The Devil's Larder

51

IT’S SAID THAT cheese is milk that has grown up, fresh milk transformed by time. If so, then what is boysie tart? A senile dish, turned bitter by the years? It’s made from old blue cheese, matured — ignored — enough to be as hard and slippery as a horse’s hoof.

The cheese is difficult, too gnarled to cut easily. You can only chisel and pare it into hard slivers, the devil’s nail clippings. It won’t be edible until you’ve baked it with sultanas, prunes and well-hung game — a scrub fowl’s best — in a sourdough case. Old cheese, old fruit, old yeast, old meat. All carcasses. For New Year’s Eve, the last meal of the dying year.

If you’ve an orange that’s gone hard and turned to parchment, then squeeze what reasty juice remains onto the tart. Then dine the old year out, with timid forks, with ancient friends. This is the taste of those dishonoured resolutions that have left their pungent marks throughout the house, those perfidies that have the gift of ageing cheese, and souring yeast, and shrivelling the plums and grapes, and putrefying meat.

Tomorrow is another year. Fresh milk.