Nanterrow is a fresh cheese: i.e its ready to eat very quickly. A ewes' milk cheese, it's soft, very delicate tasting and frankly rather wonderful, made by Caryl and John Minson at Menallack Farm near Penryn in Cornwall. They also make Menallack itself, and another sheeps cheese - but a really firm one, by contrast - called Tala.
Nanterrow's great, with a lovely fresh, lemony flavour. It comes either plain or flavoured with herbs (as in the pic), and is sold in portions of about 500g.
Vegetarian
More about Menallack Farm and its cheeses
John was a telecom engineer who lived all over (La Paz, the Yemen ...) before retiring to Cornwall with his wife Caryl in the 1980s. Inspired by a cheesmaker they'd met in Wales, Caryl started making cheese at Menallack, originally using milk from their own herd. At that time there were only three cheesemakers in Cornwall! Until her death in 2007, Caryl was the driving force at Menallack, and became an inpsiration to others wanting to tread a similar path.
Today Menallack is run by John with the help of right-hand-woman Jess (though he'd put it the other way around!). When you arrive at the farm there's a shop to your left, the cheese room itself to the right, and in the middle is the generous granite farmhouse. All in all seven people work here turning out - wait for it - sixteen different cheeses. That's the amazing thing! Unlike other makers who concentrate on one type of cheese, perhaps with a couple of variations, Menallack make hard cheese, soft cheese, blue cheese, flavoured cheeses, and use every sort of milk you can think of. Alright, not beaver. But everything else!
Click on the small picture to see the view from Menallack Farm!
