Recipes

America

America took the factory system from the last page and ran further with it than anyone. For most of a century that meant American cheese was a story about volume — enormous, cheap, consistent, and not very interesting.

That’s the received version, and it’s wrong in two directions. America invented some genuinely original cheeses along the way, one of which is the reason a Detroit pizza tastes the way it does. And the thing that eventually put the variety back was not an industry initiative but a scattering of small farms, run disproportionately by women, one of whom ended up selling me my rennet.

The originals

Three cheeses are American inventions in the proper sense — not imitations of a European original, but new things that came out of a specific factory on a specific day.

Colby, invented in Colby, Wisconsin in 1885 by Joseph Steinwand. His father owned a large cheese factory in the town and Joseph had worked in it since he was sixteen. Handling a batch of cheddar, he washed the curd with cold water — and got something else: milder, moister, springier, with an open texture rather than cheddar’s dense layered body.

That’s not a trivial variation, and it’s worth knowing why it works, because it’s a mechanism the whole families picture depends on. Washing the curd rinses away lactose. Less lactose means the bacteria have less to eat, so they make less acid, so the finished cheese is sweeter and more elastic and doesn’t develop cheddar’s sharpness. Steinwand had stumbled onto the same lever the Dutch use for gouda — arriving at it independently, in Wisconsin, at the age of twenty-odd.

Brick, invented in 1877 by John Jossi, a Swiss-born cheesemaker who had spent several years working in a New York Limburger plant before setting up in Wisconsin. Brick is what you get when somebody who understands Limburger builds something firmer, milder and far more shippable — a washed-rind cheese domesticated for a market that wasn’t ready for the real thing. It’s a bridge cheese, and it’s an honest one.

Cold pack, the third Wisconsin original, is the spreadable blend — less romantic, but a real invention.

Wisconsin, incidentally, has been the largest cheese-producing state in the country since 1910, and has never lost the title.

🔴 And this is why Detroit pizza tastes like that

Here’s the bit that lands closest to home for me, since I’m in Michigan.

Detroit-style pizza is built on Wisconsin brick cheese. Not mozzarella — or not only mozzarella. The brick is laid all the way to the edges of the high-sided, heavyweight rectangular pan, and the cheese that touches the hot steel wall caramelises into the fried, lacy, crunchy frill around the rim that is the entire point of the style.

Which means the defining feature of my state’s signature pizza is a direct descendant of Limburger, by way of a Swiss immigrant in 1877 Wisconsin, and it works because brick has the fat and the melting behaviour to fry rather than merely melt. The pan matters, the dough matters — but you cannot get that edge with a low-moisture mozzarella alone.

I have made a lot of pizza and I did not know this. It goes on the list of things to test properly.

The revival, and who actually did it

The interesting part of the American story isn’t the factories. It’s that the variety came back — and the mechanism was almost the opposite of the industrial one.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, Americans who had travelled in Europe came home having eaten proper farmhouse cheese, and found they couldn’t buy anything like it. At the same time the back-to-the-land movement put a lot of people on small farms wanting to make food by traditional methods. Those two things met, and creameries started appearing — especially in the Northeast and on the West Coast.

In 1983 the American Cheese Society was founded as a grassroots organisation, explicitly to help American cheesemakers make better cheese. Not a trade body defending an industry — a group of small producers teaching each other. (Ricki Carroll is a founding member — the same person who wrote the first book I’d recommend and who runs the supply company I’ve bought from for thirty years. She turns up at every stage of this story.)

And the American artisan revival was built disproportionately by women. Laura Chenel and Mary Keehn of Cypress Grove in California; Vermont Creamery, Lazy Lady Farm and Orb Weaver Farm in Vermont; Mystique Cheese and Seal Cove Farm in Maine. That’s not a footnote I’m adding for balance — it’s what the record shows, and it’s a genuine contrast with the European history in this wing, which is almost entirely monks, guilds and named men. When the American tradition was rebuilt from close to nothing, a strikingly large share of the rebuilding was done by women running small farms.

Given that Ricki Carroll’s book is the reason I ever tried this, and her company supplied the rennet, I’m downstream of that revival in a fairly direct way.

Wisconsin’s Master Cheesemakers

One more thing worth knowing, because it cuts against the “America does volume, Europe does quality” story.

In 1994 Wisconsin’s Center for Dairy Research launched the Master Cheesemaker program. Co-creator Jim Path had noticed that Europe had formal Master Cheesemaker credentials and reasoned that a state with a dairy industry that size ought to have one too.

It is the most rigorous advanced cheesemaking training in the country and the only master program outside Europe. Not a marketing badge — years of practice, coursework and examination in specific varieties.

Where that leaves American cheese

America is now, genuinely, both extremes at once. It is the largest industrial cheese producer in the world, still making the standardised block that Jesse Williams’ factory system was designed to produce. And it has a serious artisan sector making cheeses that win against European competition, plus the only formal mastery credential outside Europe.

Those two things coexist, and they’re both consequences of the same history: a country that industrialised early and hard, lost its variety to that, and then rebuilt the variety deliberately — the way England did, around the same time, for the same reasons, and largely without either country noticing the other was doing it.

Up next: the wider world — Latin America, the Middle East, India, and why East Asia arrived so late. Being written now.

Sources

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