The Cheese Queen Of Iceland

Eirný Sigurðardóttir asserts her dominion on home turf

Eirný Sigurðardóttir is fondly known as the Iceland Cheese Queen. Believe it or not, she’s built a career out of cheese! Eirný is obsessed with milk, knows all the Icelandic artisanal producers by name, brought Icelandic skyr to the pages of “Oxford Companion to Cheese,” teaches cheese classes and even travels for cheese. She’s lived all over the world, but returned home, because Iceland needed a queen to reign over its cultured dairy.

When I was five or six months old, my family lived in a basement in Kópavogur. My mum was not happy. She saw a job advertised in Tanzania for a Danish company doing retail development. She told my father she’d divorce him if he didn’t apply for the job. A couple of months later, we moved to Africa. I was raised in Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria. I came home to Iceland for a couple of years for school, and then we left again when I was 16. I went to Scotland, and I lived in Edinburgh for 17 years.

I had a bar for nearly seven years in the middle of Edinburgh, as well as a catering company. I taught at the Edinburgh School of Food and Wine and ran a wholesale company dealing in imported marinated olives, which we sold at farmers’ markets. 

Cheese, please

When we lived in Africa, my parents got divorced. My mother married my stepfather, who is English. He would order boxes of cheese from the UK to be sent to us in Kenya and then Nigeria a couple of times a year. For us kids, every time we got one of these big boxes — Stilton, Cheddar, Wensleydale, Lancashire — it was like Christmas. Early on, I became very enamoured with cheese. 

Everywhere I worked, cheese was very important — the restaurant industry always had amazing cheese boards. I worked in French restaurants, so we had amazing cheeses from France. In my…

..

Read More