I made Cotsold several times using Tim Smith’s recipe. I saw a lot of pictures of the cheese on Google Images, searching for “Cotswold”.
But I never tasted the original. So when a friend was going for a holiday in the Cotswolds UK, I asked her to bring me some.
She went to a cheese shop in the Cotswolds and asked for Cotswold. What? Cotswold! Well, it turned out that it’s not known there under this name.
OK, the book of Tim Smith says this cheese is also known (or is a variant of) as Double Gloucester, but I would have expected that in the Cotswolds they had known it under this name…

I’ve heard it called English Pub Cheese too.  I haven’t made any for a couple years, but it was a very stout flavored cheese.

I have made it a few times also. It has a lot of onion flavor. I have not seen any for sale anywhere. At the Dekalb World Market they sort the cheese by the country it comes from and I haven’t seen any in there at all.

‘Cotswold’ is the variant of Gloucester (pron. gloss-ster) cheese which is name-trademarked by Long Clawson Dairy, so it may be known locally by the dairy name. Long Clawson Dairy is also one of only 7 places allowed to use the name Stilton. I had the pleasure of a ‘local’ cheese plate when visiting Melton Mowbray in the summer and Cotswold was one of them; it’s a red cheese with green speckles from the chives. The menu called it ‘Cotswold.’

Well, good to hear that some people in the UK do know Cotswold cheese. Our friend brought us 3 different cheeses but didn’t remember exactly the names she was told in the cheese shop. Burford and Ashcroft she thought. One is smelling like the house were is was made was burned down and the firemen had saved the cheese just before it melted, but it’s tasting delicious. The other ones I didn’t taste yet.