Three grocery icons are vying for a lifetime achievement award — Kim Knight is in team cheese
Things that have stood the test of time: The Great Pyramid of Giza. Chesterfield sofas. Foil-wrapped wedges of Galaxy Blue Vein Cheese.
Tangy, a little crumbly and weirdly leaky (it’s the whey, apparently)
Galaxy Blue Vein is the cheese everybody eats and nobody talks about. Until now.
Ladies and gentlemen, crack open the Huntley & Palmers. Three-quarters of a century after a foil-wrapped triangle of stink hit our refrigerator shelves, the cheapest blue cheese in the country is getting the recognition it deserves.
In October, New Zealand Food Award judges will crown their 2023 champions.
Category finalists include an icecream made of cauliflower and a lox made from carrots. Among the products vying for top prizes are autumn venison sausages, live blackfoot pāua and 1kg jars of honey sloe gin pickled onions. It is important to celebrate innovation. Alcohol-free vanilla paste. Low-carb keto wraps. Blooming blueberry and chia pudding. Who wouldn’t want to taste Dona Lou’s Prawn Balchao? Every category will be hotly contested but in this writer’s ginger nut dunkin’ opinion, none more so than the AsureQuality Product Lifetime Achievement Award.
Set your kitchen timers, because the race is on for the three shortlisted classics: Wattie’s tomato sauce, Edmonds baking powder and good old Galaxy Blue Vein.
I know what you’re thinking. Baking powder is an ingredient. Tomato sauce is a condiment. Blue cheese has been sent to Earth by angels to give humankind a reason to get up in the morning and make quince paste.
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Advertise with NZME.It’s third time lucky for Brand Wattie’s (a finalist in 2020 and 2021) and Edmonds (nominated in 2020 and 2022), but I still don’t like their chances. If you were stranded on a desert island with just one food item, I guarantee you would not choose baking powder. If you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life (and you were not a 9-year-old boy) it would not be tomato sauce.
Previous winners of this prestigious Lifetime Achievement title include Griffin’s gingernuts, Vogel’s original mixed grain and Whittaker’s peanut slabs. I like all of these things. But do I like them more than blue cheese? Do they make me remember where I came from? Are they foods that made me?
If I think about my grandma’s kitchen, I should probably say it smelled like biscuits or fruit cake or even roast beef and gravy with puffy yorkshire pudding.
In fact, the smell I remember most is spew.
Sharp, thin, sickly. I pinch my nose, squint my eyes and clamp my mouth shut. I don’t want that smell to get in anywhere.
Grandma is in the kitchen, stirring cheerfully. “Macaroni cheese,” she says, a domestic scientist in a shirred gingham sunfrock. Her special invention sauce contains stinky, sticky blue vein and pungent, pukey parmesan. So much flavour!
I experience a kind of full-body disbelief. I have never seen blue cheese before and it is obviously mouldy. Parmesan drifts from a cylindrical shaker like vomity dandruff. How could cheese — the single most delicious food in the world — be so wrong?
I was 7 years old when Grandma let me taste her vomit cheese pasta. It was ... not as bad as I feared. And it lit a flavour flame. Teenage me was determined to try every exotic cheese I could find. In Greymouth, that meant gruyere, brie and Galaxy Blue Vein. I could barely pronounce all this worldliness.
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Advertise with NZME.Twenty years later, newly single, I was peeling the foil-wrapped Galaxy Blue Vein and plopping it into a pot of mushrooms and cream, to pour on top of a barely cooked eye fillet steak. Fungi, raw meat and blue cheese. I was substituting sex with umami dinners for one.
Galaxy Blue Vein was first produced in Eltham in the 1950s. Imagine! The era that food historians like to define in terms of over-boiled cabbage and fatty legs of hogget, was also the decade that wedges of yellow cheese were ripened with penicillin and sent forth to make the suburbs interesting.
Tomato sauce. Baking powder. Blue cheese. Outwit. Outplay. Outlast.
Galaxy Blue Vein does not lift up a pikelet nor complete a saveloy. It cannot be used to deodorise your fridge. It will not keep indefinitely in your glove box. Blue cheese is not easy to love — but it is still here.
