Kappacasein.

Kappacasein makes raw cow's-milk cheese in a railway arch under the main line out of London Bridge, and sells it a few minutes' walk away at Borough Market. The milk comes from one farm: Commonwork, on the Bore Place estate in Kent, organic, and the make runs only in the months the cows are out on grass, May to July. 2 The hard wheels carry the word Bermondsey pressed into the side. 1

Oglethorpe says it himself: It's just because I can't buy a farm. 1 So the milk makes the journey every morning instead of the cheesemaker making it once. The London Restaurant Awards made his stall the city's favourite in 2017, and Harden's has carried it since. 4

The day starts in the dark. Oglethorpe drives from Streatham to Chiddingstone in Kent, collects six hundred litres, and is back in the arch before the market opens: Already Bill had been awake since quarter to four. 1 The milk goes into a hundred-year-old copper vat still warm, never chilled and never pasteurised. 1 The starter is not bought in. A fresh one is grown every week from the same farm's unpasteurised milk and a little live yoghurt, which is what lets the cheese taste of the season rather than of a culture packet. 2 The curd comes out by arm: a narrow strip of metal with a cloth wrapped round it like a flag, both ends held, and Oglethorpe leaning into the whey to gather it. 1 The whey left behind becomes that morning's ricotta. The wheels go into the next arch for up to a year, and every Wednesday each one is "either washed or stroked, to spread the mould evenly", then turned. 1

Oglethorpe grew up in Zambia, took a Swiss missionary's suggestion to agricultural school in Switzerland, and came out with what he calls a certificate of competence: I'm a qualified peasant. 1 He learned the make itself on a farm in Provence, and he started on his own while working for Neal's Yard Dairy, whose Borough shop is now a few doors from his counter. 1 What he says he is doing with the milk is the answer a modernist would give and a farmer would recognise: I'm interested in transformation. 1 His limit on his own hand is the other half of it. "Nature's that much more complicated, he told Spitalfields Life, if you let it do its own thing that's much interesting to me than trying to impose anything." 1

Borough Market is where the cheese goes. Two hot things come off the counter and the rest of the case is wheels to take away: raclette scraped over new potatoes with baby gherkins and pickled onions, and the toastie, which holds "Montgomery cheddar, Ogleshield, London raclette, comte, onions and leeks sandwiched between slices of sourdough". 5 Two of those cheeses are his and the rest are bought in, which is worth knowing before you decide the sandwich is the point. Jonathan Nunn thinks it is not: the toastie "is good but it's not worth a queue, and you can just buy the cheese and make it yourself". 6 Neal's Yard Dairy published Oglethorpe's own recipe so that you can, and the one instruction that matters is the heat. Toast it hot and fast, because at a lower temperature for longer "the cheese will liquify too much and it will result in a less concentrated flavour". 3 Harden's reporters have a tip for the crush: eat it down by the river. 4

Oglethorpe has been selling that sandwich at Borough since 2003, which Neal's Yard Dairy dates for him while calling it the unofficial best toastie in town. 3 The counter came first and the permanent shop came later, and Harden's marks the return: a stall that won the city in 2017 now has a site selling the toasties, the raclette and the cheese from the dairy. 4 The part that has not changed is the season. A cheese pressed in July is the one you buy in March, and nothing is made in the months the cows are inside. 2