BOB BROWN

The Complete Book
of Cheese

Illustrations by Eric Blegvad

Author of

THE WINE COOK BOOK

AMERICA COOKS

10,000 SNACKS

SALADS AND HERBS

THE SOUTH AMERICAN COOK BOOK

SOUPS, SAUCES AND GRAVIES

THE VEGETABLE COOK BOOK

LOOK BEFORE YOU COOK!

THE EUROPEAN COOK BOOK

THE WINING AND DINING QUIZ

MOST FOR YOUR MONEY

OUTDOOR COOKING

FISH AND SEAFOOD COOK BOOK

THE COUNTRY COOK BOOK

Co-author of Food and Drink Books by The Browns

LET THERE BE BEER!

HOMEMADE HILARITY

PHIL

ALPERT

Turophile Extraordinary

I Remember Cheese

Cheese market day in a town in the north of Holland. All the
cheese-fanciers are out, thumping the cannon-ball Edams and the
millstone Goudas with their bare red knuckles, plugging in with
a hollow steel tool for samples. In Holland the business of
judging a crumb of cheese has been taken with great seriousness
for centuries. The abracadabra is comparable to that of the
wine-taster or tea-taster. These Edamers have the trained ear
of music-masters and, merely by knuckle-rapping, can tell down
to an air pocket left by a gas bubble just how mature the
interior is.

The connoisseurs use gingerbread as a mouth-freshener; and
I, too, that sunny day among the Edams, kept my gingerbread
handy and made my way from one fine cheese to another, trying
out generous plugs from the heaped cannon balls that looked
like the ammunition dump at Antietam.

I remember another market day, this time in
Lucerne. All morning I stocked up on good Schweizerkäse
and better Gruyère. For lunch I had cheese salad. All
around me the farmers were rolling two-hundred-pound
Emmentalers, bigger than oxcart wheels. I sat in a little
café, absorbing cheese and cheese lore in equal
quantities. I learned that a prize cheese must be chock-full
of equal-sized eyes, the gas holes produced during
fermentation. They must glisten like polished bar glass. The
cheese itself must be of a light, lemonish yellow. Its
flavor must be nutlike. (Nuts and Swiss cheese complement
each other as subtly as Gorgonzola and a ripe banana.) There
are, I learned, “blind” Swiss cheeses as well, but the
million-eyed ones are better.

But I don’t have to hark back to Switzerland and Holland for
cheese memories. Here at home we have increasingly taken over
the cheeses of all nations, first importing them, then
imitating them, from Swiss Engadine to what we call Genuine
Sprinz. We’ve naturalized Scandinavian Blues and smoked browns
and baptized our own Saaland Pfarr in native whiskey. Of fifty
popular Italian types we duplicate more than half, some fairly
well, others badly.

We have our own legitimate offspring too, beginning with the
Pineapple, supposed to have been first made about 1845 in
Litchfield County, Connecticut. We have our own creamy
Neufchâtel, New York Coon, Vermont Sage, the delicious
Liederkranz, California Jack, Nuworld, and dozens of others,
not all quite so original.

And, true to the American way, we’ve organized
cheese-eating. There’s an annual cheese week, and a cheese
month (October). We even boast a mail-order Cheese-of-the-Month
Club. We haven’t yet reached the point of sophistication,
however, attained by a Paris cheese club that meets regularly.
To qualify for membership you have to identify two hundred
basic cheeses, and you have to do it blindfolded.

This is a test I’d prefer not to submit to, but in my
amateur way I have during the past year or two been sharpening
my cheese perception with whatever varieties I
could encounter around New York. I’ve run into briny
Caucasian Cossack, Corsican Gricotta, and exotics like
Rarush Durmar, Travnik, and Karaghi La-la. Cheese-hunting is
one of the greatest—and least competitively
crowded—of sports. I hope this book may lead others to
give it a try.

The Big Cheese

One of the world’s first outsize cheeses officially weighed
in at four tons in a fair at Toronto, Canada, seventy years
ago. Another monstrous Cheddar tipped the scales at six tons in
the New York State Fair at Syracuse in 1937.

Before this, a one-thousand-pounder was fetched all the way
from New Zealand to London to star in the Wembley Exposition of
1924. But, compared to the outsize Syracusan, it looked like a
Baby Gouda. As a matter of fact, neither England nor any of her
great dairying colonies have gone in for mammoth jobs, except
Canada, with that four-tonner shown at Toronto.

We should mention two historic king-size Chesters. You can
find out all about them in Cheddar Gorge, edited by Sir
John Squire. The first of them weighed 149 pounds, and was the
largest made, up to the year 1825. It was proudly presented to
H.R.H. the Duke of York. (Its heft almost tied the 147-pound
Green County wheel of Wisconsin Swiss presented
by the makers to President Coolidge in 1928 in appreciation
of his raising the protective tariff against genuine Swiss
to 50 percent.) While the cheese itself weighed a mite under
150, His Royal Highness, ruff, belly, knee breeches, doffed
high hat and all, was a hundred-weight heavier, and thus
almost dwarfed it.

It was almost a century later that the second
record-breaking Chester weighed in, at only 200 pounds. Yet it
won a Gold Medal and a Challenge Cup and was presented to the
King, who graciously accepted it. This was more than Queen
Victoria had done with a bridal gift cheese that tipped the
scales at 1,100 pounds. It took a whole day’s yield from 780
contented cows, and stood a foot and eight inches high,
measuring nine feet, four inches around the middle. The
assembled donors of the cheese were so proud of it that they
asked royal permission to exhibit it on a round of country
fairs. The Queen assented to this ambitious request, perhaps
prompted by the exhibition-minded Albert. The publicity-seeking
cheesemongers assured Her Majesty that the gift would be
returned to her just as soon as it had been exhibited. But the
Queen didn’t want it back after it was show-worn. The donors
began to quarrel among themselves about what to do with the
remains, until finally it got into Chancery where so many lost
causes end their days. The cheese was never heard of again.

While it is generally true that the bigger the cheese the
better, (much the same as a magnum bottle of champagne is
better than a pint), there is a limit to the obesity of a
block, ball or brick of almost any kinds of cheese. When they
pass a certain limit, they lack homogeneity and are not nearly
so good as the smaller ones. Today a good magnum size for an
exhibition Cheddar is 560 pounds; for a prize Provolone, 280
pounds; while a Swiss wheel of only 210 will draw crowds to any
food-shop window.

Yet by and large it’s the monsters that get into the Cheese
Hall of Fame and come down to us in song and story. For
example, that four-ton Toronto affair inspired a cheese poet,
James McIntyre, who doubled as the local undertaker.

An ode to a one hundred percent American mammoth was
inspired by “The Ultra-Democratic, Anti-Federalist Cheese of
Cheshire.” This was in the summer of 1801 when the patriotic
people of Cheshire, Massachusetts, turned out en masse to
concoct a mammoth cheese on the village green for presentation
to their beloved President Jefferson. The unique demonstration
occurred spontaneously in jubilant commemoration of the
greatest political triumph of a new country in a new
century—the victory of the Democrats over the
Federalists. Its collective making was heralded in Boston’s
Mercury and New England Palladium, September 8,
1801:

This spirited achievement of early democracy is commemorated
today by a sign set up at the ancient and honorable town of
Cheshire, located between Pittsfield and North Adams, on Route
8.

Jefferson’s speech of thanks to the democratic people of
Cheshire rings out in history: “I look upon this cheese as a
token of fidelity from the very heart of the people of this
land to the great cause of equal rights to all men.”

This popular presentation started a tradition. When Van
Buren succeeded to the Presidency, he received a similar
mammoth cheese in token of the high esteem in which
he was held. A monstrous one, bigger than the Jeffersonian,
was made by New Englanders to show their loyalty to
President Jackson. For weeks this stood in state in the hall
of the White House. At last the floor was a foot deep in the
fragments remaining after the enthusiastic Democrats had
eaten their fill.

Foreign Greats

In 1953 the United States Department of Agriculture
published Handbook No. 54, entitled Cheese Varieties and
Descriptions, with this comment: “There probably are only
about eighteen distinct types or kinds of natural cheese.” All
the rest (more than 400 names) are of local origin, usually
named after towns or communities. A list of the best-known
names applied to each of these distinct varieties or groups is
given:

May we nominate another dozen to form our
own Cheese Hall of Fame? We begin our list with a partial
roll call of the big Blues family and end it with members of
the monastic order of Port-Salut Trappist that includes
Canadian Oka and our own Kentucky thoroughbred.

The Blues that Are Green

Stilton, Roquefort and Gorgonzola form the triumvirate that
rules a world of lesser Blues. They are actually green, as
green as the mythical cheese the moon is made of.

In almost every, land where cheese is made you can sample a
handful of lesser Blues and imitations of the invincible three
and try to classify them, until you’re blue in the face. The
best we can do in this slight summary is to mention a few of
the most notable, aside from our own Blues of Minnesota,
Wisconsin, Oregon and other states that major in cheese.

Danish Blues are popular and splendidly made, such as
“Flower of Denmark.” The Argentine competes with a pampas-grass
Blue all its own. But France and England are the leaders in
this line, France first with a sort of triple triumvirate
within a triumvirate—Septmoncel, Gex, and Sassenage, all
three made with three milks mixed together: cow, goat and
sheep. Septmoncel is the leader of these, made in the Jura
mountains and considered by many French caseophiles to outrank
Roquefort.

This class of Blue or marbled cheese is called fromage
persillé, as well as fromage bleu and pate bleue.
Similar mountain cheeses are made in Auvergne and Aubrac and
have distinct qualities that have brought them fame, such as
Cantal, bleu d’Auvergne Guiole or Laguiole, bleu de Salers, and
St. Flour. Olivet and Queville come within the color scheme,
and sundry others such as Champoléon, Journiac, Queyras
and Sarraz.

Of English Blues there are several celebrities beside
Stilton and Cheshire Stilton. Wensleydale was one in the early
days, and still is, together with Blue Dorset, the deepest
green of them all, and esoteric Blue Vinny, a choosey cheese
not liked by everybody, the favorite of Thomas Hardy.

Brie

Sheila Hibben once wrote in The New Yorker:

I can’t imagine any difference of opinion about Brie’s being
the queen of all cheeses, and if there is any such difference,
I shall certainly ignore it. The very shape of Brie—so
uncheese-like and so charmingly fragile—is exciting. Nine
times out of ten a Brie will let you down—will be all
caked into layers, which shows it is too young, or at the
over-runny stage, which means it is too old—but when you
come on the tenth Brie, coulant to just the right,
delicate creaminess, and the color of fresh, sweet butter, no
other cheese can compare with it.

The season of Brie, like that of oysters, is simple to
remember: only months with an “R,” beginning with September,
which is the best, bar none.

Caciocavallo

From Bulgaria to Turkey the Italian “horse cheese,” as
Caciocavallo translates, is as universally popular as it is at
home and in all the Little Italics throughout the rest of the
world. Flattering imitations are made and named after it, as
follows:

A horse’s head printed on the cheese gave rise to its
popular name and to the myth that it is made of mare’s milk. It
is, however, curded from cow’s milk, whole or partly skimmed,
and sometimes from water buffalo; hard, yellow and so buttery
that the best of it, which comes from Sorrento, is called
Cacio burro, butter cheese. Slightly salty, with a spicy
tang, it is eaten sliced when young and mild and used for
grating and seasoning when old, not only on the usual Italian
pastes but on sweets.

Different from the many grating cheeses made from little
balls of curd called grana, Caciocavallo is a pasta
fileta, or drawn-curd product. Because of this it is
sometimes drawn out in long thick threads and braided. It is a
cheese for skilled artists to make sculptures with, sometimes
horses’ heads, again bunches of grapes and other fruits, even
as Provolone is shaped like apples and pears and often worked
into elaborate bas-relief designs. But ordinarily the horse’s
head is a plain tenpin in shape or a squat bottle with a knob
on the side by which it has been tied up, two cheeses at a
time, on opposite sides of a rafter, while being smoked lightly
golden and rubbed with olive oil and butter to make it all the
more buttery.

In Calabria and Sicily it is very popular, and although the
best comes from Sorrento, there is keen competition from
Abruzzi, Apulian Province and Molise. It keeps well and doesn’t
spoil when shipped overseas.

In his Little Book of Cheese Osbert Burdett
recommends the high, horsy strength of this smoked Cacio over
tobacco smoke after dinner:

Camembert

Camembert is called “mold-matured” and all that is genuine
is labeled Syndicat du Vrai Camembert. The name in full
is Syndicat des Fabricants du Veritable Camembert de
Normandie and we agree that this is “a most useful
association for the defense of one of the best cheeses of
France.” Its extremely delicate piquance cannot be matched,
except perhaps by Brie.

Napoleon is said to have named it and to have kissed the
waitress who first served it to him in the tiny town of
Camembert. And there a statue stands today in the market place
to honor Marie Harel who made the first Camembert.

Camembert is equally good on thin slices of apple,
pineapple, pear, French “flute” or pumpernickel. As-with Brie
and with oysters, Camembert should be eaten only in the “R”
months, and of these September is the best.

Since Camembert rhymes with beware, if you can’t get the
véritable don’t fall for a domestic imitation or
any West German abomination such as one dressed like a
valentine in a heart-shaped box and labeled
“Camembert—Cheese Exquisite.” They are equally tasteless,
chalky with youth, or choking with ammoniacal gas when old and
decrepit.

Cheddar

The English Encyclopedia of Practical Cookery
says:

Named for a village near Bristol where farmer Joseph Harding
first manufactured it, the best is still called Farmhouse
Cheddar, but in America we have practically none of
this. Farmhouse Cheddar must be ripened at least nine months
to a mellowness, and little of our American cheese gets as
much as that. Back in 1695 John Houghton wrote that it
“contended in goodness (if kept from two to five years,
according to magnitude) with any cheese in England.”

Today it is called “England’s second-best cheese,” second
after Stilton, of course.

In early days a large cheese sufficed for a year or two of
family feeding, according to this old note: “A big Cheddar can
be kept for two years in excellent condition if kept in a cool
room and turned over every other day.”

But in old England some were harder to preserve: “In Bath…
I asked one lady of the larder how she kept Cheddar cheese. Her
eyes twinkled: ‘We don’t keep cheese; we eats it.'”

Cheshire

Cheshire is not only the most literary cheese in England,
but the oldest. It was already manufactured when Caesar
conquered Britain, and tradition is that the Romans built the
walled city of Chester to control the district where the
precious cheese was made. Chester on the River Dee was a
stronghold against the Roman invasion.

It came to fame with The Old Cheshire Cheese in Elizabethan
times and waxed great with Samuel Johnson presiding at the
Fleet Street Inn where White Cheshire was served “with radishes
or watercress or celery when in season,” and Red Cheshire was
served toasted or stewed in a sort of Welsh Rabbit. (See
Chapter 5.)

The Blue variety is called Cheshire-Stilton, and Vyvyan
Holland, in Cheddar Gorge suggests that “it was no doubt
a cheese of this sort, discovered and filched from the larder
of the Queen of Hearts, that accounted for the contented grin
on the face of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.”

All very English, as recorded in Victor Meusy’s couplet:

Edam and Gouda

The crimson cannon balls of Holland have been heard around
the world. Known as “red balls” in England and
katzenkopf, “cat’s head,” in Germany, they differ from
Gouda chiefly in the shape, Gouda being round but flattish and
now chiefly imported as one-pound Baby Goudas.

Edam when it is good is very, very good, but when it is bad
it is horrid. Sophisticated ones are sent over already
scalloped for the ultimate consumer to add port, and there are
crocks of Holland cheese potted with sauterne. Both Edam and
Gouda should be well aged to develop full-bodied quality, two
years being the accepted standard for Edam.

The best Edams result from a perfect combination of Breed
(black-and-white Dutch Friesian) and Feed (the rich pasturage
of Friesland and Noord Holland).

The Goudas, shaped like English Derby and Belgian Delft and
Leyden, come from South Holland. Some are specially made for
the Jewish trade and called Kosher Gouda. Both Edam and Gouda
are eaten at mealtimes thrice daily in Holland. A Dutch
breakfast without one or the other on black bread with butter
and black coffee would be unthinkable. They’re also boon
companions to plum bread and Dutch cocoa.

“Eclair Edams” are those with soft insides.

Emmentaler, Gruyère and Swiss

Whether an Emmentaler is eminently Schweizerkäse, grand
Gruyère from France, or lesser Swiss of the United
States, the shape, size and glisten of the eyes indicate the
stage of ripeness, skill of making and quality of flavor. They
must be uniform, roundish, about the size of a big cherry and,
most important of all, must glisten like the eye of a lass in
love, dry but with the suggestion of a tear.

Gruyère does not see eye to eye with the big-holed
Swiss Saanen cartwheel or American imitation. It has tiny
holes, and many of them; let us say it is freckled with
pinholes, rather than pock-marked. This variety is technically
called a niszler, while one without any holes at all is
“blind.” Eyes or holes are also called vesicles.

Gruyère Trauben (Grape Gruyère) is aged in
Neuchâtel wine in Switzerland, although most
Gruyère has been made in France since its introduction
there in 1722. The most famous is made in the Jura, and another
is called Comté from its origin in
Franche-Comté.

A blind Emmentaler was made in Switzerland for export to
Italy where it was hardened in caves to become a grating cheese
called Raper, and now it is largely imitated there. Emmentaler,
in fact, because of its piquant pecan-nut flavor and inimitable
quality, is simulated everywhere, even in Switzerland.

Besides phonies from Argentina and countries as far off as
Finland, we get a flood of imported and domestic Swisses of all
sad sorts, with all possible faults—from too many holes,
that make a flabby, wobbly cheese, to too few—cracked,
dried-up, collapsed or utterly ruined by molding inside. So it
will pay you to buy only the kind already marked genuine in
Switzerland. For there cheese such as Saanen takes six years
to ripen, improves with age, and keeps forever.

Cartwheels well over a hundred years old are still kept in
cheese cellars (as common in Switzerland as wine cellars are in
France), and it is said that the rank of a family is determined
by the age and quality of the cheese in its larder.

Feta and Casere

The Greeks have a name for it—Feta. Their neighbors
call it Greek cheese. Feta is to cheese what Hymettus is to
honey. The two together make ambrosial manna. Feta is soft and
as blinding white as a plate of fresh Ricotta smothered with
sour cream. The whiteness is preserved by shipping the cheese
all the way from Greece in kegs sloshing full of milk, the milk
being renewed from time to time. Having been cured in brine,
this great sheep-milk curd is slightly salty and somewhat
sharp, but superbly spicy.

When first we tasted it fresh from the keg with salty milk
dripping through our fingers, we gave it full marks. This was
at the Staikos Brothers Greek-import store on West 23rd Street
in Manhattan. We then compared Feta with thin wisps of its
grown-up brother, Casere. This gray and greasy, hard and
brittle palate-tickler of sheep’s milk made us bleat for more
Feta.

Gorgonzola

Gorgonzola, least pretentious of the Blues triumvirate
(including Roquefort and Stilton) is nonetheless by common
consent monarch of all other Blues from Argentina to Denmark.
In England, indeed, many epicures consider Gorgonzola greater
than Stilton, which is the highest praise any cheese can get
there. Like all great cheeses it has been widely
imitated, but never equaled. Imported Gorgonzola, when
fruity ripe, is still firm but creamy and golden inside with
rich green veins running through. Very pungent and highly
flavored, it is eaten sliced or crumbled to flavor salad
dressings, like Roquefort.

Hablé Crème Chantilly

The name Hablé Crème Chantilly sounds French,
but the cheese is Swedish and actually lives up to the blurb in
the imported package: “The overall characteristic is
indescribable and delightful freshness.”

This exclusive product of the Walk Gärd Creamery was
hailed by Sheila Hibben in The New Yorker of May 6,
1950, as enthusiastically as Brillat-Savarin would have greeted
a new dish, or the Planetarium a new star:

Miss Hibben goes on to say that only a fromage à la
crème made in Quebec had come anywhere near her
impression of the new Swedish triumph. She quotes the last word
from the makers themselves: “This is a very special product
that has never been made on this earth before,” and speaks of
“the elusive flavor of mushrooms” before summing up, “the
exquisitely textured curd and the unexpectedly fresh flavor
combine to make it one of the most subtly enjoyable foods that
have come my way in a long time.”

And so say we—all of us.

Hand Cheese

Hand cheese has this niche in our Cheese Hall of Fame not
because we consider it great, but because it is usually
included among the eighteen varieties on which the hundreds of
others are based. It is named from having been molded into its
final shape by hand. Universally popular with Germanic races,
it is too strong for the others. To our mind, Hand cheese never
had anything that Allgäuer or Limburger hasn’t improved
upon.

It is the only cheese that is commonly melted into steins of
beer and drunk instead of eaten. It is usually studded with
caraway seeds, the most natural spice for curds.

Limburger

Limburger has always been popular in America, ever since it
was brought over by German-American immigrants; but England
never took to it. This is eloquently expressed in the following
entry in the English Encyclopedia of Practical
Cookery:

But this is libel. Butter-soft and sapid, Limburger has
brought gustatory pleasure to millions of hardy gastronomes
since it came to light in the province of Lüttich in
Belgium. It has been Americanized for almost a century and is
by now one of the very few cheeses successfully imitated here,
chiefly in New York and Wisconsin.

Early Wisconsiners will never forget the Limburger Rebellion
in Green County, when the people rose in protest against the
Limburger caravan that was accustomed to park in the little
town of Monroe where it was marketed. They
threatened to stage a modern Boston Tea Party and dump the
odoriferous bricks in the river, when five or six wagonloads
were left ripening in the sun in front of the town bank. The
Limburger was finally stored safely underground.

Livarot

Livarot has been described as decadent, “The very Verlaine
of them all,” and Victor Meusy personifies it in a poem
dedicated to all the great French cheeses, of which we give a
free translation:

Münster

Like Limburger, this male cheese, often caraway-flavored,
does not fare well in England. Although over here we consider
Münster far milder than Limburger, the English writer Eric
Weir in When Madame Cooks will have none of it:

I cannot think why this cheese was not
thrown from the aeroplanes during the war to spread panic
amongst enemy troops. It would have proved far more
efficacious than those nasty deadly gases that kill people
permanently.

Neufchâtel

Although originally from Normandy, Neufchâtel, like
Limburger, was so long ago welcomed to America and made so
splendidly at home here that we may consider it our very own.
All we have against it is that it has served as the model for
too many processed abominations.

Parmesan, Romano, Pecorino, Pecorino Romano

Parmesan when young, soft and slightly crumbly is eaten on
bread. But when well aged, let us say up to a century, it
becomes Rock of Gibraltar of cheeses and really suited for
grating. It is easy to believe that the so-called “Spanish
cheese” used as a barricade by Americans in Nicaragua almost a
century ago was none other than the almost indestructible
Grana, as Parmesan is called in Italy.

The association between cheese and battling began in B.C.
days with the Jews and Romans, who fed cheese to their soldiers
not only for its energy value but as a convenient form of
rations, since every army travels on its stomach and can’t go
faster than its impedimenta. The last notable mention of cheese
in war was the name of the Monitor: “A cheese box on a
raft.”

Romano is not as expensive as Parmesan, although it is as
friable, sharp and tangy for flavoring, especially for soups
such as onion and minestrone. It is brittle and
just off-white when well aged.

Although made of sheep’s milk, Pecorino is classed with both
Parmesan and Romano. All three are excellently imitated in
Argentina. Romano and Pecorino Romano are interchangeable names
for the strong, medium-sharp and piquant Parmesan types that
sell for considerably less. Most of it is now shipped from
Sardinia. There are several different kinds: Pecorino Dolce
(sweet), Sardo Tuscano, and Pecorino Romano Cacio, which
relates it to Caciocavallo.

Kibitzers complain that some of the cheaper types of
Pecorino are soapy, but fans give it high praise. Gillian F.,
in her “Letter from Italy” in Osbert Burdett’s delectable
Little Book of Cheese, writes:

Pont L’Evêque

This semisoft, medium-strong, golden-tinted French classic
made since the thirteenth century, is definitely a dessert
cheese whose excellence is brought out best by a sound claret
or tawny port.

Port-Salut (See Trappist)

Provolone

Within recent years Provolone has taken America by storm, as
Camembert, Roquefort, Swiss, Limburger, Neufchâtel and
such great ones did long before. But it has not
been successfully imitated here because the original is made
of rich water-buffalo milk unattainable in the Americas.

With Caciocavallo, this mellow, smoky flavorsome delight is
put up in all sorts of artistic forms, red-cellophaned apples,
pears, bells, a regular zoo of animals, and in all sorts of
sizes, up to a monumental hundred-pound bas-relief imported for
exhibition purposes by Phil Alpert.

Roquefort

Homage to this fromage! Long hailed as le roi
Roquefort, it has filled books and booklets beyond count. By
the miracle of Penicillium Roqueforti a new cheese was
made. It is placed historically back around the eighth century
when Charlemagne was found picking out the green spots of
Persillé with the point of his knife, thinking them
decay. But the monks of Saint-Gall, who were his hosts,
recorded in their annals that when they regaled him with
Roquefort (because it was Friday and they had no fish) they
also made bold to tell him he was wasting the best part of the
cheese. So he tasted again, found the advice excellent and
liked it so well he ordered two caisses of it sent every
year to his palace at Aix-la-Chapelle. He also suggested that
it be cut in half first, to make sure it was well veined with
blue, and then bound up with a wooden fastening.

Perhaps he hoped the wood would protect the cheeses from
mice and rats, for the good monks of Saint-Gall couldn’t be
expected to send an escort of cats from their chalky caves to
guard them—even for Charlemagne. There is no telling how
many cats were mustered out in the caves, in those early days,
but a recent census put the number at five hundred. We can
readily imagine the head handler in the caves leading a night
inspection with a candle, followed by his chief taster and a
regiment of cats. While the Dutch and other makers of cheese
also employ cats to patrol their storage caves, Roquefort holds the
record for number. An interesting point in this connection
is that as rats and mice pick only the prime cheeses, a
gnawed one is not thrown away but greatly prized.

Sapsago, Schabziger or Swiss Green Cheese

The name Sapsago is a corruption of Schabziger, German for
whey cheese. It’s a hay cheese, flavored heavily with melilot,
a kind of clover that’s also grown for hay. It comes from
Switzerland in a hard, truncated cone wrapped in a piece of
paper that says:

We put this wrapper among our papers, sealed it tight in an
envelope, and to this day, six months later, the scent of
Sapsago clings ’round it still.

Stilton

When all seems lost in England there is still Stilton, an
endless after-dinner conversation piece to which England points
with pride. For a sound appreciation of this cheese see Clifton
Fadiman’s introduction to this book.

Taleggio and Bel Paese

When the great Italian cheese-maker, Galbini, first exported
Bel Paese some years ago, it was an eloquent ambassador to
America. But as the years went on and imitations were made in
many lands, Galbini deemed it wise to set up his own factory in
our beautiful country. However, the domestic Bel Paese
and a minute one-pounder called Bel Paesino just didn’t have
that old Alpine zest. They were no better than the German copy
called Schönland, after the original, or the French Fleur
des Alpes.

Mel Fino was a blend of Bel Paese and Gorgonzola. It perked
up the market for a full, fruity cheese with snap. Then Galbini
hit the jackpot with his Taleggio that fills the need for the
sharpest, most sophisticated pungence of them all.

Trappist, Port-Salut, or Port du Salut, and Oka

In spite of its name Trappist is no rat-trap commoner.
Always of the elect, and better known as Port-Salut or Port du
Salut from the original home of the Trappist monks in their
chief French abbey, it is also set apart from the ordinary
Canadians under the name of Oka, from the Trappist monastery
there. It is made by Trappist monks all over the world,
according to the original secret formula, and by Trappist
Cistercian monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani Trappist in
Kentucky.

This is a soft cheese, creamy and of superb flavor. You
can’t go wrong if you look for the monastery name stamped on,
such as Harzé in Belgium, Mont-des-Cats in Flanders,
Sainte Anne d’Auray in Brittany, and so forth.

Last but not least, a commercial Port-Salut entirely without
benefit of clergy or monastery is made in Milwaukee under the
Lion Brand. It is one of the finest American cheeses in which
we have ever sunk a fang.

Native Americans

American Cheddars

The first American Cheddar was made soon after 1620 around
Plymouth by Pilgrim fathers who brought along not only cheese
from the homeland but a live cow to continue the supply. Proof
of our ability to manufacture Cheddar of our own lies in the
fact that by 1790 we were exporting it back to England.

It was called Cheddar after the English original named for
the village of Cheddar near Bristol. More than a century ago it
made a new name for itself, Herkimer County cheese, from the
section of New York State where it was first made best.
Herkimer still equals its several distinguished competitors,
Coon, Colorado Blackie, California Jack, Pineapple, Sage,
Vermont Colby and Wisconsin Longhorn.

The English called our imitation Yankee, or American,
Cheddar, while here at home it was popularly known as
yellow or store cheese from its prominent position in every
country store; also apple-pie cheese because of its affinity
for the all-American dessert.

The first Cheddar factory was founded by Jesse Williams in
Rome, New York, just over a century ago and, with Herkimer
County Cheddar already widely known, this established “New
York” as the preferred “store-boughten” cheese.

An account of New York’s cheese business in the pioneer
Wooden Nutmeg Era is found in Ernest Elmo Calkins’ interesting
book, They Broke the Prairies. A Yankee named Silvanus
Ferris, “the most successful dairyman of Herkimer County,” in
the first decades of the 1800’s teamed up with Robert Nesbit,
“the old Quaker Cheese Buyer.” They bought from farmers in the
region and sold in New York City. And “according to the
business ethics of the times,” Nesbit went ahead to cheapen the
cheese offered by deprecating its quality, hinting at a bad
market and departing without buying. Later when Ferris arrived
in a more optimistic mood, offering a slightly better price,
the seller, unaware they were partners, and ignorant of the
market price, snapped up the offer.

Similar sharp-trade tactics put too much green cheese on the
market, so those honestly aged from a minimum of eight months
up to two years fetched higher prices. They were called “old,”
such as Old Herkimer, Old Wisconsin Longhorn, and Old
California Jack.

Although the established Cheddar ages are three, fresh,
medium-cured, and cured or aged, commercially they are divided
into two and described as mild and sharp. The most popular are
named for their states: Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, New York,
Ohio, Vermont and Wisconsin. Two New York Staters are called
and named separately, Coon and Herkimer County. Tillamook goes
by its own name with no mention of Oregon. Pineapple, Monterey
Jack and Sage are seldom listed as Cheddars at all, although
they are basically that.

Brick

Brick is the one and only cheese for which the whole world
gives America credit. Runners-up are Liederkranz, which rivals
say is too close to Limburger, and Pineapple, which is only a
Cheddar under its crisscrossed, painted and flavored rind. Yet
Brick is no more distinguished than either of the hundred
percent Americans, and in our opinion is less worth bragging
about.

It is a medium-firm, mild-to-strong slicing cheese for
sandwiches and melting in hot dishes. Its texture is elastic
but not rubbery, its taste sweetish, and it is full of little
round holes or eyes. All this has inspired enthusiasts to liken
it to Emmentaler. The most appropriate name for it has long
been “married man’s Limburger.” To make up for the mildness
caraway seed is sometimes added.

About Civil War time, John Jossi, a dairyman of Dodge
County, Wisconsin, came up with this novelty, a rennet cheese
made of whole cow’s milk. The curd is cut like Cheddar, heated,
stirred and cooked firm to put in a brick-shaped box without a
bottom and with slits in the sides to drain. When this is set
on the draining table a couple of bricks are also laid on the
cooked curd for pressure. It is this double use of bricks, for
shaping and for pressing, that has led to the confusion about
which came first in originating the name.

The formed “bricks” of cheese are rubbed with salt for three
days and they ripen slowly, taking up to two months.

We eat several million pounds a year and 95 percent of that
comes from Wisconsin, with a trickle from New York.

Colorado Blackie Cheese

A subtly different American Cheddar is putting Colorado on
our cheese map. It is called Blackie from the black-waxed rind
and it resembles Vermont State cheese, although it is flatter.
This is a proud new American product, proving
that although Papa Cheddar was born in England his American
kinfolk have developed independent and valuable characters
all on their own.

Coon Cheese

Coon cheese is full of flavor from being aged on shelves at
a higher temperature than cold storage. Its rind is darker from
the growth of mold and this shade is sometimes painted on more
ordinary Cheddars to make them look like Coon, which always
brings a 10 percent premium above the general run.

Made at Lowville, New York, it has received high praise from
a host of admirers, among them the French cook, Clementine, in
Phineas Beck’s Kitchen, who raised it to the par of
French immortals by calling it Fromage de Coon. Clementine used
it “with scintillating success in countless French recipes
which ended with the words gratiner au four et servir tres
chaud. She made baguettes of it by soaking sticks
three-eights-inch square and one and a half inches long in
lukewarm milk, rolling them in flour, beaten egg and bread
crumbs and browning them instantaneously in boiling oil.”

Herkimer County Cheese

The standard method for making American Cheddar was
established in Herkimer County, New York, in 1841 and has been
rigidly maintained down to this day. Made with rennet and a
bacterial “starter,” the curd is cut and pressed to squeeze out
all of the whey and then aged in cylindrical forms for a year
or more.

Herkimer leads the whole breed by being flaky, brittle,
sharp and nutty, with a crumb that will crumble, and a soft,
mouth-watering pale orange color when it is properly aged.

Isigny

Isigny is a native American cheese that came a cropper. It
seems to be extinct now, and perhaps that is all to the good,
for it never meant to be anything more than another Camembert,
of which we have plenty of imitation.

Not long after the Civil War the attempt was made to perfect
Isigny. The curd was carefully prepared according to an
original formula, washed and rubbed and set aside to come of
age. But when it did, alas, it was more like Limburger than
Camembert, and since good domestic Limburger was then a dime a
pound, obviously it wouldn’t pay off. Yet in shape the newborn
resembled Camembert, although it was much larger. So they cut
it down and named it after the delicate French Creme
d’lsigny.

Jack, California Jack and Monterey Jack

Jack was first known as Monterey cheese from the California
county where it originated. Then it was called Jack for short,
and only now takes its full name after sixty years of
popularity on the West Coast. Because it is little known in the
East and has to be shipped so far, it commands the top Cheddar
price.

Monterey Jack is a stirred curd Cheddar without any annatto
coloring. It is sweeter than most and milder when young, but it
gets sharper with age and more expensive because of storage
costs.

Liederkranz

No native American cheese has been so widely ballyhooed, and
so deservedly, as Liederkranz, which translates “Wreath of
Song.”

Back in the gay, inventive nineties, Emil Frey, a young
delicatessen keeper in New York, tried to please some
bereft customers by making an imitation of Bismarck
Schlosskäse. This was imperative because the imported
German cheese didn’t stand up during the long sea trip and
Emil’s customers, mostly members of the famous Liederkranz
singing society, didn’t feel like singing without it. But
Emil’s attempts at imitation only added indigestion to their
dejection, until one day—fabelhaft! One of
those cheese dream castles in Spain came true. He turned out
a tawny, altogether golden, tangy and mellow little marvel
that actually was an improvement on Bismarck’s old
Schlosskäse. Better than Brick, it was a deodorized
Limburger, both a man’s cheese and one that cheese-conscious
women adored.

Emil named it “Wreath of Song” for the Liederkranz
customers. It soon became as internationally known as tabasco
from Texas or Parisian Camembert which it slightly resembles.
Borden’s bought out Frey in 1929 and they enjoy telling the
story of a G.I. who, to celebrate V-E Day in Paris, sent to his
family in Indiana, only a few miles from the factory at Van
Wert, Ohio, a whole case of what he had learned was “the finest
cheese France could make.” And when the family opened it, there
was Liederkranz.

Another deserved distinction is that of being sandwiched in
between two foreign immortals in the following recipe:

Schnitzelbank Pot

The name Schnitzelbank comes from “school bench,” a
game. This snappy-sweet pot is specially suited to a beer party
and stein songs. It is also the affinity-spread with rye and
pumpernickel, and may be served in small sandwiches or on
crackers, celery and such, to make appetizing tidbits for
cocktails, tea, or cider.

Like the trinity of cheeses that make it, the mixture is
eaten best at room temperature, when its flavor is fullest. If
kept in the refrigerator, it should be taken out a couple of
hours before serving. Since it is a natural cheese mixture,
which has gone through no process or doping with preservative,
it will not keep more than two weeks. This mellow-sharp mix is
the sort of ideal the factory processors shoot at with their
olive-pimiento abominations. Once you’ve potted your own,
you’ll find it gives the same thrill as garnishing your own
Liptauer.

Minnesota Blue

The discovery of sandstone caves in the bluffs along the
Mississippi, in and near the Twin Cities of Minnesota, has
established a distinctive type of Blue cheese named for the
state. Although the Roquefort process of France is followed and
the cheese is inoculated in the same way by mold from bread, it
can never equal the genuine imported, marked with its red-sheep
brand, because the milk used in Minnesota Blue is cow’s milk,
and the caves are sandstone instead of limestone. Yet this is
an excellent, Blue cheese in its own right.

Pineapple

Pineapple cheese is named after its shape rather than its
flavor, although there are rumors that some pineapple flavor is
noticeable near the oiled rind. This flavor does not penetrate
through to the Cheddar center. Many makers of processed cheese
have tampered with the original, so today you can’t be sure of
anything except getting a smaller size every year or two, at a
higher price. Originally six pounds, the Pineapple has shrunk
to nearly six ounces. The proper bright-orange, oiled and
shellacked surface is more apt to be a sickly lemon.

Always an ornamental cheese, it once stood in state on the
side-board under a silver bell also made to represent a
pineapple. You cut a top slice off the cheese, just as you
would off the fruit, and there was a rose-colored,
fine-tasting, mellow-hard cheese to spoon out with a special
silver cheese spoon or scoop. Between meals the silver top was
put on the silver holder and the oiled and shellacked rind kept
the cheese moist. Even when the Pineapple was eaten down to the
rind the shell served as a dunking bowl to fill with some
salubrious cold Fondue or salad.

Made in the same manner as Cheddar with the curd cooked
harder, Pineapple’s distinction lies in being hung in a net
that makes diamond-shaped corrugations on the surface,
simulating the sections of the fruit. It is a pioneer American
product with almost a century and a half of service since Lewis
M. Norton conceived it in 1808 in Litchfield County,
Connecticut. There in 1845 he built a factory and made a
deserved fortune out of his decorative ingenuity with what
before had been plain, unromantic yellow or store cheese.

Perhaps his inspiration came from cone-shaped Cheshire in
old England, also called Pineapple cheese, combined with the
hanging up of Provolones in Italy that leaves the looser
pattern of the four sustaining strings.

Sage, Vermont Sage and Vermont State

The story of Sage cheese, or green cheese as it was called
originally, shows the several phases most cheeses have gone
through, from their simple, honest beginnings to
commercialization, and sometimes back to the real thing.

The English Encyclopedia of Practical Cookery has an
early Sage recipe:

Fancy Cheese in America, lay Charles A. Publow,
records the commercialization of the cheese mentioned above, a
century or two later, in 1910:

A modern cheese authority reported on the current (1953)
method:

In scouting around for a possible maker of the real thing
today, we wrote to Vrest Orton of Vermont, and got this
reply:

The genuine Vermont Sage arrived. Here are our notes on
it:

Old-Fashioned Vermont State Store Cheese

We received from savant Vrest Orton another letter, together
with some Vermont store cheese and some crackers.

Tillamook

It takes two pocket-sized, but thick, yellow volumes to
record the story of Oregon’s great Tillamook. The Cheddar
Box, by Dean Collins, comes neatly boxed and bound in
golden cloth stamped with a purple title, like the rind of a
real Tillamook. Volume I is entitled Cheese Cheddar, and
Volume II is a two-pound Cheddar cheese labeled Tillamook and
molded to fit inside its book jacket. We borrowed Volume I from
a noted littérateur, and never could get him to
come across with Volume II. We guessed its fate, however, from
a note on the flyleaf of the only tome available: “This is an
excellent cheese, full cream and medium sharp, and a unique set
of books in which Volume II suggests Bacon’s: ‘Some books are
to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed
and digested.'”

Wisconsin Longhorn

Since we began this chapter with all-American Cheddars, it
is only fitting to end with Wisconsin Longhorn, a sort of
national standard, even though it’s not nearly so fancy or
high-priced as some of the regional natives that can’t approach
its enormous output. It’s one of those all-purpose round
cheeses that even taste round in your mouth. We are specially
partial to it.

Most Cheddars are named after their states. Yet, putting all
of these thirty-seven states together, they
produce only about half as much as Wisconsin alone.

Besides Longhorn, in Wisconsin there are a dozen regional
competitors ranging from White Twin Cheddar, to which no
annatto coloring has been added, through Green Bay cheese to
Wisconsin Redskin and Martha Washington Aged, proudly set forth
by P.H. Kasper of Bear Creek, who is said to have “won more
prizes in forty years than any ten cheesemakers put
together.”

To help guarantee a market for all this excellent apple-pie
cheese, the Wisconsin State Legislature made a law about it,
recognizing the truth of Eugene Field’s jingle:

Small matter in the Badger State when the affinity is made
legal and the couple lawfully wedded in Statute No. 160,065.
It’s still in force:

Besides Longhorn, Wisconsin leads in Limburger. It produces
so much Swiss that the state is sometimes called
Swissconsin.

Sixty-five Sizzling Rabbits

Unlike the beginning of the classical Jugged Hare recipe:
“First catch your hare!” we modern Rabbit-hunters start off
with “First catch your Cheddar!” And some of us go so far as to
smuggle in formerly forbidden fromages such as
Gruyère, Neufchâtel, Parmesan, and mixtures
thereof. We run the gamut of personal preferences in selecting the
Rabbit cheese itself, from old-time American, yellow or
store cheese, to Coon and Canadian-smoked, though all of it
is still Cheddar, no matter how you slice it.

Then, too, guests are made to run the gauntlet of
all-American trimmings from pin-money pickles to peanut butter,
succotash and maybe marshmallows; we add mustard, chill, curry,
tabasco and sundry bottled red devils from the grocery store,
to add pep and piquance to the traditional cayenne and black
pepper. This results in Rabbits that are out of focus, out of
order and out of this world.

Among modern sins of omission, the Worcestershire sauce is
left out by braggarts who aver that they can take it or leave
it. And, in these degenerate days, when it comes to
substitutions for the original beer or stale pale ale, we find
the gratings of great Cheddars wet down with mere California
sherry or even ginger ale—yet so far, thank goodness, no
Cokes. And there’s tomato juice out of a can into the Rum Turn
Tiddy, and sometimes celery soup in place of milk or cream.

In view of all this, we can only look to the standard
cookbooks for salvation. These are mostly compiled by women,
our thoughtful mothers, wives and sweethearts who have saved
the twin Basic Rabbits for us. If it weren’t for these Fanny
Farmers, the making of a real aboriginal Welsh Rabbit would be
a lost art—lost in sporting male attempts to improve upon
the original.

The girls are still polite about the whole thing and
protectively pervert the original spelling of “Rabbit” to
“Rarebit” in their culinary guides. We have heard that once a
club of ladies in high society tried to high-pressure the
publishers of Mr. Webster’s dictionary to change the old
spelling in their favor. Yet there is a lot to be said for this
more genteel and appetizing rendering of the word, for the
Welsh masterpiece is, after all, a very rare bit of
cheesemongery, male or female.

Yet in dealing with “Rarebits” the distaff side seldom sets
down more than the basic Adam and Eve in a whole Paradise of
Rabbits: No. 1, the wild male type made with beer, and No.
2, the mild female made with milk. Yet now that the chafing
dish has come back to stay, there’s a flurry in the Rabbit
warren and the new cooking encyclopedias give up to a dozen
variants. Actually there are easily half a gross of valid
ones in current esteem.

The two basic recipes are differentiated by the liquid
ingredient, but both the beer and the milk are used only one
way—warm, or anyway at room temperature. And again for
the two, there is but one traditional cheese—Cheddar,
ripe, old or merely aged from six months onward. This is also
called American, store, sharp, Rabbit, yellow, beer, Wisconsin
Longhorn, mouse, and even rat.

The seasoned, sapid Cheddar-type, so indispensable, includes
dozens of varieties under different names, regional or
commercial. These are easily identified as
sisters-under-the-rinds by all five senses:

Beyond all this (and in spite of the school that plumps for
the No. 2 temperance alternative) we must point out that beer
has a special affinity for Cheddar. The French
have clearly established this in their names for Welsh
Rabbit, Fromage Fondue à la Bière and
Fondue à l’Anglaise.

To prepare such a cheese for the pan, each Rabbit hound may
have a preference all his own, for here the question comes up
of how it melts best. Do you shave, slice, dice, shred, mince,
chop, cut, scrape or crumble it in the fingers? This will vary
according to one’s temperament and the condition of the cheese.
Generally, for best results it is coarsely grated. When it
comes to making all this into a rare bit of Rabbit there
is:

The One and Only Method

Use a double boiler, or preferably a chafing dish, avoiding
aluminum and other soft metals. Heat the upper pan by simmering
water in the lower one, but don’t let the water boil up or
touch the top pan.

Most, but not all, Rabbits are begun by heating a bit of
butter or margarine in the pan in which one cup of roughly
grated cheese, usually sharp Cheddar, is melted and mixed with
one-half cup of liquid, added gradually. (The butter isn’t
necessary for a cheese that should melt by itself.)

The two principal ingredients are melted smoothly together
and kept from curdling by stirring steadily in one direction
only, over an even heat. The spoon used should be of hard wood,
sterling silver or porcelain. Never use tin, aluminum or soft
metal—the taste may come off to taint the job.

Be sure the liquid is at room temperature, or warmer, and
add it gradually, without interrupting the stirring. Do not let
it come to the bubbling point, and never let it boil.

Add seasonings only when the cheese is melted, which will
take two or three minutes. Then continue to stir in the same
direction without an instant’s letup, for maybe ten minutes or
more, until the Rabbit is smooth. The consistency and velvety
smoothness depend a good deal on whether or
not an egg, or a beaten yolk, is added.

The hotter the Rabbit is served, the better. You can sizzle
the top with a salamander or other branding iron, but in any
case set it forth as nearly sizzling as possible, on toast
hellishly hot, whether it’s browned or buttered on one side or
both.

Give a thought to the sad case of the “little dog whose name
was Rover, and when he was dead he was dead all over.”
Something very similar happens with a Rabbit that’s allowed to
cool down—when it’s cold it’s cold all over, and you
can’t resuscitate it by heating.

No. 1 (with beer)

Usually crusts are cut off the bread before toasting, and
some aesthetes toast one side only, spreading the toasted side
with cold butter for taste contrast. Lay the toast on the hot
plate, buttered side down, and pour the Rabbit over the porous
untoasted side so it can soak in. (This is recommended in Lady
Llanover’s recipe, which appears on page 52 of this book.)

Although the original bread for Rabbit toast was white,
there is now no limit in choice among whole wheat, graham,
rolls, muffins, buns, croutons and crackers, to infinity.

No. 2 (with milk)

Either of these basic recipes can be made without eggs, and
more cheaply, although the beaten egg is a guarantee against
stringiness. When the egg is missing, we are sad to record that
a teaspoon or so of cornstarch generally takes its place.

Rabbiteers are of two minds about fast and slow heating and
stirring, so you’ll have to adjust that to your own experience
and rhythm. As a rule, the heat is reduced when the cheese is
almost melted, and speed of stirring slows when the eggs and
last ingredients go in.

Many moderns who have found that monosodium glutamate steps
up the flavor of natural cheese, put it in at the start, using
one-half teaspoon for each cup of grated Cheddar. When it comes
to pepper you are fancy-free. As both black and white
pepper are now held in almost equal esteem,
you might equip your hutch with twin hand-mills to do the
grinding fresh, for this is always worth the trouble.
Tabasco sauce is little used and needs a cautious hand, but
some addicts can’t leave it out any more than they can swear
off the Worcestershire.

The school that plumps for malty Rabbits and the other that
goes for milky ones are equally emphatic in their choice. So
let us consider the compromise of our old friend Frederick
Philip Stieff, the Baltimore homme de bouche, as he set
it forth for us years ago in 10,000 Snacks: “The idea of
cooking a Rabbit with beer is an exploded and dangerous theory.
Tap your keg or open your case of ale or beer and serve
with, not in your Rabbit.”

The Stieff
Recipe     BASIC MILK RABBIT

Nota bene: A Welsh Rabbit, to be a success, should
never be of the consistency whereby it may be used to tie up
bundles, nor yet should it bounce if inadvertently dropped on
the kitchen floor.

Lady Llanover’s Toasted Welsh
Rabbit

From this original toasting of the cheese many Englishmen
still call Welsh Rabbit “Toasted Cheese,” but Lady Llanover
goes on to point out that the Toasted Rabbit of her Wales and
the Melted or Stewed Buck Rabbit of England (which has become
our American standard) are as different in the making as the
regional cheeses used in them, and she says that while doctors
prescribed the toasted Welsh as salubrious for invalids, the
stewed cheese of Olde England was “only adapted to strong
digestions.”

English literature rings with praise for the toasted cheese
of Wales and England. There is Christopher North’s eloquent
“threads of unbeaten gold, shining like gossamer filaments
(that may be pulled from its tough and tenacious
substance).”

Yet not all of the references are complimentary.

Thus Shakespeare in King Lear:

And Sydney Smith’s:

But Rhys Davis in My Wales makes up for such
rudenesses:

And, lest we forget, the wonderful drink that made Alice
grow and grow to the ceiling of Wonderland contained not only
strawberry jam but toasted cheese.

Then there’s the frightening nursery
rhyme:

And, perhaps worst of all, Shakespeare, no cheese-lover,
this tune in Merry Wives of Windsor:

An elaboration of the simple Welsh original went English
with Dr. William Maginn, the London journalist whose facile pen
enlivened the Blackwoods Magazine era with Ten
Tales:

Dr. Maginn’s Rabbit

The popularity of this has come down to us
in the succinct summing-up, “Toasted cheese hath no
master.”

The Welsh original became simple after Dr. Maginn’s supper
sandwich was served, a century and a half ago; for it was
served as a savory to sum up and help digest a dinner, in this
form:

After-Dinner Rabbit

While toasted cheese undoubtedly was the Number One dairy
dish of Anglo-Saxons, stewed cheese came along to rival it in
Elizabethan London. This sophisticated, big-city dish, also
called a Buck Rabbit, was the making of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese
on Fleet Street, where Dr. Johnson later presided. And it must
have been the pick of the town back in the days when barrooms
still had sawdust on the floor, for the learned Doctor endorsed
old Omar Khayyam’s love of the pub with: “There is nothing
which has been contrived by man by which so much happiness is
produced as by a good tavern.” Yet he was no gourmet, as may be
judged by his likening of a succulent, golden-fried oyster to
“a baby’s ear dropped in sawdust.”

Perhaps it is just as well that no description of the
world’s first Golden Buck has come down from him. But we don’t
have to look far for on-the-spot pen pictures by other men of
letters at “The Cheese,” as it was affectionately called. To a
man they sang praises for that piping hot dish of preserved and
beatified milk.

Inspired by stewed cheese, Mark Lemon, the leading rhymester
of Punch, wrote the following poem and dedicated it to
the memory of Lovelace:

All that’s necessary is an old-time “cheese stewer” or a
reasonable substitute. The base of this is what was once
quaintly called a “hot-water bath.” This was a sort of
miniature wash boiler just big enough to fit in snugly half a
dozen individual tins, made squarish and standing high enough
above the bath water to keep any of it from getting into the
stew. In these tins the cheese is melted. But since such a
tinsmith’s contraption is hard to come by in these days of
fireproof cooking glass, we suggest muffin tins, ramekins or
even small cups to crowd into the bottom of your double boiler
or chafing dish. But beyond this we plump for a revival of the
“cheese stewer” in stainless steel, silver or glass.

In the ritual at “The Cheese,” these dishes, brimming over,
“bubbling and blistering with the stew,” followed a pudding
that’s still famous. Although down the centuries the recipe has
been kept secret, the identifiable ingredients have been
itemized as follows: “Tender steak, savory oyster, seductive
kidney, fascinating lark, rich gravy, ardent pepper and
delicate paste”—not to mention mushrooms. And after the
second or third helping of pudding, with a pint of stout,
bitter, or the mildest and mellowest brown October Ale in a
dented pewter pot, “the stewed Cheshire cheese.”

Cheese was the one and only other course prescribed by
tradition and appetite from the time when Charles II aled and
regaled Nell Gwyn at “The Cheese,” where Shakespeare is said to
have sampled this “kind of a glorified Welsh Rarebit, served
piping hot in the square shallow tins in which it is cooked and
garnished with sippets of delicately colored toast.”

Among early records is this report of
Addison’s in The Spectator of September 25,1711:

Only a short time later, in 1725, the proprietor of
Simpson’s in the Strand inaugurated a daily guessing contest
that drew crowds to his fashionable eating and drinking place.
He would set forth a huge portion of cheese and wager champagne
and cigars for the house that no one present could correctly
estimate the weight, height and girth of it.

As late as 1795, when Boswell was accompanying Dr. Johnson
to “The Cheese,” records of St. Dunstan’s Club, which also met
there, showed that the current price of a Buck Rabbit was
tuppence, and that this was also the amount of the usual
tip.

Ye Original Recipe

It is notable that there is no beer or ale in this recipe,
but not lamentable, since all aboriginal cheese toasts were
washed down in tossing seas of ale, beer, porter,
stout, and ‘arf and ‘arf.

This creamy Stewed Buck, on which the literary greats of
Johnson’s time supped while they smoked their church wardens,
received its highest praise from an American newspaper woman
who rhapsodized in 1891: “Then came stewed cheese, on the thin
shaving of crisp, golden toast in hot silver saucers—so
hot that the cheese was the substance of thick cream, the
flavor of purple pansies and red raspberries commingled.”

This may seem a bit flowery, but in truth many fine cheeses
hold a trace of the bouquet of the flowers that have enriched
the milk. Alpine blooms and herbs haunt the Gruyère,
Parmesan wafts the scent of Parma violets, the Flower Cheese of
England is perfumed with the petals of rose, violet, marigold
and jasmine.

Oven Rabbit (FROM AN OLD
RECIPE)

Yorkshire Rabbit

Golden Buck

Golden Buck II

The Venerable Yorkshire
Buck

Bacon is the thing that identifies any Yorkshire Rabbit.

Yale College Welsh Rabbit
(MORIARTY’S)

There are two schools of postgraduate
Rabbit-hunters: Yale, as above, with beer both in the Rabbit
and with it; and the other featured in the Stieff Recipe,
which prefers leaving it out of the Rabbit, but taps a keg
to drink with it.

The ancient age of Moriarty’s campus classic is registered
by the use of pioneer black pepper in place of white, which is
often used today and is thought more sophisticated by some than
the red cayenne of Rector’s Naughty Nineties Chafing Dish
Rabbit, which is precisely the same as our Basic Recipe No.
1.

Border-hopping Bunny, or
Frijole Rabbit

In the whole hutch of kitchen Rabbitry the most popular
modern ones are made with tomato, a little or lots. They hop in
from everywhere, from Mexico to South Africa, and call for all
kinds of quirks, down to mixing in some dried beef, and there
is even a skimpy Tomato Rabbit for reducers, made with farmer
cheese and skimmed milk.

Although the quaintly named Rum Tum Tiddy was doubtless the
great-grandpappy of all Tomato Rabbits, a richer, more buttery
and more eggy one has taken its place as the standard today.
The following is a typical recipe for this, tried and true,
since it has had a successful run through a score of
the best modern cookbooks, with only slight personal changes
to keep its juice a-flowing blood-red.

Tomato Rabbit

Instead of soda, some antiquated recipes call for “a
tablespoon of bicarbonate of potash.”

South African Tomato
Rabbit

Rum Tum Tiddy, Rink Tum
Ditty, etc. (OLD BOSTON STYLE)

Tomato Soup Rabbit

This is a quickie Rum Tum Tiddy, without any onion, a poor,
housebroken version of the original. It can be called a Celery
Rabbit if you use a can of celery soup in place of the
tomato.

Onion Rum Tum Tiddy

Sherry Rum Tum Tiddy

Blushing Bunny

Blushing Bunny is one of those playful English names for
dishes, like Pink Poodle, Scotch Woodcock (given below), Bubble
and Squeak (Bubblum Squeakum), and Toad in the Hole.

Scotch Woodcock

American Woodchuck

No doubt this all-American Tomato Rabbit with brown sugar
was named after the native woodchuck, in playful imitation of
the Scotch Woodcock above. It’s the only Rabbit we know that’s
sweetened with brown sugar.

Running Rabbit

This running cony can be poured over toast like any other
Rabbit, or over crushed crackers in a hot tureen, as in Sherry
Rum Tum Tiddy, or served like Fondue, in the original cooking
bowl or pan, with the spoon kept moving in it in one direction
only and the Rabbit following the spoon, like a greyhound
following the stuffed rabbit at the dog races.

Mexican Chilaly

This popular modern Rabbit seems to be a twin to Rum Tum
Tiddy in spite of the centuries’ difference in age.

Fluffy, Eggy Rabbit

Grilled Tomato Rabbit

Grilled Tomato and Onion
Rabbit

For another onion-flavored Rabbit see Celery and Onion
Rabbit.

The Devil’s Own

Dried Beef or Chipped Beef
Rabbit

No salt is needed on this jerked steer meat that is called
both dried beef and chipped beef on this side of the border,
tasajo on the other side, and xarque when you get
all the way down to Brazil.

Kansas Jack Rabbit

Kansas has plenty of the makings for this, yet the dish must
have been easier to make on Baron Münchhausen’s “Island of
Cheese,” where the cornstalks produced loaves of bread,
ready-made, instead of ears, and were no doubt crossed with
long-eared jacks to produce Corn Rabbits quite as
miraculous.

After tomatoes, in popularity, come onions
and then green peppers or canned pimientos as vegetable
ingredients in modern, Americanized Rabbits. And after that,
corn, as in the following recipe which appeals to all
Latin-Americans from Mexico to Chile because it has
everything.

Latin-American Corn
Rabbit

Mushroom-Tomato
Rabbit

Celery and Onion
Rabbit

Asparagus Rabbit

Oyster Rabbit

Sea-food Rabbits

“Bouquet of the Sea”
Rabbit

Other Fish Rabbit, Fresh or
Dried

Grilled Sardine
Rabbit

Roe Rabbits

Plain Sardine Rabbit

Anchovy Rabbit

Smoked sturgeon, whiting,
eel, smoked salmon, and the like

Smoked Cheddar Rabbit

Crumby Rabbit

Crumby Tomato Rabbit

Gherkin or Irish
Rabbit

This may have been called Irish after the green of the
pickle.

Dutch Rabbit

Proof that there is no Anglo-Saxon influence here lies in
the use of prepared mustard. The English, who still do a lot of
things the hard way, mix their biting dry mustard fresh with
water before every meal, while the Germans and French bottle
theirs, as we do.

Pumpernickel Rabbit

Since beer is a kind of liquid bread, it is natural for the
two to commingle in Rabbits whether they are blond Dutch or
black pumpernickel. And since cheese is only solid milk, and
the Cheddar is noted for its beery smell, there is further
affinity here. An old English proverb sums it up neatly: “Bread
and cheese are the two targets against death.”

By the way, the word pumpernickel is said to have been
coined when Napoleon tasted his first black bread in Germany.
Contemptuously he spat it out with: “This would be good for my
horse, Nicole.” “Bon pour Nicole” in French.

Gruyère Welsh Rabbit
au gratin

To our American ears anything au gratin suggests
“with cheese,” so this Rabbit au gratin may sound
redundant. To a Frenchman, however, it means a dish covered
with bread crumbs.

Swiss Cheese Rabbit

Sherry Rabbit

Spanish Sherry Rabbit

Pink Poodle

Although wine Rabbits, red or white, are as unusual as Swiss
ones with Gruyère in place of Cheddar, wine is commonly
drunk with anything from a Golden Buck to a Blushing Bunny. But
for most of us, a deep draught of beer or ale goes best with an
even deeper draught of the mellow scent of a Cheddar
golden-yellow.

Savory Eggy Dry
Rabbit

This “dry” Rabbit, in which the volume of the eggs makes up
for any lacking liquid, is still served as a savory after the
sweets to finish a fine meal in some old-fashioned English
homes and hostelries.

Cream Cheese Rabbit

Reducing Rarebit (Tomato
Rarebit)[A]

Curry Rabbit

People who can’t let well enough alone put cornstarch in
Rabbits, just as they add soda to spoil the cooking of
vegetables.

Ginger Ale Rabbit

Buttermilk Rabbit

Eggnog Rabbit

Ever since the innovation of bottled eggnogs fresh from the
milkman in holiday season, such supremely creamy and flavorful
Rabbits have been multiplying as fast as guinea pigs.

All-American Succotash
Rabbit

Danish Rabbit

Easy English Rabbit

The Fondue

There is a conspiracy among the dictionary makers to take
the heart out of the Fondue. Webster makes it seem no better
than a collapsed soufflé, with his definition:

Thorndike-Barnhart further demotes this dish, that for
centuries has been one of the world’s greatest, to “a
combination of melted cheese, eggs and butter” and explains
that the name comes from the French fondre, meaning
melt. The latest snub is delivered by the up-to-date Cook’s
Quiz compiled by TV culinary experts:

A baked dish, indeed! Yet the Fondue has added to the gaiety
and inebriety of nations, if not of
dictionaries. It has commanded the respect of the culinary
great. Savarin, Boulestin, André Simon, all have
hailed its heavenly consistency, all have been regaled with
its creamy, nay velvety, smoothness.

A touch of garlic, a dash of kirsch, fresh ground black
pepper, nutmeg, black pearl truffles of Bugey, red cayenne
pepper, the luscious gravy of roast turkey—such little
matters help to make an authentic dunking Fondue, not a baked
Fondue, mind you. Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin a century and a
half ago brought the original “receipt” with him and spread it
around with characteristic generosity during the two years of
his exile in New York after the French Revolution. In his
monumental Physiologie du Goût he records an
incident that occurred in 1795:

As the great French gourmet, Savarin was born on the Swiss
border (at Belley, in the fertile Province of Bugey, where
Gertrude Stein later had a summer home), he no doubt ate
Gruyère three times a day, as is the custom in
Switzerland and adjacent parts. He sets down the recipe just as
he got it from its Swiss source, the papers of Monsieur
Trolliet, in the neighboring Canton of Berne:

This has long been quoted as the proper way to make the
national dish of Switzerland. Savarin tells of hearing oldsters
in his district laugh over the Bishop of Belley eating his
Fondue with a spoon instead of the traditional fork, in the
first decade of the 1700’s. He tells, too, of a Fondue party he
threw for a couple of his septuagenarian cousins in Paris
“about the year 1801.”

The party was the result of much friendly taunting of the
master: “By Jove, Jean, you have been bragging for such a long
time about your Fondues, you have continually made our mouths
water. It is high time to put a stop to all this. We will come
and breakfast with you some day and see what sort of thing this
dish is.”

Savarin invited them for ten o’clock next day, started them
off with the table laid on a “snow white cloth, and in each
one’s place two dozen oysters with a bright golden lemon. At
each end of the table stood a bottle of sauterne, carefully
wiped, excepting the cork, which showed distinctly that it had
been in the cellar for a long while…. After the oysters,
which were quite fresh, came some broiled kidneys, a
terrine of foie gras, a pie with truffles, and
finally the Fondue. The different ingredients had all been
assembled in a stewpan, which was placed on the table over a
chafing dish, heated with spirits of wine.

“Then,” Savarin is quoted, “I commenced operations on the
field of battle, and my cousins did not lose a single one of
my movements. They were loud in the praise
of this preparation, and asked me to let them have the
receipt, which I promised them….”

This Fondue breakfast party that gave the nineteenth century
such a good start was polished off with “fruits in season and
sweets, a cup of genuine mocha, … and finally two sorts of
liqueurs, one a spirit for cleansing, and the other an oil for
softening.”

This primitive Swiss Cheese Fondue is now prepared more
elaborately in what is called:

Neufchâtel
Style

The dunkers stab the hunks of crusty French bread through
the soft part to secure a firm hold in the crust, for if your
bread comes off in dunking you pay a forfeit,
often a bottle of wine.

The dunking is done as rhythmically as the stirring, guests
taking regular turns at twirling the fork to keep the cheese
swirling. When this “chafing dish cheese custard,” as it has
been called in England, is ready for eating, each in turn
thrusts in his fork, sops up a mouthful with the bread for a
sponge and gives the Fondue a final stir, to keep it always
moving in the same direction. All the while the heat beneath
the dish keeps it gently bubbling.

Such a Neufchâtel party was a favorite of King Edward
VII, especially when he was stepping out as the Prince of
Wales. He was as fond of Fondue as most of the great gourmets
of his day and preferred it to Welsh Rabbit, perhaps because of
the wine and kirsch that went into it.

At such a party a little heated wine is added if the Fondue
gets too thick. When finally it has cooked down to a crust in
the bottom of the dish, this is forked out by the host and
divided among the guests as a very special dividend.

Any dry white wine will serve in a pinch, and the
Switzerland Cheese Association, in broadcasting this classical
recipe, points out that any dry rum, slivovitz, or brandy,
including applejack, will be a valid substitute for the kirsch.
To us, applejack seems specially suited, when we stop to
consider our native taste that has married apple pie to cheese
since pioneer times.

In culinary usage fondue means “melting to an edible
consistency” and this, of course, doesn’t refer to cheese
alone, although we use it chiefly for that.

In France Fondue is also the common name for a simple dish
of eggs scrambled with grated cheese and butter and served very
hot on toasted bread, or filled into fancy paper cases, quickly
browned on top and served at once. The reason for this is that
all baked Fondues fall as easily and as far as Soufflés,
although the latter are more noted for this failing. There is a
similarity in the soft fluffiness of both, although the Fondues
are always more moist. For there is a stiff, stuffed-shirt
buildup around any Soufflé,
suggesting a dressy dinner, while Fondue
started as a self-service dunking bowl.

Our modern tendency is to try to make over the original
French Fondue on the Welsh Rabbit model—to turn it into a
sort of French Rabbit. Although we know that both
Gruyère and Emmentaler are what we call Swiss and that
it is impossible in America to duplicate the rich Alpine flavor
given by the mountain herbs, we are inclined to try all sorts
of domestic cheeses and mixtures thereof. But it’s best to
stick to Savarin’s “lump of Gruyère” just as the
neighboring French and Italians do. It is interesting to note
that this Swiss Alpine cooking has become so international that
it is credited to Italy in the following description we reprint
from When Madame Cooks, by an Englishman, Eric Weir:

Fondue à
l’Italienne

The imported Swiss sometimes is cubed instead of grated,
then marinated for four or five hours in dry white wine, before
being melted and liquored with the schnapps. This can be
pleasantly adopted here in:

All-American Fondue

We say French instead of Swiss because the French took over
the dish so eagerly, together with the great Gruyère
that makes it distinctive. They internationalized it, sent it
around the world with bouillabaisse and onion soup, that
celestial soupe à l’oignon on which snowy showers
of grated Gruyère descend.

To put the Welsh Rabbit in its place they called it Fondue
à l’Anglaise, which also points up the twinlike
relationship of the world’s two favorite dishes of melted
cheese. But to differentiate and show they are not identical
twins, the No. 1 dish remained Fromage Fondue while the second
was baptized Fromage Fondue à la Bière.

Beginning with Savarin the French whisked
up more rapturous, rhapsodic writing about Gruyère
and its offspring, the Fondue, together with the puffed
Soufflé, than about any other imported cheese except
Parmesan.

Parmesan and Gruyère were praised as the two greatest
culinary cheeses. A variant Fondue was made of the Italian
cheese.

Parmesan Fondue

Sapsago Swiss Fondue

This is also nice when served bubbling in
individual, preheated pastry shells, casseroles or ramekins,
although this way most of the fun of the dunking party is
left out. To make up for it, however, cooked slices of
mushrooms are sometimes added.

At the Cheese Cellar in the New York World’s Fair Swiss
Pavilion, where a continual dunking party was in progress,
thousands of amateurs learned such basic things as not to
overcook the Fondue lest it become stringy, and the protocol of
dunking in turn and keeping the mass in continual motion until
the next on the Fondue line dips in his cube of bread. The
success of the dish depends on making it quickly, keeping it
gently a-bubble and never letting it stand still for a split
second.

The Swiss, who consume three or four times as much cheese
per capita as we, and almost twice as much as the French, are
willing to share Fondue honors with the French Alpine province
of Savoy, a natural cheese cellar with almost two dozen
distinctive types of its very own, such as Fat cheese, also
called Death’s Head; La Grande Bornand, a luscious half-dried
sheep’s milker; Chevrotins, small, dry goat milk cheeses; and
Le Vacherin. The latter, made in both Savoy and Switzerland,
boasts two interesting variants:

Here is a good assortment of Fondues:

Vacherin-Fribourg
Fondue

La Fondue Comtois

Chives Fondue

Tomato Fondue

Here the two most popular melted-cheese dishes tangle, but
they’re held together with the common ingredient, tomato.

Fondue also appears as a sauce to pour over baked tomatoes.
Stale bread crumbs are soaked in tomato juice to make:

Tomato Baked Fondue

Although Savarin’s dunking Fondue was first to make a
sensation on these shores and is still in highest esteem among
epicures, the Fondue America took to its bosom was baked. The
original recipe came from the super-caseous province of Savoy
under the explicit title, La Fondue au Fromage.

La Fondue au Fromage

We adapted this to our national taste which had already
based the whole business of melted cheese on the Welsh Rabbit
with stale ale or milk instead of white wine and
Worcestershire, mustard and hot peppers. Today we have come up
with this:

100% American Fondue

This is more of a baked cheese job than a true Fondue, to
our way of thinking, and the scalded milk doesn’t exactly take
the place of the wine or kirsch. It is characteristic of our
bland cookery.

Quickie Catsup Tummy
Fondiddy

This might be suggested as a novel midnight snack, with a
cup of cocoa, for a change.

Cheese and Rice
Fondue

Corn and Cheese
Fondue

Cheese Fondue

Brick Fondue

Cheddar Dunk Bowl

Soufflés, Puffs and Ramekins

There isn’t much difference between Cheese Soufflés,
Puffs and Ramekins. The English Encyclopedia of Practical
Cookery, the oldest, biggest and best of such works in
English, lumps Cheese Puffs and Ramekins together, giving the
same recipes for both, although it treats each extensively
under its own name when not made with cheese.

Cheese was the basis of the original French Ramequin, cheese
and bread crumbs or puff paste, baked in a mold, (with puff
again the principal factor in Soufflé, from the French
souffler, puff up).

Basic Soufflé

To perk up the seasonings, mustard, Worcestershire sauce,
lemon juice, nutmeg and even garlic are often used to taste,
especially in England.

While Cheddar is the preferred cheese, Parmesan runs it a
close second. Then comes Swiss. You may use any two or all
three of these together. Sometimes Roquefort is added, as in
the Ramekin recipes below.

Parmesan
Soufflé

Swiss Soufflé

Parmesan-Swiss
Soufflé

Any of these makes a light, lovely luncheon or a proper
climax to a grand dinner.

Cheese-Corn
Soufflé

Cheese-Spinach
Soufflé

Cheese-Tomato
Soufflé

Cheese-Sea-food
Soufflé

Cheese-Mushroom
Soufflé

Cheese-Potato
Soufflé (Potato Puff)

The English, in concocting such a Potato Puff or
Soufflé, are inclined to make it extra peppery, as they
do most of their Cheese Soufflés, with not only “a dust
of black pepper” but “as much cayenne as may be stood on the
face of a sixpence.”

Cheese Fritter
Soufflés

Three-in-One Puffs

Such miniature Soufflés serve as liaison officers for
this entire section, since they are baked in ramekins, or
ramequins, from the French word for the small baking dish that
holds only one portion. These may be paper boxes, usually
round, earthenware, china, Pyrex, of any attractive shape in
which to bake or serve the Puffs.

More commonly, in America at least, Puffs are made without
ramekin dishes, as follows:

Fried Puffs

Roquefort Puffs

The constant repetition of “beaten stiff” in these recipes
may give the impression that the whites are badly beaten up,
but such is not the case. They are simply whipped to peaks and
left moist and glistening as a teardrop, with a slight sad
droop to them that shows there is still room for the air to
expand and puff things up in cooking.

Parmesan Puffs

Breakfast Puffs

Danish Fondue Puffs

New England Cheese
Puffs

Cream Cheese Puffs

Some Ramekin dishes are made so exquisitely that they may be
collected like snuff bottles.

Ramekins are utterly French, both the cooked Puffs and the
individual dishes in which they are baked. Essentially a Cheese
Puff, this is also au gratin when topped with both
cheese and browned bread crumbs. By a sort of poetic cook’s
license the name is also applied to any kind of cake containing
cheese and cooked in the identifying one-portion ramekin. It is
used chiefly in the plural, however, together with the name of
the chief ingredient, such as “Chicken Ramekins” and:

Cheese Ramekins I

Cheese Ramekins II

Cheese Ramekins III

The most popular cheese for Ramekins has always been, and
still is, Gruyère. But because the early English also
adopted Italian Parmesan, that followed as a close second, and
remains there today.

Sharp Cheddar makes tangy Ramekins, as will be seen in this
second oldster; for though it prescribes Gloucester and
Cheshire “‘arf-and-‘arf,” both are essentially Cheddars.
Gloucester has been called “a glorified Cheshire” and the
latter has long been known as a peculiarly rich and colorful
elder brother of Cheddar, described in Kenelme Digby’s
Closet Open’d as a “quick, fat, rich, well-tasted
cheese.”

Cheese Ramekins IV

Since both Gloucester cheese and Cheshire cheese are not
easily come by even in London today, it would be hard to
reproduce this in the States. So the best we can suggest is to
use half-and-half of two of our own great Cheddars, say
half-Coon and half-Wisconsin Longhorn, or half-Tillamook and
half-Herkimer County. For there’s no doubt about it,
contrasting cheeses tickle the taste buds, and as many as three
different kinds put together make Puffs all the more
perfect.

Ramequins à la
Parisienne

Le Ramequin
Morézien

Several French provinces are known for distinctive
individual Puffs usually served in the dainty fluted forms they
are cooked in. In Jeanne d’Arc’s Lorraine, for instance, there
are the simply named Les Ramequins, made of flour,
Gruyère and eggs.

Swiss-Roquefort
Ramekins

Puff Paste Ramekins

Frying Pan Ramekins

There are two schools of salamandering among turophiles. One
holds that it toughens the cheese and makes it less digestible;
the other that it’s simply swell. Some of the latter addicts
have special cheese-branding irons made with their monograms,
to identify their creations, whether they be burned on the
skins of Welsh Rabbits or Frying Pan Ramekins. Salamandering
with an iron that has a gay, carnivalesque design can make a
sort of harlequin Ramekin.

Casserole Ramekin

Pizzas, Blintzes, Pastes, Cheese Cakes, etc.

No matter how big or hungry your family, you can always
appease them with pizza.

Pizza—The Tomato Pie of
Sicily

The proper pans come all tin and a yard wide, down to
regular apple-pie size, but twelve-inch pans are the most
popular.

Miniature Pizzas

Italian-Swiss
Scallopini

Neapolitan Baked Lasagne, or
Stuffed Noodles

Little Hats,
Cappelletti

Dauphiny Ravioli

Italian Fritters

Italian Asparagus and
Cheese

Garlic on Cheese

Spaniards call garlic cloves teeth, Englishmen call them
toes. It was cheese and garlic together that inspired
Shakespeare to Hotspur’s declaration in King Henry
IV:

Some people can take a mere soupçon of the
stuff, while others can down it by the soup spoon, so we feel
it necessary in reprinting our recipe to point to the warning
of another early English writer: “Garlic is very dangerous to
young children, fine women and hot young men.”

Blintzes

Vatroushki

Cottage Cheese
Pancakes

Cheese Waffles

Today you can get imported canned Holland cheese waffles to
heat quickly and serve.

Napkin Dumpling

Butter and cheese are mixed together in equal parts for
cheese butter. Serbia has a cheese called Butter that more or
less matches Turkey’s Durak, of which butter is an
indispensable ingredient, and French Cancoillote is based on
sour milk simmered with butter.

The English have a cheese called Margarine, made with the
butter substitute. In Westphalia there are no two schools of
thought about whether ’tis better to eat butter with cheese or
not, for in Westphalia sour-milk cheese, butter is mixed in as
part of the process of making. The Arabs press curds and butter
together to store in vats, and the Scots have Crowdie or Cruddy
Butter.

The value of buttermilk is stressed in an extravagant old
Hindu proverb: “A man may live without bread, but without
buttermilk he dies.”

Cheese was made before butter, being the earliest form of
dairy manufacturing, so buttermilk cheese
came well after plain milk cheese, even after whey cheese.
It is very tasty, and a natural with potato salad. The curd
is salted after draining and sold in small parchment
packages.

German “leather” cheese has buttermilk mixed with the plain.
The Danes make their Appetitost with sour buttermilk. Ricotta
Romano, for a novelty, is made of sheep buttermilk.

In America cottage cheese is also called pot, Dutch and
smearcase. It is the easiest and quickest to make of all
cheeses, by simply letting milk sour, or adding buttermilk to
curdle it, then stand a while on the back of the kitchen stove,
since it is homemade as a rule. It is drained in a bag of
cheesecloth and may be eaten the same day, usually salted.

The Pilgrims brought along the following two tried and true
recipes from olde England, and both are still in use and good
repute:

Cottage Cheese No. 1

Let milk sour until clotted. Pour boiling water over and it
will immediately curd. Stir well and pour into a colander. Pour
a little cold water on the curd, salt it and break it up
attractively for serving.

Cottage Cheese No. 2

A very rich and tasty variety is made of equal parts whole
milk and buttermilk heated together to just under the boiling
point. Pour into a linen bag and let drain until next day. Then
remove, salt to taste and add a bit of butter or cream to make
a smooth, creamy consistency, and pat into balls the size of a
Seville orange.

In England there are three distinct manners of making cream
cheese:

1. Fresh milk strained and lightly drained.
2. Scalded cream dried and drained dry, like
   Devonshire.
3. Rennet curd ripened, with thin, edible rind, or none,
   packaged
   in small blocks or miniature bricks by dairy companies,
   as
   in the U.S. Philadelphia Cream cheese.

American cream cheeses follow the English pattern, being
named from then: region or established brands owned by
Breakstone, Borden, Kraft, Shefford, etc.

Cream cheese such as the first listed above is easier to
make than cottage cheese or any other. Technically, in fact, it
is not a cheese but the dried curd of milk and is often called
virginal. Fresh milk is simply strained through muslin in a
perforated box through which the whey and extra moisture drains
away for three or four days, leaving a residue as firm as fresh
butter.

In America, where we mix cream cheese with everything, a
popular assortment of twelve sold in New York bears these
ingredients and names: Chives, Cherry, Garden, Caviar, Lachs,
Pimiento, Olive and Pimiento, Pineapple, Relish, Scallion,
Strawberry, and Triple Decker of Relish, Pimiento and Cream in
layers.

In Italy there is Stracchino Cream, in Sweden Chantilly.
Finally, to come to France, la Foncée or Fromage de Pau,
a cream also known around the world as Crême d’Isigny,
Double Crême, Fromage à la Crême de Gien,
Pots de Crême St. Gervais, etc. etc.

The French go even farther by eating thick fresh cream with
Chevretons du Beaujolais and Fromage Blanc in the style that
adds à la crême to their already glorified
names.

The English came along with Snow Cream Cheese that is more
of a dessert, similar to Italian Cream Cheese.

We’d like to have a cheese ice cream to contrast with too
sweet ones. Attempts at this have been made, both here and in
England; Scottish Caledonian cream came closest. We
have frozen cheese with fruit, to be sure, but no true
cheese ice cream as yet, though some cream cheeses seem
especially suitable.

In this parody by Calverly, “The Farmer’s Daughter,” the
ingredients suggest cheese cake, dating back to 1381 In
England. From that year Kettner in his Book of the Table
quotes this recipe:

This primitive “receipt” grew up into Richmond maids of
honor that caused Kettner to wax poetic with:

Coronation Cheese Cake

The Oxford Dictionary defines cheese cake as a
“tartlet filled with sweet curds, etc.” This shows that the
cheese is the main thing, and the and-so-forth just a matter of
taste. We are delighted to record that the Lord Mayor of London
picked traditional cheese tarts, the maids of honor mentioned
earlier in this section, as the Coronation dessert with which
to regale the second Queen Elizabeth at the city luncheon in
Guildhall This is most
fitting, since these tarts were named
after the maids of honor at the court of the first Queen
Elizabeth. The original recipe is said to have sold for a
thousand pounds. These Richmond maids of honor had the usual
cheese cake ingredients: butter and eggs and pounds of
cheese, but what made the subtle flavor: nutmeg, brandy,
lemon, orange-flower water, or all four?

More than 2,000 years before this land of Coronation cheese
cake, the Greeks had a word for it—several in fact:
Apician Cheese Cake, Aristoxenean, and Philoxenean among them.
Then the Romans took it over and we read from an epistle of the
period:

Plato mentioned cheese cake, and a town near Thebes was
named for it before Christ was born, at a time when cheese
cakes were widely known as “dainty food for mortal man.”

Today cheese cakes come in a half dozen popular styles, of
which the ones flavored with fresh pineapple are the most
popular in New York. But buyers delight in every sort,
including the one hundred percent American type called cheese
pies.

Indeed, there seems to be no dividing line between cheese
cakes and cheese pies. While most of them are sweet, some are
made piquant with pimientos and olives. We offer a favorite of
ours made from popcorn-style pot cheese put through a
sieve:

Pineapple Cheese Cake

Because of the time and labor involved maybe you had better
buy your cheese cakes, even though some of the truly fine ones
cost a dime a bite, especially the pedigreed Jewish-American
ones in Manhattan. Reuben’s and Lindy’s are two leaders at
about five dollars a cake. Some are fruited with cherries or
strawberries.

Cheese Custard

Open-faced Cheese Pie

The Apple-pie Affinity

Hot apple pie was always accompanied with cheese in New
England, even as every slice of apple pie in Wisconsin has
cheese for a sidekick, according to law. Pioneer
hot pies were baked in brick ovens and flavored with nutmeg,
cinnamon and rose geranium. The cheese was Cheddar, but
today all sorts of pie and cheese combinations are common,
such as banana pie and Gorgonzola, mince with Danish Blue,
pumpkin with cream cheese, peach pie with Hablé, and
even a green dusting of Sapsago over raisin pie.

Apple pie au gratin, thickly grated over with
Parmesan, Caciocavallo or Sapsago, is something special when
served with black coffee. Cider, too, or applejack, is a
natural accompaniment to any dessert of apple with its
cheese.

Apple Pie Adorned

Apple Pie á la
Cheese

Cheese-crusty Apple
Pie

Flan au Fromage

Christmas Cake
Sandwiches

Angelic Camembert

Such a delicate dessert is a favorite with the ladies, since
some of them find a prime Camembert a bit too strong if taken
straight.

Although A. W. Fulton’s observation in For Men Only
is going out of date, it is none the less amusing:

Another writer has said that “only
gourmets among women seem to like cheese, except farm women
and foreigners.” The association between gourmets and farm
women is borne out by the following urgent plea from early
Italian landowners:

Having found out for ourselves, we suggest a golden slice of
Taleggio, Stracchino, or pale gold Bel Paese to polish off a
good dinner, with a juicy Lombardy pear or its American
equivalent, a Bartlett, let us say.

This celestial association of cheese and pears is further
accented by the French:

This places the cheese after the fruit, as the last course,
in accordance with early English usage set down by John Clarke
in his Paroemiologia:

But in his Epigrams Ben Jonson serves them
together.

That brings us back to cheese and pippins:

When should the cheese be served? In England it is served
before or after the fruit, with or without the port.

Following The Book of Keruynge in modern spelling we
note when it was published in 1431 the proper thing “after
meat” was “pears, nuts, strawberries, whortleberries (American
huckle
berries) and hard cheese.” In modern
practice we serve some suitable cheese like Camembert
directly on slices of apple and pears, Gorgonzola on sliced
banana, Hablé spread on pineapple and a cheese
dessert tray to match the Lazy Lou, with everything crunchy
down to Crackerjacks. Good, too, are figs, both fresh and
preserved, stuffed with cream cheese, kumquats, avocados,
fruity dunking mixtures of Pineapple cheese, served in the
scooped-out casque of the cheese itself, and apple or pear
and Provolone creamed and put back in the rind it came in.
Pots of liquored and wined cheeses, no end, those of your
own making being the best.

Champagned Roquefort or
Gorgonzola

After dinner cheeses suggested by Phil Alpert are:

FROM FRANCE: Port-Salut, Roblochon, Coulommiers, Camembert,
Brie, Roquefort, Calvados (try it with a spot of Calvados,
apple brandy)

FROM THE U.S.: Liederkranz, Blue, Cheddar

FROM SWEDEN: Hablé Crême Chantilly

FROM ITALY: Taleggio, Gorgonzola, Provolone, Bel Paese

FROM HUNGARY: Kascaval

FROM SWITZERLAND: Swiss
Gruyère

FROM GERMANY: Kümmelkäse

FROM NORWAY: Gjetost, Bondost

FROM HOLLAND: Edam, Gouda

FROM ENGLAND: Stilton

FROM POLAND: Warshawski Syr

Au Gratin, Soups, Salads and Sauces

He who says au gratin says Parmesan. Thomas Gray, the
English poet, saluted it two centuries ago with:

On September 4, 1666, Pepys recorded the burying of his pet
Parmesan, “as well as my wine and some other things,” in a pit
in Sir W. Batten’s garden. And on the selfsame fourth of
September, more than a century later, in 1784, Woodforde in his
Diary of a Country Parson wrote:

The second most popular cheese for au gratin is
Italian Romano, and, for an entirely different flavor, Swiss
Sapsago. The French, who gave us this cookery term, use
it in its original meaning for any dish with a browned
topping, usually of bread crumbs, or crumbs and cheese. In
America we think of au gratin as grated cheese only,
although Webster says, “with a browned covering, often mixed
with butter or cheese; as, potatoes au gratin.” So
let us begin with that.

Potatoes au Gratin

Eggs au Gratin

Tomatoes au Gratin

Onion Soup au Gratin

At gala parties, where wine flows, a couple of glasses of
champagne are often added to the bouillon.

In the famed onion soup au gratin at Les Halles in
Paris, grated Gruyère is used in place of Parmesan. They
are interchangeable in this recipe.

Chicken Cheese Soup

Imported French marmites are de rigueur for a
real onion soup au gratin, and an imported Parmesan
grinder might be used for freshly ground cheese. In preparing,
it is well to remember that they are basically only melted
cheese, melted from the top down.

Green Cheese Salad
Julienne

American Cheese Salad

Cheese and Nut Salad

Brie or Camembert
Salad

Three-in-One Mold

Swiss Cheese Salad

Rosie’s Swiss Breakfast
Cheese Salad

Often Emmentaler is cubed in a salad for breakfast, relished
specially by males on the morning after. We quote the original
recipe brought over by Rosie from the Swiss Tyrol to thrill the
writers’ and artists’ colony of Ridgefield, New Jersey, in her
brother Emil’s White House Inn:

Gorgonzola and Banana
Salad

Cheese and Pea Salad

Apple and Cheese
Salad

Roquefort Cheese Salad
Dressing

Unfortunately, even when the Roquefort is the French import,
complete with the picture of the sheep in red, and garanti
véritable, the dressing is often ruined by bad
vinegar and cottonseed oil (of all things). When bottled to
sell in stores, all sorts of extraneous spice, oils and mustard
flour are used where nothing more is necessary than the
manipulation of a fork, fine olive oil and good
vinegar—white wine, tarragon or malt. Some ardent
amateurs must have their splash of Worcestershire sauce or
lemon juice with salt and pepper. This Roquefort dressing is
good on all green salads, but on endive it’s something
special.

Sauce Mornay

Sauce Mornay has been hailed internationally as “the
greatest culinary achievement in cheese.”

Plain Cheese Sauce

From thin to medium to thick it serves divers purposes:

Thin: it may be used instead of milk to make a tasty
milk toast, sometimes spiced with curry.

Medium: for baking by pouring over crackers soaked in
milk.

Thick: serves as a sort of Welsh Rabbit when poured
generously over bread toasted on one side only, with the
untoasted side up, to let the sauce sink in.

Parsleyed Cheese
Sauce

Since this is the Complete Book of Cheese we will fill a
bounteous cornucopia here with more or less essential, if not
indispensable, recipes and dishes not so easy to classify, or
overlooked or crowded out of the main sections devoted to the
classic Fondues, Rabbits, Soufflés, etc.

Stuffed Celery, Endive, Anise and Other Suitable
Stalks

Use any soft cheese you like, or firm cheese softened by
pressing through a sieve; at room temperature, of course, with
any seasoning or relish.

Cold Dunking

Cheese Charlotte

Straws

Supa Shetgia
[B]

Italians are so dependent on cheese to enrich all their
dishes, from soups to spaghetti—and indeed any
vegetable—that a shaker of grated Parmesan, Romano or
reasonable substitute stands ready at every table, or is served
freshly grated on a side dish. Thus any Italian soup might be
called a cheese soup, but we know of only one, the great
minestrone, in which cheese is listed as an indispensable
ingredient along with the pasta, peas, onion, tomatoes, kidney
beans, celery, olive oil, garlic, oregano, potatoes, carrots,
and so forth.

Likewise, a chunk of melting or toasting cheese is essential
in the Fritto Misto, the finest mixed grill we know, and it’s
served up as a separate tidbit with the meats.

Italians grate on more cheese for seasoning than any other
people, as the French are wont to use more wine in cooking.

Pfeffernüsse and
Caraway

The gingery little “pepper nuts,” pfeffernüsse,
imported from Germany in barrels at Christmastime, make one of
the best accompaniments to almost any kind of cheese. For
contrast try a dish of caraway.

Diablotins

Small rounds of buttered bread or toast heaped with a mound
of grated cheese and browned in the oven is a French
contribution.

Cheddar Omelet

Parmesan Omelet
(mild)

Parmesan Omelet (full
flavored)

A Meal-in-One Omelet

Tomato and

Omelet with Cheese
Sauce

The French use grated Gruyère for this with all sorts
of sauces, such as the Savoyar de Savoie, with potatoes,
chervil, tarragon and cream. A delicious appearance and added
flavor can be had by browning with a salamander.

Spanish
Flan—Quesillo

Italian Fritto Misto

Polish Piroghs (a
pocketful of cheese)

Cheesed Mashed
Potatoes

If there’s a chafing dish handy, a first-rate nightcap can
be made via a

Sautéed Swiss
Sandwich

Appetizers, Crackers, Sandwiches, Savories,
Snacks, Spreads and Toasts

In America cheese got its start in country stores in our
cracker-barrel days when every man felt free to saunter in,
pick up the cheese knife and cut himself a wedge from the
big-bellied rattrap cheese standing under its glass bell or
wire mesh hood that kept the flies off but not the
free-lunchers. Cheese by itself being none too palatable, the
taster would saunter over to the cracker barrel, shoo the cat
off and help himself to the old-time crackers that can’t be
beat today.

At that time Wisconsin still belonged to
the Indians and Vermont was our leading cheese state, with
its Sage and Cheddar and Vermont Country Store Crackers, as
Vrest Orton of Weston Vermont, calls them. When Orton heard
we were writing this book, he sent samples from the store
his father started in 1897 which is still going strong.
Together with the Vermont Good Old-fashioned Natural Cheese
and the Sage came a handy handmade Cracker Basket, all
wicker, ten crackers long and just one double cracker wide.
A snug little casket for those puffy, old-time, two-in-one
soda biscuits that have no salt to spoil the taste of the
accompanying cheese. Each does double duty because it’s made
to split in the middle, so you can try one kind of cheese on
one half and another on t’other, or sandwich them
between.

Some Pied Piper took the country cheese and crackers to the
corner saloon and led a free-lunch procession that never
faltered till Prohibition came. The same old store cheese was
soon pepped up as saloon cheese with a saucer of caraway seeds,
bowls of pickles, peppers, pickled peppers and rye bread with
plenty of mustard, pretzels or cheese straws, smearcase and
schwarzbrot. Beer and cheese forever together, as in the
free-lunch ditty of that great day:

It was there and then that cheese came of age from coast to
coast. In every bar there was a choice of Swiss, Cottage,
Limburger—manly cheeses, walkie-talkie oldsters that
could sit up and beg, golden yellow, tangy mellow, always cut
in cubes. Cheese takes the cube form as naturally as
eggs take the oval and honeycombs the hexagon.

On the more elegant handout buffets, besides the shapely
cubes, free Welsh Rabbit started at four every afternoon, to
lead the tired businessman in by the nose; or a smear of
Canadian Snappy out of a pure white porcelain pot in the classy
places, on a Bent’s water biscuit.

Next to nibbling cheese with crackers and appetizers, of
which there is no end in sight, cheese sandwiches help us
consume most of our country’s enormous output of Brick, Cheddar
and Swiss. To attempt to classify and describe all of these
would be impossible, so we will content ourselves by picking a
few of the cold and hot, the plain and the fancy, the familiar
and the exotic. Let’s use the alphabet to sum up the
situation.

A     Alpine Club Sandwich

B     Boston Beany, Open-face

C     Cheeseburgers

D     Deviled Rye

E     Egg, Open-faced

F     French-fried Swiss

G     Grilled Chicken-Ham-Cheddar

H     He-man Sandwich,
Open-faced

I     International Sandwich

J     Jurassiennes, or Croûtes
Comtoises

K     Kümmelkäse

L     Limburger Onion or Limburger Catsup

M     Meringue, Open-faced (from the Browns’
10,000 Snacks)

N     Neufchâtel and Honey

O     Oskar’s Ham-Cam

P     Pickled Camembert

Q     Queijo da Serra Sandwich

R     Roquefort Nut

S     Smoky Sandwich and Sturgeon-smoked
Sandwich

T     Tangy Sandwich

U     Unusual Sandwich—of Flowers, Hay and
Clover

V     Vegetarian Sandwich

W     Witch’s Sandwich

X     Xochomilco Sandwich

Y     Yolk Picnic Sandwich

Z     Zebra

For good measure we will toss in a couple of toasted cheese
sandwiches.

Toasted Cheese
Sandwich

This toasted cheeser is so good it’s positively sinful. The
French, who outdo us in both cooking and sin, make one of their
own in the form of fried fingers of stale bread doused in an
‘arf and ‘arf Welsh Rabbit and Fondue melting of
Gruyère, that serves as a liaison to further sandwich
the two.

Garlic is often used in place of chopped chives, and in
contrast to this wild one there’s a mild one made of Dutch
cream cheese by the equally Dutch Pennsylvanians.

England, of course, together with Wales, holds all-time
honors with such celebrated regional “toasting cheeses” as
Devonshire and Dunlop. Even British Newfoundland is known for
its simple version, that’s quite as pleasing as its rich Prince
Edward Island Oyster Stew.

Newfoundland Toasted Cheese
Sandwich

“Fit for Drink”

Greece was the first country to prove its epicurean fitness,
according to the old saying above, for it had wine to tipple
and sheep’s milk cheese to nibble. The classical Greek cheese
has always been Feta, and no doubt this was the kind that Circe
combined most suitably with wine to make a farewell drink for
her lovers. She put further sweetness and body into the stirrup
cup by stirring honey and barley meal into it. Today we might
whip this up in an electric mixer to toast her memory.

While a land flowing with milk and honey is the ideal of
many, France, Italy, Spain or Portugal, flowing with wine and
honey, suit a lot of gourmets better. Indeed, in such
vinous-caseous places cheese is on the house at all wine sales
for prospective customers to snack upon and thus bring out the
full flavor of the cellared vintages. But professional wine
tasters are forbidden any cheese between sips. They may
clear their palates with plain bread, but nary a crumb of
Roquefort or cube of Gruyère in working hours, lest
it give the wine a spurious nobility.

And, speaking of Roquefort, Romanée has the closest
affinity for it. Such affinities are also found in Pont
l’Evêque and Beaujolais, Brie and red champagne,
Coulommiers and any good vin rosé. Heavenly
marriages are made in Burgundy between red and white wines of
both Côtes, de Nuits and de Baune, and Burgundian cheeses
such as Epoisses, Soumaintarin and Saint-Florentin. Pommard and
Port-Salut seem to be made for each other, as do Château
Margaux and Camembert.

A great cheese for a great wine is the rule that brings
together in the neighboring provinces such notables as Sainte
Maure, Valençay, Vendôme and the Loire
wines—Vouvray, Saumur and Anjou. Gruyère mates
with Chablis, Camembert with St. Emilion; and any dry red wine,
most commonly claret, is a fit drink for the hundreds of other
fine French cheeses.

Every country has such happy marriages, an Italian standard
being Provolone and Chianti. Then there is a most unusual pair,
French Neufchâtel cheese and Swiss Neuchâtel wine
from just across the border. Switzerland also has another
cheese favorite at home—Trauben (grape cheese), named
from the Neuchâtel wine in which it is aged.

One kind of French Neufchâtel cheese, Bondon, is also
uniquely suited to the company of any good wine because it is
made in the exact shape and size of a wine barrel bung. A
similar relation is found in Brinzas (or Brindzas) that are
packed in miniature wine barrels, strongly suggesting what
should be drunk with such excellent cheeses: Hungarian Tokay.
Other foreign cheeses go to market wrapped in vine leaves. The
affinity has clearly been laid down in heaven.

Only the English seem to have a fortissimo taste in
the go-with wines, according to these matches registered by
André Simon in The Art of Good Living:

To these we might add brittle chips of Greek Casere with
nips of Amontillado, for an eloquent appetizer.

The English also pour port into Stilton, and sundry other
wines and liquors into Cheddars and such. This doctoring leads
to fraudulent imitation, however, for either port or stout is
put into counterfeit Cheshire cheese to make up for the
richness it lacks.

While some combinations of cheeses and wines may turn out
palatable, we prefer taking ours straight. When something more
fiery is needed we can twirl the flecks of pure gold in a
chalice of Eau de Vie de Danzig and nibble on legitimate Danzig
cheese unadulterated. Goldwasser, or Eau de Vie, was a
favorite liqueur of cheese-loving Franklin Roosevelt, and we
can be sure he took the two separately.

Another perfect combination, if you can take it, is imported
kümmel with any caraway-seeded cheese, or cream cheese
with a handy saucer of caraway seeds. In the section of France
devoted to gin, the juniper berries that flavor the drink also
go into a local cheese, Fromage Fort. This is further fortified
with brandy, white wine and pepper. One regional tipple with
such brutally strong cheese is black coffee laced with gin.

French la Jonchée is another potted thriller with not
only coffee and rum mixed in during the making, but orange
flower water, too. Then there is la Petafina, made with brandy
and absinthe; Hazebrook with brandy alone; and la Cachat with
white wine and brandy.

In Italy white Gorgonzola is also put up in crocks with
brandy. In Oporto the sharp cheese of that name is enlivened by
port, Cider and the greatest of applejacks, Calvados, seem made
to go the regional Calvados cheese. This is also true of our
native Jersey Lightning and hard cider with their accompanying
New York State cheese. In the Auge Valley of
France, farmers also drink homemade cider with their own
Augelot, a piquant kind of Pont l’Evêque.

The English sip pear cider (perry) with almost any British
cheese. Milk would seem to be redundant, but Sage cheese and
buttermilk do go well together.

Wine and cheese have other things in common. Some wines and
some cheeses are aged in caves, and there are vintage cheeses
no less than vintage wines, as is the case with Stilton.

Lazy Lou

Once, so goes the sad story, there was a cheesemonger
unworthy of his heritage. He exported a shipload of inferior
“Swiss” made somewhere in the U.S.A. Bad to begin with, it had
worsened on the voyage. Rejected by the health authorities on
the other side, it was shipped back, reaching home in the
unhappy condition known as “cracked.” To cut his losses the
rascally cheesemonger had his cargo ground up and its flavor
disguised with hot peppers and chili sauce. Thus there came
into being the abortion known as the “cheese spread.”

The cheese spread or “food” and its cousin, the processed
cheese, are handy, cheap and nasty. They are available every

where and some people even like them. So
any cheese book is bound to take formal notice of their
existence. I have done so—and now, an unfond farewell
to them.

My academic cheese education began at the University of
Wisconsin in 1904. I grew up with our great Midwest industry; I
have read with profit hundreds of pamphlets put out by the
learned Aggies of my Alma Mater. Mostly they treat of honest,
natural cheeses: the making, keeping and enjoying of authentic
Longhorn Cheddars, short Bricks and naturalized Limburgers.

At the School of Agriculture the students still, I am told,
keep their hand in by studying the classical layout on a cheese
board. One booklet recommends the following for freshman
contemplation:

These six sturdy samples of Wisconsin’s best will stimulate
any amount of classroom discussion. Does the Edam go better
with German-American black bread or with Swedish Ry-Krisp? To
butter or not to butter? And if to butter, with which cheese?
Salt or sweet? How close do we come to the excellence of the
genuine Alpine Swiss? Primary school stuff, but not unworthy of
thought.

Pass on down the years. You are now ready to graduate. Your
cheese board can stand a more sophisticated setup. Try two
boards; play the teams against each other.

The postgraduate may play the game using as counters the
great and distinctive cheeses of more than fifty countries.
Your Scandinavian board alone, just to give an idea of the
riches available, will shine with blues, yellows, whites, smoky
browns, and chocolates representing Sweden, Norway, Denmark,
Finland, Iceland and Lapland.

For the Britisher only blue-veined Stilton is worthy to
crown the banquet. The Frenchman defends Roquefort, the Dane
his own regal Blue; the Swiss sticks to Emmentaler before,
during and after all three meals. You may prefer to finish with
a delicate Brie, a smoky slice of Provolone, a bit of Baby
Gouda, or some Liptauer Garniert, about which more later.

We load them all on Lazy Lou, Lazy Susan’s big twin brother,
a giant roulette wheel of cheese, every number a winner. A
second Lazy Lou will bear the savories and go-withs. For these
tidbits the English have a divine genius; think of the deviled
shrimps, smoked oysters, herring roe on toast, snips of broiled
sausage … But we will make do with some olives and radishes,
a few pickles, nuts, capers. With our two trusty Lazy Lous on
hand plus wine or beer, we can easily dispense with the mere
dinner itself.

Perhaps it is an Italian night. Then Lazy Lou is happily
burdened with imported Latticini; Incanestrato, still bearing
the imprint of its wicker basket; Pepato, which is but
Incanestrato peppered; Mel Fina; deep-yellow, buttery Scanno
with its slightly burned flavor; tangy Asiago; Caciocavallo, so
called because the the cheeses, tied in pairs and hung over a
pole, look as though they were sitting in a saddle—cheese on
horseback, or “cacio a cavallo.” Then we ring in Lazy
Lou’s first assistant, an old, silver-plated, revolving
Florentine magnum-holder. It’s designed to spin a gigantic
flask of Chianti. The flick of a finger and the bottle is
before you. Gently pull it down and hold your glass to the
spout.

True, imported wines and cheeses are expensive. But native
American products and reasonably edible imitations of the real
thing are available as substitutes. Anyway, protein for
protein, a cheese party will cost less than a steak barbecue.
And it can be more fun.

Encourage your guests to contribute their own latest
discoveries. One may bring along as his ticket of admission a
Primavera from Brazil; another some cubes of an Andean
specialty just flown in from Colombia’s mountain city,
Mérida, and still wrapped in its aromatic leaves of
Frailejón Lanudo; another a few wedges of savory
sweet English Flower cheese, some flavored with rose petals,
others with marigolds; another a tube of South American
Kräuterkäse.

Provide your own assortment of breads and try to include
some of those fat, flaky old-fashioned crackers that country
stores in New England can still supply. Mustard? Sure, if
.you like it. If you want to be fancy, use a tricky
little gadget put out by the Maille condiment-makers in France
and available here in the food specialty shops. It’s a
miniature painter’s palate holding five mustards of different
shades and flavors and two mustard paddles. The mustards, in
proper chromatic order, are: jonquil yellow “Strong Dijon”;
“Green Herbs”; brownish “Tarragon”; golden “Ora”; crimson
“Tomato-flavored.”

And, just to keep things moving, we have restored an antique
whirling cruet-holder to deliver Worcestershire sauce, soy
sauce, A-1, Tap Sauce and Major Grey’s Chutney. Salt shakers
and pepper mills are handy, with a big-holed tin canister
filled with crushed red-pepper pods, chili powder,
Hungarian-paprika and such small matters. Butter, both sweet
and salt, is on hand, together with, saucers or bowls of curry,
capers, chives (sliced, not chopped), minced onion, fresh mint leaves,
chopped pimientos, caraway, quartered lemons, parsley, fresh
tarragon, tomato slices, red and white radishes, green and
black olives, pearl onions and assorted nutmeats.

Some years ago, when I was collaborating with my mother,
Cora, and my wife, Rose, in writing 10,000 Snacks
(which, by the way, devotes nearly forty pages to cheeses), we
staged a rather elaborate tasting party just for the three of
us. It took a two-tiered Lazy Lou to twirl the load.

The eight wedges on the top round were English and French
samples and the lower one carried the rest, as follows:

The tasting began with familiar English Cheddars, Cheshires
and Stiltons from the top row. We had cheese knives, scoops,
graters, scrapers and a regulation wire saw, but for this line
of crumbly Britishers fingers were best.

The Cheddar was a light, lemony-yellow, almost white, like
our best domestic “bar cheese” of old.

The Cheshire was moldy and milky, with a slightly fermented
flavor that brought up the musty dining room of Fleet Street’s
Cheshire cheese and called for draughts of beer. The Stilton
was strong but mellow, as high in flavor as in price.

Only the rum-flavored Canadian Cheddar from Montreal (by
courtesy English) let us down. It was done up as fancy as a
bridegroom in waxed white paper and looked as smooth
and glossy as a gardenia. But there its beauty ended. Either
the rum that flavored it wasn’t up to much or the mixture
hadn’t been allowed to ripen naturally.

The French Münster, however, was hearty, cheery, and
better made than most German Münster, which at that time
wasn’t being exported much by the Nazis. The Brie was melting
prime, the Camembert was so perfectly matured we ate every
scrap of the crust, which can’t be done with many American
“Camemberts” or, indeed, with the dead, dry French ones sold
out of season. Then came the Roquefort, a regal cheese we voted
the best buy of the lot, even though it was the most expensive.
A plump piece, pleasantly unctuous but not greasy, sharp in
scent, stimulatingly bittersweet in taste—unbeatable.
There is no American pretender to the Roquefort throne. Ours is
invariably chalky and tasteless. That doesn’t mean we have no
good Blues. We have. But they are not Roquefort.

The Sapsago or Kräuterkäse from Switzerland (it
has been made in the Canton of Glarus for over five hundred
years) was the least expensive of the lot. Well-cured and dry,
it lent itself to grating and tasted fine on an old-fashioned
buttered soda cracker. Sapsago has its own seduction, derived
from the clover-leaf powder with which the curd is mixed and
which gives it its haunting flavor and spring-like sage-green
color.

Next came some truly great Swiss Gruyère, delicately
rich, and nutty enough to make us think of the sharp white
wines to be drunk with it at the source.

As for the Provolone, notable for the water-buffalo milk
that makes it, there’s an example of really grown-up milk.
Perfumed as spring flowers drenched with a shower of Anjou,
having a bouquet all its own and a trace of a winelike kick, it
made us vow never to taste another American imitation. Only a
smooth-cheeked, thick slab cut from a pedigreed Italian
Provolone of medium girth, all in one piece and with no sign of
a crack, satisfy the gourmet.

The second Italian classic was
Gorgonzola, gorgeous Gorgonzola, as fruity as apples,
peaches and pears sliced together. It smells so much like a
ripe banana we often eat them together, plain or with the
crumbly formaggio lightly forked into the fruit,
split lengthwise.

After that the Edam tasted too lipsticky, like the red-paint
job on its rind, and the Gouda seemed only half-hearted. Both
too obviously ready-made for commerce with nothing individual
or custom-made about them, rolled or bounced over from Holland
by the boat load.

The Ostiepki from Czechoslovakia might have been a link of
smoked ostrich sausage put up in the skin of its own red neck.
In spite of its pleasing lemon-yellow interior, we couldn’t
think of any use for it except maybe crumbling thirty or forty
cents’ worth into a ten-cent bowl of bean soup. But that seemed
like a waste of money, so we set it aside to try in tiny chunks
on crackers as an appetizer some other day, when it might be
more appetizing.

We felt much the same about the chocolate-brown Norwegian
Gjetost that looked like a slab of boarding-school fudge and
which had the same cloying cling to the tongue. We were told by
a native that our piece was entirely too young. That’s what
made it so insipid, undeveloped in texture and flavor. But the
next piece we got turned out to be too old and decrepit, and so
strong it would have taken a Paul Bunyan to stand up under it.
When we complained to our expert about the shock to our
palates, he only laughed, pointing to the nail on his little
finger.

“You should take just a little bit, like that. A pill no
bigger than a couple of aspirins or an Alka-Seltzer. It’s only
in the morning you take it when it’s old and strong like this,
for a pick-me-up, a cure for a hangover, you know, like a
prairie oyster well soused in Worcestershire.”

That made us think we might use it up to flavor a Welsh
Rabbit, instead of the Worcestershire sauce, but we
couldn’t melt it with anything less than a blowtorch.

To bring the party to a happy end, we went to town on the
Hungarian Liptauer, garnishing that fine,
granulating buttery base after mixing it well with some
cream cheese. We mixed the mixed cheese with sardine and
tuna mashed together in a little of the oil from the can. We
juiced it with lemon, sluiced it with bottled sauces, worked
in the leftovers, some tarragon, mint, spicy seeds, parsley,
capers and chives. We peppered and paprikaed it, salted and
spiced it, then spread it thicker than butter on
pumpernickel and went to it. That’s Liptauer
Garniert.

The A-B-Z of Cheese

Each cheese is listed by its name and country of origin,
with any further information available. Unless otherwise
indicated, the cheese is made of cow’s milk.

A

Aberdeen
Scotland

Soft; creamy mellow.

Abertam
Bohemia (Made near Carlsbad)

Hard; sheep; distinctive, with a savory smack all its
own.

Absinthe see Petafina.

Acidophilus see Saint-Ivel.

Aettekees
Belgium

November to May—winter-made and eaten.

Affiné, Carré
see Ancien Impérial.

Affumicata, Mozzarella see Mozzarella.

After-dinner cheeses see
Chapter 8.

Agricultural school cheeses see
College-educated.

Aiguilles, Fromage d’
Alpine France

Named “Cheese of the Needles” from the sharp Alpine peaks of
the district where it is made.

Aizy, Cendrée d’ see
Cendrée.

Ajacilo, Ajaccio
Corsica

Semihard; piquant; nut-flavor. Named after the chief city of
French Corsica where a cheese-lover, Napoleon, was born.

à la Crème see Fromage, Fromage
Blanc, Chevretons.

à la Main see Vacherin.

à la Pie see Fromage.

à la Rachette see Bagnes.

Albini
Northern Italy

Semihard; made of both goat and cow milk; white, mellow,
pleasant-tasting table cheese.

Albula
Switzerland

Rich with the flavor of cuds of green herbs chewed into
creamy milk that makes tasty curds. Made in the fertile Swiss
Valley of Albula whose proud name it bears.

Alderney
Channel Islands

The French, who are fond of this special product of the very
special breed of cattle named after the Channel Island of
Alderney, translate it phonetically—Fromage
d’Aurigny.

Alemtejo
Portugal

Called in full Queijo de Alemtejo, cheese of Alemtejo, in
the same way that so many French cheeses carry along the
fromage title. Soft; sheep and sometimes goat or cow; in
cylinders of three sizes, weighing respectively about two
ounces, one pound, and four pounds. The smaller sizes are the
ones most often made with mixed goat and sheep milk. The method
of curdling without the usual animal rennet is interesting and
unusual. The milk is warmed and curdled with vegetable rennet
made from the flowers of a local thistle, or cardoon, which is
used in two other Portuguese cheeses—Queijo da Cardiga
and Queijo da Serra da Estrella—and probably in many
others not known beyond their locale. In France la Caillebotte
is distinguished for being clabbered with chardonnette,
wild artichoke seed. In Portugal, where there isn’t so much
separating of the sheep from the goats, it takes several weeks
for Alemtejos to ripen, depending on the lactic content and
difference in sizes.

Alfalfa see Sage.

Alise Saint-Reine
France

Soft; summer-made.

Allgäuer Bergkäse, Allgäuer Rundkäse,
or Allgäuer Emmentaler
Bavaria

Hard; Emmentaler type. The small district of Allgäu
names a mountain of cheeses almost as fabulous as our
“Rock-candy Mountain.” There are two principal kinds, vintage
Allgäuer Bergkäse
and soft Allgäuer Rahmkäse,
described below. This celebrated cheese section runs through
rich pasture lands right down and into the Swiss Valley of
the Emme that gives the name Emmentaler to one of the
world’s greatest. So it is no wonder that Allgäuer
Bergkäse can compete with the best Swiss. Before the
Russian revolution, in fact, all vintage cheeses of
Allgäu were bought up by wealthy Russian noblemen and
kept in their home caves in separate compartments for each
year, as far back as the early 1900’s. As with fine vintage
wines, the price of the great years went up steadily. Such
cheeses were shipped to their Russian owners only when the
chief cheese-pluggers of Allgäu found they had reached
their prime.

Allgäuer Rahmkäse
Bavaria

Full cream, similar to Romadur and Limburger, but milder
than both. This sets a high grade for similar cheeses made in
the Bavarian mountains, in monasteries such as Andechs. It goes
exquisitely with the rich dark Bavarian beer. Some of it is as
slippery as the stronger, smellier Bierkäse, or the
old-time Slipcote of England. Like so many North Europeans, it
is often flavored with caraway. Although entirely different
from its big brother, vintage Bergkäse, Rahmkäse can
stand proudly at its side as one of the finest cheeses in
Germany.

Alpe see Fiore di Alpe.

Al Pepe
Italy

Hard and peppery, like its name. Similar to Pepato
(see).

Alpes
France

Similar to Bel Paese.

Alpestra
Austria

A smoked cheese that tastes, smells and inhales like
whatever fish it was smoked with. The French Alps has a
different Alpestre; Italy spells hers Alpestro.

Alpestre, Alpin, or Fromage de Briançon
France

Hard; goat; dry; small; lightly salted. Made at
Briançon and Gap.

Alpestro
Italy

Semisoft; goat; dry; lightly salted.

Alpin or Clérimbert
Alpine France

The milk is coagulated with rennet at 80° F. in two
hours. The curd is dipped into molds three to four inches in
diameter and two and a half inches in height, allowed to drain,
turned several times for one day only, then salted and ripened
one to two weeks.

Altenburg, or Altenburger Ziegenkäse
Germany

Soft; goat; small and flat—one to two inches thick,
eight inches in diameter, weight two pounds.

Alt Kuhkäse Old Cow Cheese
Germany

Hard; well-aged, as its simple name suggests.

Altsohl see Brinza.

Ambert, or Fourme d’Ambert
Limagne, Auvergne, France

A kind of Cheddar made from November to May and belonging to
the Cantal—Fourme-La Tome tribe.

American, American Cheddar
U.S.A.

Described under their home states and distinctive names are
a dozen fine American Cheddars, such as Coon, Wiscon

sin, Herkimer County and Tillamook, to
name only a few. They come in as many different shapes, with
traditional names such as Daisies, Flats, Longhorns,
Midgets, Picnics, Prints and Twins. The ones simply called
Cheddars weigh about sixty pounds. All are made and pressed
and ripened in about the same way, although they differ
greatly in flavor and quality. They are ripened anywhere
from two months to two years and become sharper, richer and
more flavorsome, as well as more expensive, with the passing
of time. See Cheddar states and Cheddar types in
Chapter 4.

Americano Romano
U.S.A.

Hard; brittle; sharp.

Amou
Béarn, France

Winter cheese, October to May.

Anatolian
Turkey

Hard; sharp.

Anchovy Links
U.S.A.

American processed cheese that can be mixed up with
anchovies or any fish from whitebait to whale, made like a
sausage and sold in handy links.

Ancien Impérial
Normandy, France

Soft; fresh cream; white, mellow and creamy like
Neufchâtel and made in the same way. Tiny bricks packaged
in tin foil, two inches square, one-half inch thick, weighing
three ounces. Eaten both fresh and when ripe. It is also called
Carré and has separate names for the new and the old:
(a) Petit Carré when newly made; (b) Carré
Affiné, when it has reached a ripe old age, which
doesn’t take long—about the same time as
Neufchâtel.

Ancona see Pecorino.

Andean
Venezuela

A cow’s-milker made in the Andes near Mérida. It is
formed into rough cubes and wrapped in the pungent, aromatic
leaves of Frailejón Lanudo (Espeletia
Schultzii) which imparts to it a characteristic flavor.
(Description given in Buen Provecho! by Dorothy
Kamen-Kaye.)

Andechs
Bavaria

A lusty Allgäuer type. Monk-made on the monastery hill
at Andechs on Ammersee. A superb snack with equally monkish
dark beer, black bread and blacker radishes, served by the
brothers in dark brown robes.

Antwerp
Belgium

Semihard; nut-flavored; named after its place of origin.

Appenzeller
Switzerland, Bavaria and Baden

Semisoft Emmentaler type made in a small twenty-pound
wheel—a pony-cart wheel in comparison to the big Swiss.
There are two qualities: (a) Common, made of skim milk and
cured in brine for a year; (b) Festive, full milk, steeped in
brine with wine, plus white wine lees and pepper. The only
cheese we know of that is ripened with lees of wine.

Appetitost
Denmark

Semisoft; sour milk; nutlike flavor. It’s an appetizer that
lives up to its name, eaten fresh on the spot, from the loose
bottom pans in which it is made.

Appetost
Denmark

Sour buttermilk, similar to Primula, with caraway seeds
added for snap. Imitated in U.S.A.

Apple U.S.A.

A small New York State Cheddar put up in the form of a
red-cheeked apple for New York City trade. Inspired by the
pear-shaped Provolone and Baby Gouda, no doubt.

Arber
Bohemia

Semihard; sour milk; yellow; mellow and creamy. Made in
mountains between Bohemia and Silesia.

Argentine
Argentina

Argentina is specially noted for fine reproductions of
classical Italian hard-grating cheeses such as Parmesan and
Romano, rich and fruity because of the lush pampas-grass
feeding.

Armavir
Western Caucasus

Soft; whole sour sheep milk; a hand cheese made by stirring
cold, sour buttermilk or whey into heated milk, pressing in
forms and ripening in a warm place. Similar to Hand cheese.

Arnauten see Travnik.

Arovature
Italy

Water-buffalo milk.

Arras, Coeurs d’ see Coeurs.

Arrigny
Champagne, France

Made only in winter, November to May. Since gourmet products
of the same province often have a special affinity, Arrigny and
champagne are specially well suited to one another.

Artichoke, Cardoon or Thistle for Rennet see
Caillebotte.

Artificial Dessert Cheese

In the lavish days of olde England Artificial Dessert Cheese
was made by mixing one quart of cream with two of milk and
spiking it with powdered cinnamon, nutmeg and mace. Four
beaten eggs were then stirred in with one-half cup of white
vinegar and the mixture boiled to a curd. It was then poured
into a cheesecloth and hung up to drain six to eight hours.
When taken out of the cloth it was further flavored with
rose water, sweetened with castor sugar, left to ripen for
an hour or two and finally served up with more cream.

Asadero, or Oaxaca
Jalisco and Oaxaca, Mexico

White; whole-milk. Curd is heated, and hot curd is cut and
braided or kneaded into loaves from eight ounces to eleven
pounds in weight Asadero means “suitable for roasting.”

Asco
Corsica, France

Made only in the winter season, October to May.

Asiago I, II and III
Vicenza, Italy

Sometimes classed as medium and mild, depending mostly on
age. Loaves weigh about eighteen pounds each and look like
American Cheddar but have a taste all their own.

I. Mild, nutty and sharp, used for table slicing and
eating.

II. Medium, semihard and tangy, also used for slicing until
nine months old.

III. Hard, old, dry, sharp, brittle. When over nine months
old, it’s fine for grating.

Asin, or Water cheese
Northern Italy

Sour-milk; washed-curd; whitish; soft; buttery. Made mostly
in spring and eaten in summer and autumn. Dessert
cheese, frequently eaten with honey and
fruit.

Au Cumin
see Münster.

Au Fenouil
see Tome de Savoie.

Au Foin and de Foin

A style of ripening “on the hay.” See Pithiviers au
Foin and Fromage de Foin.

Augelot
Valée d’Auge, Normandy, France

Soft; tangy; piquant Pont l’Evêque type.

d’Auray see Sainte-Anne.

Aurigny, Fromage d’ see Alderney.

Aurillac see Bleu d’Auvergne.

Aurore and Triple Aurore
Normandy, France

Made and eaten all year.

Australian and New Zealand
Australia and New Zealand

Enough cheese is produced for local consumption, chiefly
Cheddar; some Gruyère, but unfortunately mostly
processed.

Autun
Nivernais, France

Produced and eaten all year. Fromage de Vache is another
name for it and this is of special interest in a province where
the chief competitors are made of goat’s milk.

Auvergne, Bleu d’ see Bleu.

Au Vin Blanc, Confits see Epoisses.

Avesnes, Boulette d’ see Boulette.

Aydes, les
Orléanais, France

Not eaten during July, August or September. Season, October
to June.

Azeitão, Queijo do
Portugal

Soft, sheep, sapid and extremely oily as the superlative
ão implies. There are no finer, fatter cheeses in
the world than those made of rich sheep milk in the mountains
of Portugal and named for them.

Azeitoso
Portugal

Soft; mellow, zestful and as oily as it is named.

Azuldoch Mountain
Turkey

Mild and mellow mountain product.

B

Backsteiner
Bavaria

Resembles Limburger, but smaller, and translates Brick, from
the shape. It is aromatic and piquant and not very much like
the U.S. Brick.

Bagnes, or Fromage à la Raclette
Switzerland

Not only hard but very hard, named from racler,
French for “scrape.” A thick, one-half-inch slice is cut across
the whole cheese and toasted until runny. It is then scraped
off the pan it’s toasted in with a flexible knife, spread on
bread and eaten like an open-faced Welsh Rabbit sandwich.

Bagozzo, Grana Bagozzo, Bresciano
Italy

Hard; yellow; sharp. Surface often colored red. Parmesan
type.

Bakers’ cheese

Skim milk, similar to cottage cheese, but softer and finer
grained. Used in making bakery products such as cheese cake,
pie, and pastries, but may also be eaten like creamed cottage
cheese.

Ball
U.S.A.

Made from thick sour milk in Pennsylvania in the style of
the original Pennsylvania Dutch settlers.

Ballakäse or Womelsdorf

Similar to Ball.

Balls, Dutch Red

English name for Edam.

Banbury
England

Soft, rich cylinder about one inch thick made in the town of
Banbury, famous for its spicy, citrus-peel buns and its
equestrienne. Banbury cheese with Banbury buns made a
sensational snack in the early nineteenth century, but both are
getting scarce today.

Banick
Armenia

White and sweet.

Banjaluka
Bosnia

Port-Salut type from its Trappist monastery.

Banon, or les Petits Banons
Provence, France,

Small, dried, sheep-milker, made in the foothills of the
Alps and exported through Marseilles in season, May to
November. This sprightly summer cheese is generously sprinkled
with the local brandy and festively wrapped in fresh green
leaves.

Bar cheese
U.S.A.

Any saloon Cheddar, formerly served on every free-lunch
counter in the U.S. Before Prohibition, free-lunch cheese was
the backbone of America’s cheese industry.

Barbacena
Minas Geraes, Brazil

Hard, white, sometimes chalky. Named from its home city in
the leading cheese state of Brazil.

Barberey, or Fromage de
Troyes
Champagne, France

Soft, creamy and smooth, resembling Camembert, five to six
inches in diameter and 1¼ inches thick. Named from its
home town, Barberey, near Troyes, whose name it also bears.
Fresh, warm milk is coagulated by rennet in four hours. Uncut
curd then goes into a wooden mold with a perforated bottom, to
drain three hours, before being finished off in an earthenware
mold. The cheeses are salted, dried and ripened three weeks in
a cave. The season is from November to May and when made in
summer they are often sold fresh.

Barboux
France

Soft.

Baronet
U.S.A.

A natural product, mild and mellow.

Barron
France

Soft.

Bassillac see Bleu.

Bath
England

Gently made, lightly salted, drained on a straw mat in the
historic resort town of Bath. Ripened in two weeks and eaten
only when covered with a refined fuzzy mold that’s also
eminently edible. It is the most delicate of English-speaking
cheeses.

Battelmatt
Switzerland, St. Gothard Alps, northern Italy, and western
Austria

An Emmentaler made small where milk is not plentiful. The
“wheel” is only sixteen inches in diameter and four inches
high, weighing forty to eighty pounds. The cooking of the curd
is done at a little lower temperature than Emmentaler, it
ripens more rapidly—in four months —
and is somewhat softer, but has the same
holes and creamy though sharp, full nutty flavor.

Bauden (see also Koppen)
Germany, Austria, Bohemia and Silesia

Semisoft, sour milk, hand type, made in herders’ mountain
huts in about the same way as Harzkäse, though it is
bigger. In two forms, one cup shape (called Koppen), the other
a cylinder. Strong and aromatic, whether made with or without
caraway.

Bavarian Beer cheese see Bayrischer
Bierkäse.

Bavarian Cream
German

Very soft; smooth and creamy. Made in the Bavarian
mountains. Especially good with sweet wines and sweet
sauces.

Bavarois à la Vanille see Fromage
Bavarois.

Bayonne see Fromage de Bayonne.

Bayrischer Bierkäse
Bavaria

Bavarian beer cheese from the Tyrol is made not only to eat
with beer, but to dunk in it.

Beads of cheese
Tibet

Beads of hard cheese, two inches in diameter, are strung
like a necklace of cowrie shells or a rosary, fifty to a
hundred on a string. Also see Money Made of Cheese.

Beagues see Tome de Savoie.

Bean Cake, Tao-foo, or Tofu
China, Japan, the Orient

Soy bean cheese imported from Shanghai and other oriental
ports, and also imitated in every Chinatown around the world.
Made from the milk of beans and curdled with its own vegetable
rennet.

Beaujolais see
Chevretons.

Beaumont, or Tome de Beaumont
Savoy, France

A more or less successful imitation of Trappist Tamie, a
trade-secret triumph of Savoy. At its best from October to
June.

Beaupré de Roybon
Dauphiné, France

A winter specialty made from November to April.

Beckenried
Switzerland

A good mountain cheese from goat milk.

Beer cheese
U.S.A.

While our beer cheese came from Germany and the word is
merely a translation of Bierkäse, we use it chiefly for a
type of strong Limburger made mostly in Milwaukee. This fine,
aromatic cheese is considered by many as the very best to eat
while drinking beer. But in Germany Bierkäse is more apt
to be dissolved in a glass or stein of beer, much as we mix
malted powder in milk, and drunk with it, rather than
eaten.

Beer-Regis
Dorsetshire, England

This sounds like another beer cheese, but it’s only a mild
Cheddar named after its hometown in Dorsetshire.

Beist-Cheese
Scotland

A curiosity of the old days. “The first milk after a
calving, boiled or baked to a thick consistency, the result
somewhat resembling new-made cheese, though this is clearly not
a true cheese.” (MacNeill)

Belarno
Italy

Hard; goat; creamy dessert cheese.

Belgian Cooked
Belgium

The milk, which has been allowed to curdle spontaneously, is
skimmed and allowed to drain. When dry it is thoroughly kneaded
by hand and is allowed to undergo fermentation, which takes
ordinarily from ten to fourteen days in winter and six to
eight days in summer. When the fermentation is complete,
cream and salt are added and the mixture is heated slowly
and stirred until homogeneous, when it is put into molds and
allowed to ripen for eight days longer. A cheese ordinarily
weighs about three-and-a-half pounds. It is not essentially
different from other forms of cooked cheese.

Beli Sir see Domaci.

Bellelay, Tête de Moine, or Monk’s Head
Switzerland

Soft, buttery, semisharp spread. Sweet milk is coagulated
with rennet in twenty to thirty minutes, the curd cut fairly
fine and cooked not so firm as Emmentaler, but firmer than
Limburger. After being pressed, the cheeses are wrapped in bark
for a couple of weeks until they can stand alone. Since no eyes
are desired in the cheeses, they are ripened in a moist cellar
at a lowish temperature. They take a year to ripen and will
keep three or four years. The diameter is seven inches, the
weight nine to fifteen pounds. The monk’s head after cutting is
kept wrapped in a napkin soaked in white wine and the soft,
creamy spread is scraped out to “butter” bread and snacks that
go with more white wine. Such combinations of old wine and old
cheese suggest monkish influence, which began here in the
fifteenth century with the jolly friars of the Canton of Bern.
There it is still made exclusively and not exported, for
there’s never quite enough to go around.

Bel Paese
Italy

See under Foreign Greats, Chapter
3. Also see Mel Fino, a blend, and Bel Paese
types—French Boudanne and German Saint Stefano. The
American imitation is not nearly so good as the Italian
original.

Bel Paesino
U.S.A.

A play on the Bel Paese name and fame. Weight one pound and
diminutive in every other way.

Bergkäse see Allgäuer.

Bergquara
Sweden

Semihard, fat, resembles Dutch Gouda. Tangy, pleasant taste.
Gets sharper with age, as they all do. Molded in cylinders of
fifteen to forty pounds. Popular in Sweden since the eighteenth
century.

Berkeley
England

Named after its home town in Gloucester, England.

Berliner Kuhkäse
Berlin, Germany

Cow cheese, pet-named turkey cock cheese by Berlin students.
Typical German hand cheese, soft; aromatic with caraway seeds,
and that’s about the only difference between it and Alt
Kuhkäse, without caraway.

Bernarde, Formagelle Bernarde
Italy

Cow’s whole milk, to which about 10% of goat’s milk is added
for flavor. Cured for two months.

Berques
France

Made of skim milk.

Berry Rennet see Withania.

Bessay, le
Bourbonnais, France

Soft, mild, and creamy.

Bexhill
England

Cream cheeses, small, flat, round. Excellent munching.

Bierkäse
Germany

There are several of these unique beer cheeses that are
actually dissolved in a stein of beer and drunk down with it in
the Bierstubes, notably Bayrischer, Dresdener, and
Olmützer. Semisoft; aromatic; sharp. Well imitated in
echt Deutsche American spots such as Milwaukee and
Hoboken.

Bifrost
Norway

Goat; white; mildly salt. Imitated in a process spread in
4¼-ounce package.

Binn
Wallis, Switzerland

Exceptionally fine Swiss from the great cheese canton of
Wallis.

Bitto
Northern Italy

Hard Emmentaler type made in the Valtellina. It is really
two cheeses in one. When eaten fresh, it is smooth, sapid,
big-eyed Swiss. When eaten after two years of ripening, it is
very hard and sharp and has small eyes.

Blanc à la crème see Fromage
Blanc.

Blanc see Fromage Blanc I and II.

Bleu
France

Brittle; blue-veined; smooth; biting.

Bleu d’Auvergne or Fromage Bleu
Auvergne, France

Hard; sheep or mixed sheep, goat or cow; from Pontgibaud and
Laqueuille ripening caves. Similar to better-known Cantal of
the same province. Akin to Roquefort and Stilton, and to Bleu
de Laqueuille.

Bleu de Bassillac
Limousin, France

Blue mold of Roquefort type that’s prime from November to
May.

Bleu de Laqueuille
France

Similar to Bleu d’Auvergne, but with a different savor.
Named for its originator, Antoine Roussel-Laqueuille, who first
made it a century ago, in 1854.

Bleu de Limousin, Fromage
Lower Limousin

Practically the same as Bleu de Bassillac, from Lower
Limousin.

Bleu de Salers
France

A variety of Bleu d’Auvergne from the same province
distinguished for its blues that are green. With the majority,
this is at its best only in the winter months, from November to
May.

Bleu, Fromage see Bleu d’Auvergne.

Bleu-Olivet see Olivet.

Blind

The name for cheeses lacking the usual holes of the type
they belong to, such as blind Swiss.

Block Edam
U.S.A.

U.S. imitation of the classical Dutch cheese named after the
town of Edam.

Block, Smoked
Austria

The name is self-explanatory and suggests a well-colored
meerschaum.

Bloder, or Schlicker Milch
Switzerland

Sour-milker.

Blue Cheddar see Cheshire-Stilton.

Blue, Danish see Danish Blue.

Blue Dorset see Dorset.

Blue, Jura see Jura Bleu and Septmoncel.

Blue, and Blue with Port Links
U.S.A.

One of the modern American process sausages.

Blue, Minnesota see
Minnesota.

Blue Moon
U.S.A.

A process product.

Blue Vinny, Blue Vinid, Blue-veined Dorset, or Double
Dorset
Dorsetshire, England

A unique Blue that actually isn’t green-veined. Farmers make
it for private consumption, because it dries up too easily to
market. An epicurean esoteric match for Truckles No. 1 of
Wiltshire. It comes in a flat form, chalk-white, crumbly and
sharply flavored, with a “royal Blue” vein running right
through horizontally. The Vinny mold, from which it was named,
is different from all other cheese molds and has a different
action.

Bocconi Geganti
Italy

Sharp and smoky specialty.

Bocconi Provoloni see Provolone.

Boîte see Fromage de Boîte.

Bombay
India

Hard; goat; dry; sharp. Good to crunch with a Bombay Duck in
place of a cracker.

Bondes see Bondon de Neufchâtel.

Bondon de Neufchâtel, or Bondes
Normandy, France

Nicknamed Bonde à tout bien, from resemblance
to the bung in a barrel of Neuchâtel wine. Soft, small
loaf rolls, fresh and mild. Similar to Gournay, but sweeter
because of 2% added sugar.