It wouldn’t be summer without a trip to Mary Quicke’s in Devon. This time we’re particularly excited, carrying a box of our new summer buns: buttery brioche filled with sweet Datterini tomatoes, fresh basil and, most importantly, Mary’s own cheese curds. We can’t wait for her to try one.
Mary is a 14th-generation dairy farmer who makes cloth-bound cheddar. We’ve been buying her cheese for so many years that somewhere along the way she became part of our story, and as we’ve baked her cheddar into quiches, scones, breads, crackers and brioches, her business has grown alongside ours.
Mary is one of the people who taught us how much can come from really knowing those who make our ingredients. Her cheese has deepened our appreciation of provenance, but working with her has shaped us in other ways too. Spend enough time with someone who has devoted her life to one craft and you inevitably begin looking at your own differently.
The cheddaring process.
Our seasonal buns began with something Mary introduced us to: cheese curds. Curds are the fresh, solid pieces separated from the whey during cheesemaking. Soft, creamy and irresistibly squeaky, they would usually continue through the cheddaring process to become cheese, but we loved them just as they were and began cooking with them. Eventually, they found their place at our baker’s table.
The dairy farm.
Mary Quicke in her farmhouse garden.
En route to Mary’s family home, the road gets steadily bumpier. On a hill, with thick forest below and a large garden wrapped around it, the whitewashed, 16th-century house feels enclosed by the natural world. There isn’t a single bar of phone reception either.
Our shoulders relax.
For this visit, Mary’s daughter Jane will be joining us for lunch. We’re having tea around Mary’s kitchen dining table, nibbling on homemade tortilla, when she arrives.
“JANE!” says Mary mid-sentence, jumping up to give her daughter a hug.
She’s arrived straight from the airport, having been at a cheese conference in New York, and the pair haven’t seen each other for three weeks.
“You’ll get to see us being extra nice to each other today,” Jane jokes.
Mary picking flowers for lunch.
We all head out to Mary’s vegetable garden, where they pick salad leaves and edible flowers to serve with lunch. Over the past couple of years, Jane has taken over running the family business, with Mary now a director.
Mary and her daughter Jane.
“Jane is super capable,” Mary says. “She understands the science of everything and has a much more structured way of thinking.”
In fact, when we first became interested in using the fresh curds, the farm’s environmental health officer wasn’t sure they could sell them to us. Curds simply weren’t something Quicke’s had sold in this way before. It was Jane who eventually found a way to make it possible. We’re very glad she did.
Lifting fresh curds from the whey.
“But you’ve blazed a trail for me, and for so many other women in food, Mum,” says Jane.
“She was a female farmer in the 80s, and so challenged a lot of assumptions about gender in farming.”
Soon after Mary started running the family business in 1987, she went to the Oxford Farming Conference for the first time and found herself in a room of 400 men and three women.
“Your father must be so disappointed that one of your brothers didn’t take the farm on,” one of the male attendees said to her.
“I think I might have sworn at him,” Mary tells us.
She describes her younger self as “a bit arrogant”, but wonders if it was a defence mechanism.
“If people are challenging your right to be there, you tend to get a bit more exaggerated and expressive. A bit more in your face,” she says.
The cloth for the clothbound cheddar, and Quicke’s whey butter hand rolled.
In cheese, there was another history at play. Before industrial cheesemaking, the dairy was often the domain of women. Men may have been running the farm, but their wives were the craftspeople making the cheese, cream and butter.
“There were a lot of amazing ladies in cheese who were dairy advisors,” says Mary. “The ones with all that knowledge. I feel like I’m a successor, learning at the hands of some of those extraordinary women.”
That lineage runs through Mary’s own family. Her mother, Prue Quicke, built the cheese dairy, having left home at 16 to go to art school and continuing to paint throughout her life while raising six children. Mary’s grandmother, a “formidable lady” called Constance Quicke, ran the farming business while her husband was fighting in the Second World War.
“So maybe in my family there is a tradition where women aren’t just sitting with their hands in their lap,” says Mary.
She and Jane continue chatting about their family history as they finish gathering ingredients for the salad. As we make our way back towards the house, Mary regularly interrupts herself to point out a favourite plant, from the wild thistles that grow there to the roses, poppies and nigellas she has planted herself.
“Our world is very precious,” she says. “And all of us are connected by food. There must be something about breaking bread, eating together, recognising each other’s humanity, that is a stand for peace.”
The table’s set.
By now, it’s time for lunch. We sit around a table together against a border thick with cosmos and goldenrod.
Along with the brioches and cheeseboard are bags of our Waste Not Cheese Crackers. Another idea that came from our friendship with Mary, we make the crackers with her cheese offcuts that would otherwise go to waste.
Our relationship with Mary has often grown in exactly this way, by looking more closely at what already exists. The whey left from cheesemaking gives us the butter we use at GAIL’s. Cheese offcuts become crackers. And fresh curds, something Quicke’s hadn’t previously sold in this way, found a new life in our bakeries.
Most curds continue through the cheddaring process and into maturation, a journey that can take up to a couple of years before the cheese is ready to sell. Finding a use for some of them while they are still fresh gives a small cheesemaker like Mary something very different: immediacy. For us, it gives our bakers another exceptional ingredient to work with.
And as we have grown, so has the amount of Quicke’s cheese we buy. Today, more than half of the cheddar we buy comes from Quicke’s.
That relationship mattered particularly during Covid. As restaurants and food businesses closed, many of the orders that cheesemakers depended on disappeared almost overnight. GAIL’s was fortunate to keep trading strongly, and we kept buying. We used Mary’s cheese in our bakes and began selling her cheese and butter directly from our bakery fridges, helping to keep demand high at a moment when Quicke’s needed it most. It made something we had perhaps always understood instinctively feel very real: when you choose to grow alongside small craftspeople, being a good customer matters most when things become difficult.
Fresh cheddar curds, Datterini tomatoes and basil in the GAIL’s summer brioche bun.
At last, Mary takes a bite of her cheese curd brioche.
“Exquisite,” she says.
“You've got that concentrated essence of tomato, the basil, which obviously goes amazingly, and then the cheese just sort of lusciously rounding it out. I'm deeply excited by that.”
