Sometimes things collude to create beauty; components merge and hatch at just the right moment and excellence is born.
Stinking Bishop belongs in this bracket. Each circular slab hums like a sweaty codpiece but smacks of delicious, complex creaminess. It hammers on the senses with foul-smelling lusciousness. The Gloucestershire cheese is a stunning deity dragged through the quagmire, and boasts far more than a fetid injection of flavour. Monks, a wife beater, the threat of extinction, and a monstrous rabbit have all played a hand in its status. It’s officially the smelliest cheese in Britain and surely only a matter of time before someone starts an e-petition to have it embellished on the St. George’s Cross.
Stinking Bishop is so bloody English, in fact, that its creator professes he “still doesn’t know how to make cheese,” demonstrating the archetypal false modesty that Americans find so bewildering. Charles Martell, a distiller and former lorry driver, creates the stuff in a village outside Gloucester. The setup is simple enough but the backstory is one of mystery, fortune, and intrigue.
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