than people who clocked up between seven and eight hours. Were cheese suppers involved? We need to be told.
 
Still even the prospect of a purple werewolf painting my toenails in a dream, say, is not going to stop me indulging in my latest passion – late night Stilton toasties. With bacon and pomegranate seeds and thinly sliced walnut bread if you can find it. Delicious. Two even better, with a glass of stout. And a dreamless night guaranteed.
 
MY recent blog about Stilton in literature provoked an odd little scholarly response about TS Eliot taking umbrage over a proposed statue to Stilton. Back in 1935, the Nobel Prize-winning poet wrote a letter to The Times supporting Sir John Squire’s “manly and spirited defence of Stilton cheese” while rejecting his plan for a national Stiltonian Monument.

 

Instead, Eliot recommended the formation of a Society for the Preservation of Ancient Cheeses, but showed his own lack of discrimination by declaring the “inferiority of even the finest Stilton to a noble old Cheshire when in prime condition.” (He also at one point called Wensleydale the Mozart of cheese.)
 
The following year, 1936, the Stilton Cheesmakers Association was formed, a much more progressive outfit than an Ancient Cheese Preservation gang. Witness the year-on popularity of Blue Stilton, while Eliot’s reputation has been on the wane. There’s still time to get that statue built, though. Atop a hill overlooking the A1, a giant crusty truckle perhaps. The Big Cheese around here. Poetic justice.