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Forget Kraft Singles: North American cheesemaking is thriving
 Crap Singles isn't cheese....[Spectator] ’What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?’ Bertie Wooster was once heard to groan. Does cheese matter in a time of coronavirus, climate panic and tariff wars? These pressures can lead anyone to succumb temporarily to Sartresque nausea. Fortunately the gentleman’s gentleman was at hand with a steadying dose of sanity: ’There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter.’ And there is no time at which cheese does not matter. Cheese, with its long and glorious history, its capacity for soaring to the summit of refinement and sounding the bass-string of humility, its microbiological and gastronomical complexity, its connection to specific geographical locations, and its inextricability from culture and tradition, is a microcosm of civilization. And civilization always matters. The Pilgrim Fathers, who took the precaution of packing a cow onto one of the first ships to follow the Mayflower, made cheese according to English recipes ‐ essentially variations on cheddar. But Quebecers claim to have invented the first specifically North American cheese in 1635 on the Île d’Orléans. It was poetically named Le Paillasson, the Doormat, owing to the reed mat on which it rested while drying above the woodstove. The reeds, gathered from a shoreline washed by salty water at high tide, lent it an inimitable flavor. The Pilgrims’ independence-loving descendants adopted cheese as a medium of exuberant self-expression. President Thomas Jefferson was presented with a wheel of the stuff, alleged to weigh in at 1,600lbs, with his motto impressed upon the rind: ’Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.’ A similarly gigantic cheese was given to President Jackson, who, perhaps intimidated by the monster, assigned it a room in the White House where it resided, untouched, until his term was up. Mercifully for the incoming administration, Jackson threw a final cheese-tasting party at which the behemoth was demolished by Washingtonians armed with knives. Some of this joie de vivre was lost with mass production, wartime rationing and the need to send vast shipments of cheddar to troops overseas. Milk collected in quantity had to be pasteurized ‐ killing the bouquet of the flavor-enhancing micro-organisms that were unique to each individual farm. Many artisan cheesemakers stopped producing (although Quebec’s cheesewrights took new heart from the arrival of French Trappists who settled in Oka and laid the foundations for la belle province’s flourishing cheese industry today). Blandness and uniformity conspired against North American cheese. With the advent of Kraft Singles, it looked like they’d won. Uncle Sam, though temporarily stunned, wasn’t down for the count. Artisan cheesemakers began popping up in the Seventies; today the American Cheese Society reports nearly a thousand of them. If the Land of the Free ever suffered from an inferiority complex about its cheese products, it need blush no longer. At the 2019 World Cheese Awards in Bergamo, Italy, an Oregon cheese, Rogue River Blue, creamed 3,803 other cheeses and won first place. American wine and American cheese. Can't get much better. Except for bourbon. Posted by: DarthVader 2020-03-11 |
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