My favorite writer for American Heritage Magazine is John Steele Gordon. He usually writes the Business of America column. He gives needed background context to current events and insight into past events that are prologue to today. One of his earlier articles dealt with the limited American variety of cheeses,"Consider the United States. It has produced only three great,
uniquely American cheeses: Monterey Jack, brick, and Liederkranz." Mr. Gordon expands, "Soft drinks were invented in this country by businessmen, not chefs. So were canned soups, nondairy coffee creamers, breakfast cereals, and—may the Lord forgive us—TV dinners. Coca-Cola may well be the
most famous American product in the world."
However some elements of American foodstuffs don't fit with mass production, "The essence of industrialized food, of course, is uniformity and vast production. ...The essence of great cheeses, however, is idiosyncrasy and, almost always, very limited production. For natural cheese is a living thing."
"What makes cheese possible is the happy property of milk protein that it coagulates in the presence of acids and other chemicals produced by microorganisms. The protein and fat form curds, allowing most of the liquid to be separated out. The curds are then molded and stored while the microorganisms continue to work their magic, slowly producing the flavor, aroma, and consistency of each type of cheese."
"It is the infinite variety of these microorganisms that makes for the infinite variety of cheeses."
Natural Cheese itself is as individual as the people and the regions from where they came. Like the horse, "Europeans began settling the New World, they brought with them the cheese-making know-how that had developed over many thousands of years. Each immigrant group also brought a taste for the particular cheeses it had known at home, and cheese makers necessarily catered to these tastes." These were not the processed cheeses do familiar to our grocery shelves today. Then, cheeses were not formed and extruded on assembly line like an automobile. These European style cheeses were nurtured from years of experience, milks and bacteria. But cheeses and transportation and buggy whips were about to change.
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1996/7/1996_7_42.shtml
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