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Caboc

Soft, double-cream cheese rolled in toasted pinhead oatmeal to make logs about 10cm long, 4cm diameter. Weight: 125g. Colour: cream inside, grey oatmeal outside. Flavour: rich cream, buttery with a mild tang.

In the period prior to the Highland Clearances the native soft cheese of Viking and Pictish ancestry was made by every crofter with surplus milk. Its demise came with the increase in sheep farming and shooting estates, putting an end to the crofter's system of taking his cattle, sheep and goats to the mountain grazings in summer where the women and children made the peasant cheese known as crowdie. A recipe for a richer cheese, made for the clan chiefs, is reputed to he the oldest historical record of a traditional Scottish cheese. It has been passed down through the female line of the descendants of Mariota de Ile, a daughter of a fifteenth-century Macdonald of the Isles. The present descendant, and owner of the recipe, Susanna Stone, has revived the cheese, making it in her creamery in Tam where she began by making the crofters' cheese, crowdie, in the early 1960s (see below). A pioneer of the post-war farmhouse cheese-making revival, she called the oatmeal coated chieftain's cheese Caboc, a derivation from the Scots word for any round cheese 'kebbuck'. Others cheese-makers have copied the recipe with varying degrees of success and the cheese is now established in the Scottish speciality cheese market. The recipe uses pasteurized milk from cattle on 3 designated farms. 'This soft, double-cream cheese is made with lactic acid but no rennet and the logs are finished by rolling in toasted pinhead oatmeal before packing. The exact method is a trade secret.