In both The Annals of the Parish (1821) and The Ayrshire Legatees (1820), John Galt mentions Delap-cheese. While of course the works are fiction, there was a particular type of cheese that originated in Ayrshire and would have been popular when Galt was a boy in Irvine. It is called Dunlop cheese.
Dunlop cheese takes its name from the Dunlop, a village in
Ayrshire where it was supposedly first made.
The story goes that a woman named Barbara Gilmour, a farmer’s wife, was
the first to introduce the cheese in Ayrshire.
It is said that Barbara went to Ireland to avoid the troubles around the
time of the Covenanters and it was there that she saw the process which she
thought improved the taste and texture of cheese. On returning home around 1688, she applied it
in her own dairy, and the cheese became very popular and was produced
throughout Ayrshire and other parts of Scotland.
In The Ayrshire Legatees, Mrs Pringle in a letter from London to her friend Miss Mally Glencairn describing her preparations for her journey to London writes –
“and in the same bocks with them I packit a small crock of our ain excellent poudered butter, with a Delap cheese, for I was told that such commodities are not to be had genuine in London.”
John Galt has his own version of the origins of the cheese. In Annals of the Parish The Rev Micah Balwhidder describes his future wife -
“Soon after this, the time was drawing near for my second
marriage. I had placed my affections,
with due consideration, on Miss Lizy Kibbock, the well brought-up daughter of
Mr Joseph Kibbock of the Gorbyholm, who was the first that made a speculation
in the farming way in Ayrshire, and whose cheese were of such an excellent
quality, that they have, under the name of Delap-cheese, spread far and wide of
the civilized world.”
Dunlop cheese was well known throughout Scotland and thought especially good for roasting and spread on oat cakes.
