Recipes

    The United States

    A country with no dairy tradition of its own before 1600, which became the largest cheese producer on earth, spent most of the twentieth century making one orange rectangle, buried 560 million pounds of surplus in a limestone mine, and then — in 2019 — won the world championship.

    That arc is the page.

    Where American cheese came from

    The American history page covers the sequence properly: the English farmhouse tradition arriving with colonists, Jesse Williams’s first cheese factory in 1851, and the industrial consolidation that followed. This page is what’s actually on the shelf, and the two things that make the US distinctive.

    Distinctive thing one: everything here is an immigrant cheese, and most of them say so. Colby is a cheddar variation. Wisconsin Brick is Limburger’s descendant. Monterey Jack descends from the Spanish mission cheeses of California. Reggianito’s cousins are in Argentina. The Americas are the wing’s control group and the US is the largest sample in it.

    Distinctive thing two: the institutions are unlike anywhere else. Land-grant universities with dairy science departments and their own creameries. A federal price-support system that bought cheese. And a five-decade artisan revival driven by people who mostly learned from books and each other rather than from a parent.

    ⭐ Cougar Gold — a state university’s cheese, sold in a can

    Washington State University’s creamery has been selling cheese in tins since the 1940s, and it is still doing it.

    The origin is properly institutional: the US government and the American Can Company funded WSU research to find a way to keep cheese successfully in cans. The result, named after Norman S. Golding, one of the men who developed it, is Cougar Gold — a sharp white cheddar, aged at least one year, sold exclusively in 30-ounce tins.

    ⭐ Add the can to the vessel ledger. This wing has found cheese matured in sheepskins, fir bark, clay pots, tufa pits, spruce bands, coconut shells, banana leaves and olive oil. America’s contribution is a sealed steel can, arrived at by a wartime-adjacent research contract, and the cheese ages inside it — buyers routinely keep tins for years.

    It is also the clearest possible illustration of the point rind treatment makes about wax: seal the cheese completely and you get a cheese that ripens from within only, reliably, indefinitely, with an entire category of flavour development traded away for an entire category of failure removed. A can is wax taken to its logical conclusion.

    🔴 The government cheese, and where it went

    The story most Americans half-remember, with the actual numbers.

    The mechanism was the Agricultural Act of 1949, which had the federal government buy surplus butter, cheese and nonfat dry milk whenever market prices fell below a set floor — a price guarantee to keep dairy farmers solvent.

    The consequence was exactly what a guaranteed floor produces. By the late 1970s American dairies were producing far more milk than the market could absorb, and by December 1981 more than 560 million pounds of cheese had accumulated in warehouses.

    The disposal: that same month, Reagan authorised the release of 30 million pounds for free distribution to low-income households — which is the “government cheese” people remember eating.

    And the storage is the part that sounds invented and isn’t. Surplus was moved into converted limestone mines, notably in Missouri; the Springfield Underground genuinely received it, and 1982 photographs show pallets labelled “USDA Food” and “Pasteurized Process American Cheese” inside the facility.

    ⚠ One caution, because this story attracts inflation. You will read that the caves currently hold “1.4 billion pounds of cheese.” That figure comes from modern total dairy stocks reporting, not from a single cheese pile, and the two get conflated constantly. The 560 million pounds in December 1981 and the 30 million released are the numbers I can stand behind.

    ⭐ What I take from it is the same lesson as the English collapse and Operation Flood, from the opposite direction: institutions decide what a country’s cheese is. Britain’s institutions destroyed a farmhouse tradition and later a single buyer rebuilt part of it. India’s built a collection network and got fresh milk at enormous scale. America’s guaranteed a price and got, quite literally, a mountain — of the one cheese cheapest to make and store.

    ⭐⭐ Rogue River Blue — and the newest cheese here uses the oldest technique

    In 2019, at the World Cheese Awards in Bergamo, Rogue Creamery’s Rogue River Blue was named World’s Best Cheese — the first American cheese ever to take the title.

    The detail is good: it scored 100 points and tied with an Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano, and won on a tie-breaking vote. Rogue Creamery, in southern Oregon, has been making cheese since 1933.

    And here is the part that closes a loop this wing has been drawing for fourteen pages. It is an organic, cave-aged blue, wrapped in Syrah grape leaves that have been soaked in pear spirits.

    Leaves. Again.

    Banon in chestnut leaves · Cabrales traditionally in maple leaves · kesong puti in banana leaves · kalari ripened on pine · Cornish Yarg in nettles · fir bark in the Carpathians — and now a twenty-first-century American artisan cheese that beat Parmigiano-Reggiano, doing the same thing.

    The most modern cheese on this page is wrapped in leaves, because the vessel is an ingredient and that was never a primitive workaround. It’s the single most consistent finding in the entire world tour, and the newest data point is the strongest one.

    The ones worth knowing

    Wisconsin Brick — invented in Wisconsin, a milder washed-rind descendant of Limburger, and the Chalet Cheese Cooperative in Monroe — founded 1885 by five dairy farmers — is still the only Limburger producer in the United States as well as making Brick.

    Colby — from Colby, Wisconsin. A cheddar made by washing the curd, which is the Dutch intervention applied to an English cheese: less acid, higher pH, softer and milder. An American original that is really a hybrid of two European ideas, which is about as American as a cheese gets.

    Monterey Jack — descended from the queso del país of the Spanish California missions, and its aged form, Dry Jack, is a serious grating cheese with a cocoa-and-oil rubbed rind.

    Liederkranz — a washed-rind created in New York in the 1890s, made continuously for most of a century, discontinued in the 1980s, and later revived from preserved cultures. ⚠ Reported rather than verified here, but worth naming for what it demonstrates: a twentieth-century cheese can be brought back from a frozen culture in a way Milbenkäse — which survived only in one woman’s memory — could not have been.

    Maytag Blue (Iowa) — developed from university dairy research and made since the 1940s by the family better known for washing machines. Another land-grant institution in the ancestry.

    Humboldt Fog (Cypress Grove, California) — a bloomy-rind goat’s cheese with a line of vegetable ash through the middle, and probably the single most recognisable American artisan cheese.

    Pleasant Ridge Reserve (Uplands, Wisconsin) — an alpine-style raw-milk cheese made only from summer pasture milk, which is the season argument adopted deliberately by a modern maker rather than inherited.

    Vermont Shepherd, Jasper Hill, Cowgirl Creamery, Point Reyes — the spine of the artisan revival that began in the 1980s and is now three or four decades deep.

    And processed cheese, which America invented and exported to the world — covered properly on the processed and modern family page, where emulsifying salts turn out to be genuinely clever chemistry rather than a crime.

    What to take to the bench

    The 60-day rule shapes everything I can legally make and sell, and it is argued out on the raw-milk wars. For a home maker giving cheese away it mostly doesn’t bite; it’s worth knowing that it exists and what it does and doesn’t do.

    ⭐ Pleasant Ridge Reserve is the model I’d actually copy — not the recipe, the decision. Making an alpine-style cheese only from summer milk, on purpose, because the milk is genuinely different, is a discipline available to anybody with a source and a notebook. It costs nothing but restraint.

    And Cougar Gold is a reminder that sealing works. My own default is wax, and I’ve occasionally felt apologetic about it next to natural rinds. A sealed cheddar that a university has sold for eighty years and that people deliberately keep for a decade is a decent argument that the trade-off is a legitimate choice rather than a compromise.

    Next in this wing: Canada, then Africa and Oceania, then the roundup of the ones nobody here has heard of.

    Sources

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