To capture a slice of life on Home Farm, we put our baker’s dozen of questions to Mary Quicke, whose family have run the Devonshire farm for 14 generations, and whose cheese we love to eat.
1. What time did you get up this morning?
6.30am.
2. How do you take your coffee?
I prefer tea. A flat white, if I must.
3. What do you usually have for breakfast?
Cheese starter (like a cheddary yogurt – yum), fruit that I grow in my garden, seeds, nuts, rolled oats and wheat germ.
4. How do you and GAIL’s know each other?
You make magic out of our cheese, butter, whey and buttermilk.
5. What’s the first food you remember loving as a child?
Poached salmon.
6. Have you ever baked bread? How did that go?
I love baking bread. My mother taught all her six children to bake the Doris Grant loaf, with wholemeal flour and a single rise. My favourite is a seedy spelt wholemeal loaf.
7. What does the smell of freshly baked bread remind you of?
Home. Comfort. Love. Happiness
8. What do you spread on your toast?
Quicke’s whey butter.
9. For us, bread is the fundamental thing. What’s fundamental for you?
Cheese! With great bread. And salad that I grow from heaps of different plants.
10. What’s in your ultimate sandwich?
Homemade wholemeal bread, or a sourdough if it’s not my own. Our whey butter and Cheddar and plenty of my salad leaves crammed in.
11. If we could give you a lifetime supply of anything we make, what would that be?
Cheese scones!
12. We work with three primary ingredients. Four if you include time. What are the main ingredients in your life and work, concrete or abstract?
Milk, starter, rennet, salt, time and love.
13. What would you do for a living if not this?
That’s difficult – maybe I’d make extraordinary flavoured salads?