Recipes

Industrialization

Harding, on the last page, worked out how to make cheddar consistently and then taught the method to anyone who asked — including American cheesemakers who travelled to Somerset to learn it. This page is what those Americans did when they got home.

They didn’t improve the cheese. They reorganised who makes it, and that turned out to matter far more.

Jesse Williams, 1851, and the problem of uniformity

Jesse Williams was born in Rome, New York in 1798, the son of a Connecticut farmer who’d served in the Revolution. He was a successful farmer and a successful cheesemaker, and what bothered him was not that American cheese was bad. It was that it was inconsistent — variable in quality, and not even uniform in size. Buyers couldn’t rely on it, so it sold badly.

His diagnosis was that the problem wasn’t skill, it was structure. Every farm making its own cheese to its own standard produces, in aggregate, an unreliable product. So in 1851, at Highland Mills just north of Rome, he built something new: a factory that took in milk from surrounding farms and made all of it into cheese in one place, to one standard, by people who did nothing else.

The first year it produced 100,000 pounds of cheese, and it worked immediately.

Then it spread at a rate that’s hard to credit. Within fifteen years there were 500 such factories in New York State alone, and Oneida County by itself was producing over eight million pounds of cheese a year.

Notice what Williams actually solved, because it’s the same problem this wing keeps circling. The Comté fruitières pooled milk from farms too small to make a wheel alone and solved consistency socially — rotating duty, a shared ledger, proportional payout. Williams pooled milk from farms and solved it industrially — one building, one paid specialist, one standard. Same input problem, two completely different institutions, six hundred years apart.

⭐ And he gave it away

Here’s the detail that made me sit up: Williams never patented any of it. He gave his methods to the agricultural world.

Put that next to Harding, who published his system in a journal of the Royal Agricultural Society and personally trained his competitors, including foreign ones. The two men who between them industrialised cheese in the English-speaking world both treated the method as something to be published rather than owned.

That is why it moved so fast. Five hundred factories in fifteen years is not the spread of a trade secret; it’s the spread of an openly documented one. The entire modern cheese industry was bootstrapped on deliberately shared knowledge — which I find worth saying out loud, because the next step in the story goes precisely the other way.

Kraft, 1916, and cheese that survives a warehouse

James L. Kraft filed a patent in 1916 for a process that solved a completely different problem: not how to make cheese consistently, but how to make it stop being alive.

The patent describes taking cheese of the cheddar genus and preventing it from disintegrating under heat — by grinding it, heating it with continuous agitation until thoroughly sterilised, and packaging it. What comes out is a cheese that no longer ripens, doesn’t separate when melted, tolerates warmth, and keeps more or less indefinitely.

Everything the rest of this section treats as the point of cheese — the living rind, the slow proteolysis, the way a wheel changes over two years — is precisely what that process removes. And that’s not an accusation, it’s the design brief. Kraft was solving for armies, shops without refrigeration, and shipping. Processed cheese fed a lot of people, and it did it by trading away everything that makes a cheese interesting in exchange for everything that makes a product reliable.

He also patented it. The posture shift from Williams and Harding to Kraft — from published method to owned process — is the arrival of cheese as a branded manufactured good rather than an agricultural one.

🔴 The first GMO in the human food supply was cheese rennet

This is the fact from this page I’d most like people to know, because almost nobody does.

In 1990 the FDA approved fermentation-produced chymosin (FPC) for use in food. It was the first bioengineered product permitted in the US food supply — before the Flavr Savr tomato, before GM soy, before any of the things that get argued about.

How it works: the gene that codes for chymosin, the enzyme in a calf’s stomach that clots milk, was isolated from calf cells and cloned into microorganisms — E. coli, the yeast Kluyveromyces lactis, or the fungus Aspergillus niger. Those organisms then produce pure chymosin by fermentation, in a tank, in quantity.

Two things make this genuinely interesting rather than just a trivia answer.

It’s better rennet, on the merits. Traditional animal rennet is an extract containing chymosin plus other enzymes in ratios that vary with the animal’s age and diet. FPC is a single, pure, identical enzyme every time — so it’s more consistent, and it avoids the bitterness that other proteases can develop in long-aged cheese. It is also not the same thing as the “microbial rennet” sold as a vegetarian option, which is a genuinely different fungal enzyme with its own quirks.

And it defuses an argument by accident. FPC means the enzyme requires no calf, which is what a great many vegetarians actually wanted — while being, technically, a product of genetic engineering, which is what a great many of the same people are wary of. The most animal-friendly rennet available is the GM one. I don’t think there’s a tidy resolution there; I just think it’s a more honest place to stand than either camp’s slogan. Most cheese in American supermarkets is now made with it, and it gets labelled “enzymes.”

What industrialization bought and what it cost

Worth being even-handed, because this page could easily be a lament and shouldn’t be.

What it bought: cheese that’s cheap, safe, available everywhere, and the same every time. Pasteurisation and standardisation ended a real toll of dairy-borne illness — remember the Brucella in the oldest cheese we’ve ever found. Consistency isn’t a small thing either; it’s what let cheese become an ingredient people could build a food economy on.

What it cost: variety, and the people who held it. The logic that produced 500 factories in fifteen years is the same logic that, applied by a state under wartime emergency, produced Government Cheddar and took British farmhouse cheesemakers from 3,500 to under 100. Centralising for consistency and centralising until only one cheese remains are points on one line, not different things.

Which is the honest frame for my own hobby. I’m not making cheese because the industry failed — I’ve said elsewhere that the shops are full of very good cheese, and that’s largely thanks to this page. I make it because industrial logic optimises for reliability, and variation is the interesting part, and a converted refrigerator in a basement is a place where variation is allowed.

Up next: America — Wisconsin, Vermont, California, and the artisan renaissance that started putting the variety back. Being written now.

Sources

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