Flower Marie

Flower Marie is an artisan, soft, mould ripened cheese. The recipe was developed by the late James Aldridge and then passed on to the Golden Cross Cheese dairy in the early nineties. It is still made there with unpasteurised ewe’s milk by Kevin & Alison Blunt at Greenacres Farm, Holmes Hill, East Sussex.

James Aldridge was a scaffolder and mechanic from Lambeth who was sadly injured in a building accident. He was unable to continue working so joined his wife, Pat, as a cheesemonger in South London. Little did he know, he would soon become famous for leading a revival of specialist farmhouse cheese in the UK.
He initially focused on sourcing organic, raw milk, British cheeses for the shop that his wife and he ran, tracking down small production cheese makers and searching for those that followed natural production methods. He then moved into rind washing cheeses himself and eventually became well known for his wine washed Caerphilly. He then went on to develop many well known British cheeses including the Flower Marie, Lord of the Hundreds and Olde Sussex.
For many years, he was the go-to man for cheese advice and had a wealth of scientific knowledge that helped him improve a wide range of cheeses.
He was almost bankrupted by the UK government, who ordered the destruction of £50,000 of his cheese, due to an unrelated incident at one of his producers, despite his cheeses being tested and being proven to be uncontaminated. Despite a vast number of donations from the public, he was unable to sell the business so instead opened a cheese making school to benefit British cheese. He passed away in 2001, aged 61, but many of his cheeses continue to be made to this day.

Golden Cross Dairy is run by Kevin & Alison Blunt at Greenacres Farm, Holmes Hill, East Sussex. They have a herd of grass fed British Saanen, Toggenberg and British Alpine goats and make award winning goat’s cheeses, as well as one ewe’s milk cheese, the Flower Marie, using milk from a Friesland-Dorset ewe dairy in Stratford upon Avon.
Kevin and Alison met at University, where he was studying biochemistry and she was studying human biology and nursing. Kevin first set foot on a farm during a university summer break and then got a job as a herdsman after university, in Melton Mowbray. Alison was able to move around the country with him, until they came across a six acre smallholding in Eastbourne, while visiting Alison’s parents. They bought it in 1984 and began their farming journey, hand milking a tiny herd of goats and keeping a few free range chickens. They lived in a caravan for 5 years whilst waiting for planning permission to build a proper farmhouse, which they finally achieved in 1989.

In 2013, they installed a large solar system which produces around 35% of their energy needs. They also use a smart water heater to use the heat usually lost during the cooling process to warm their water for cleaning. The system alone can heat water to 50°.