Obituaries : Patrick Rance; Encouraged Traditional Cheese Making

Patrick Rance, a champion of local farmhouse cheeses in Britain, France and the United States who also wrote two of the definitive books on the subject, “The Great British Cheese Book” and “The French Cheese Book,” died Aug. 22 in Britain. He was 81.

An eccentric former military man given to wearing Hawaiian shirts and a monocle, Rance was a passionate believer that cheese was more than “just a thing to eat.” In his books and public appearances, he stressed the importance of cheese as a marker of a country’s civility: its tradition, culture, care of the countryside and enjoyment of life. He was as beloved by cheese makers as he was dreaded by government officials whose regulations so choked small farmers.

As a friend of farmhouse cheese makers, he was unparalleled. Since 1983, Rance had been cherished for his membership in and encouragement of the fledgling American Cheese Society. When it began as a relatively puny outfit intent on reintroducing sharp, mature, raw milk cheeses to a country raised on individually wrapped slices of plastic-like cheese, the odds were stacked against it.

However, in 1990, Rance traveled from London to New York to address its seventh annual meeting where, according to former society President Gerd Stern, he gave a rousing address.

“He was,” says Stern, “the primary world spokesman for cheese made on the farm, for people who love cheese rather than consider it a business.”

Born the son of a vicar in Southend-on-Sea in Essex in 1918, Rance was steered away from university into the military but, as the Times of London wryly noted in an obituary this week, he went on to become a polymath, speaking five languages and being an expert on classical music, butterflies, Shakespeare and bacteriology.

Commissioned a year before the outbreak of World War II, he was a major by age 24 and participated in the Anzio landings.

In the 1950s, married to journalist Janet Maxtone Graham, he settled in a home attached to a country store in Streatley, Berkshire. With the food revolution of the 1980s, this has become an acceptable, even upscale thing to do, but back then becoming a village provisioner was faintly shocking. Polite expectations of the time would have placed him in the Foreign Office or a bank. The only socially acceptable job concerning comestibles would have been wine merchant--seen as “not just trade.”

Then, as ever, Rance was impervious to snobbery, and the London Times recorded his 1954 alphabetical inventory as containing: “Alka Seltzer, Bombay duck, crumpets, dog food, elastic, French butter, greeting cards, hot water bottles, ice cream, Jersey milk, Kleenex, lychees, mushrooms, nylons . . . “

That year his shop stocked only three cheeses: Dutch Edam, New Zealand cheddar and Danish blue. However, by 1975 it had what the late Observer food writer Jane Grigson described as “a magnificent and odoriferous” spread of cheeses whose range and condition surpassed that of any supplier in the country.

Most of these cheeses were French, and Rance set out across Britain in search of the cheeses he remembered savoring in his childhood: cheddar, Stilton and Cheshire. To his horror, he found that World War II had all but wiped out traditional farmhouse cheese making. The state of Cheshire cheese was typical: There had been 405 farms making it before the war, but by the 1950s there were only 44.

He blamed the decline of cheeses on the disappearance of specialist shops because of supermarkets, pasteurization regulations and avarice by the giant dairies peddling processed cheeses. These created a hostile world for what he considered “real” Cheshire, meaning that made with unpasteurized milk from a single herd of traditionally grazed cattle, then cloth-bound and aged in whole rounds.

The publication of “The Great British Cheese Book” in 1982 alerted Britain to the loss of that cheese making tradition, dating back to Roman times.

One of the Cheshire cheese makers Rance championed was the Appleby family of Shropshire. Though initially taken aback when Rance greeted them wearing pajamas at his Streatley store, they credit him with their survival.

“If it hadn’t been for him, we’d have given up years ago,” said Christine Appleby. “He was the flagship of British cheese.”

Ruth Kirkham, one of the last people to make raw milk Lancashire cheese in the northwest of England, said much the same. “Other people come onto the cheese scene, but he was a genuine one,” she said. “He had a great taste for cheese, and made people aware of the little cheese makers.”

Person after person says Rance always had time for “nobodies,” that his fame among snobbish gastronomes never went to his head. It was the smallest farmers whom he held in the highest regard: “With their love and understanding of the land and the animals which provide milk for their cheeses, the makers of farmhouse cheese are the best guardians and restorers of the natural, unpolluted countryside,” he said.

He described himself as “an old fool” when, in 1984, he took on the task of writing a guide to French cheeses, of which there were famously more varieties than days in the year. By the time he finished, he had found more than 750 types. “There is one certain fact about French cheeses,” he wrote. “Practically speaking, they are innumerable.”

Ari Weinzweig, co-owner of Zingerman’s Delicatessen in Ann Arbor, Mich., was the first to introduce American cheeses to Britain. In the process he opened Rance’s eyes to a nascent American cheese movement. “He especially liked Ig Vella’s Dry Jack and Peluso’s Teleme from California,” said Weinzweig. “He was very excited that there were well-made cheeses coming from the States.”

Weinzweig remembered Rance’s patriotism as the best possible sort. “He wasn’t supportive of British cheeses in a way that excluded others,” he said. “He was as passionate about traditional foods and cheeses from other parts of the world as he was about the British ones.”

Rance is survived by seven children.