Can anyone tell me why it’s so flipping hard for restaurants to give you enough bread/crackers to go with your cheeseboard?
When you order a cheeseboard, you expect to get a selection of small pieces of very tasty cheese. The kind of cheese you eat a bit of at a time as opposed to scoffing segment of Dairy Lea in one mouthful. So it is nice to have lots of crackers and/or bread to eat the cheese with.
When I go to French places, the bread/cracker supply is usually fine. At dependable French wine bar Beaujolais, if you order cheese or pate (or any food, now that I think about it), you get a basket of delicious bread and butter and when that basket of bread looks like it might shortly be empty, someone fills it up. You don’t have to ask.
But twice this week I have ordered cheeseboards in pubs that pride themselves on doing good food and twice the number of crackers has only marginally been greater than the number of pieces of cheese on a board.
Sample cheeseboard one: the cheeseboard at a pub called The Coach & Horses in Clerkenwell, for £8.25. It most definitely prides itself on being a gastropub and I went there for a food-based quiz, where the entrance fee included a sample of some of the menu and everyone who worked there was completely lovely and welcoming, as were the quiz hosts.
As a pub selling itself on its ‘foodie’ credentials, you’d think they could get a cheeseboard right. Well… the cheese was nice, I’ll say that.
But, I suppose BECAUSE it was a ‘foodie’ pub, instead of giving us bread or any commercial cheese crackers, they’d made their own – some kind of sweetish cookie type thing that had been over baked (they didn’t look burnt but when you smelled the backs of the cookies, you could clearly tell they’d been in the oven for a few minutes more than was ideal).
I have to call these cookies not crackers because, well, they crumbled. They were not at all robust. Also not what you want in a cheese cracker. And as if that wasn’t annoying enough, there were about eight tiny cookies and four pieces of cheese.
I know: awful food and such small portions. My point is… YOU NEEDED MORE THINGS TO PUT THE CHEESE ON.
Furthermore, this cheeseboard was served with what appeared to be a side of extremely over-cooked morello cherry jam (the menu only says they serve their cheese with ‘preserve’). It had the consistency Marmite, but much firmer. It tasted OK, if you’d wanted a sweet thing to put on a scone (except it was so thick you couldn’t spread it on anything). There’s no way I’d have served it to anyone.
Sample cheeseboard two: The Black Dog in Vauxhall, costing £7. Again, it makes a big point of doing the food thing, with a big open kitchen, and the staff were all really keen and friendly. Nice.
The cheeseboard arrives and this time it’s accompanied by Carr’s Water Crackers, which is good, I like that. But… only about eight crackers for four pieces of cheese.
These cheeses aren’t like a piece of farmhouse supermarket cheddar, you don’t eat a huge hunk of them! They’re really tasty, so a little bit goes a long way. You don’t eat half a piece of cheese per biscuit!
I was already in High Dudgeon over the issue of cracker distribution because of the Coach and Horses and this time, I wasn’t going to just sit back and … eat cheese without crackers. So I asked for more crackers from the bartender, who then asked the chef, whose body language appeared to be saying: “I VERY MUCH BEGRUDGE THEE AN EXTRA 50 PENCE WORTH OF CRACKERS.”
Furthermore (again), the Black Dog cheeseboard was served with a dish of what is billed as ‘apple and pear chutney’, but it had a very wet consistency and was more like a Christmas-spiced compote than a chutney. Like the Marmite-textured jam, it might be vaguely OK in a weird way to serve with cheese, but it’s not by any means the best thing to serve with cheese. So why serve it?
In summary, my rules for a good cheeseboard.
Nice cheese
Plentiful plain crackers and/or bread (go crazy and work on a ratio of say 5 pieces of bread for every piece of cheese)
DON’T SERVE IT WITH MORELLO CHERRY JAM OR CHRISTMAS SPICED-COMPOTE THAT YOU’VE MISTAKENLY CALLED CHUTNEY.
P.S. Also, The Black Dog, three pieces of toasted bread with all that smoke salmon pate is also not enough!
