A road trip with cheddar
If the thought of reading an entire book about a single cheese makes your neck start to slump, you have never spent time chatting with Gordon Edgar, the longtime cheese buyer at Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Edgar can make any discussion of cheese mites or the acid levels in Cantal entertaining. His new book, “Cheddar: A Journey to the Heart of America’s Most Iconic Cheese,” chronicles a series of road trips around the country; it’s as funny as a Sarah Vowell history without her neurotic need to self-expose.
As he sets off in search of cheddar’s past and present, Edgar judges mac-andcheese contests, visits third-generation producers in Vermont and Wisconsin, and makes pilgrimages to underperforming cheese monuments. Cheddar, it turns out, isn’t just a cheese, but a lens for looking at the entire American food system.
Q: What got you so fascinated about cheddar?
A: Well, I realized that cheddar was key to understanding cheese in the United States.
In the 1980s, people all over the United States decided to go back to high-quality farmstead cheesemaking, either to make dairy farming viable or because they were interested in the way real, traditional food could be something incredible to make and eat.
As a cheese buyer for a store that serves a wide diversity of people, I was interested in trying to support new American producers. But I wondered how we got to this point. Indeed, as I learned more about cheese, I realized that there was a time when American cheesemaking was considered some of the best in the world.
Then, in 1851, the first cheddar factory appeared in upstate New York, and it revolutionized the way America made cheese. From that time on, cheddar was the most popular cheese in the U.S. because it was easily transferable to a factory setting.
Q: What makes cheddar cheddar?
A: There are many arguments over what makes a real cheddar. Traditional cheddar is “cheddared,” which means that after you coagulate the milk and you have curds and whey, you pile the curds on top of each other to make them exude more moisture.
Q: When did the cheddar that most people think of in America — that big orange block — come about?
A: Cheddar-making has been a constant push toward efficiency and yielding more cheap protein. When you create cheese, the more moisture you lose, the more money you lose, because you’re basically charging by the pound. After World War II, the technology for better plastics emerged, so instead of making rounds (wrapped in cloth or wax), they started making cheddar in blocks and sealing them in plastic.
Q: Is cheddar in America evolving?
A: Definitely. I fell like we’re in this real renaissance of cheddar-making. The traditional cloth-bound cheddar went extinct in America and it almost went extinct in England. It was basically brought back by the cheese renaissance that started in the 1970s and ’80s.
On a different level, with the advent of designer cheese cultures, you can design your
own flavor profile. Block cheddar is less dependent on the milk producers get and more on what they want the flavor to be, which is sweet and sharp.
Q: Who in California is making the most interesting cheddars?
A: Though there are fewer (artisanal) cheddars in California than in most cheese-producing states, Fiscalini cheddar may be the most traditional-tasting clothbound cheddar made in the United States. Mariano Gonzalez gets that really dank, complex, grassy, earthy flavor out of his clothbound cheddar, and it’s some of the best in the world.
Q: Name three cheddars that people should eat while they’re reading your book.
A: I would say Montgomery cheddar, from the Montgomery family in England — that’s the classic clothbound Englishstyle cheddar. My current favorite is Grafton’s Queen of Quality clothbound cheddar (from Vermont), made with the milk from Jersey cows, which gives it a richer flavor. And for a block cheddar, the Prairie Breeze from Milton Creamery in Iowa is one of those sweet, crunchy cheeses made by Mennonites. But I could name a million.
Q: After reading this book, I get the sense that the Rainbow Cheese department is an endless source of cheese puns.
A: Yes, that’s definitely true. Not just Rainbow. Cheese lends itself to punning. You have to have a pun if you’re a sheep cheese producer — it’s practically a law.
“I realized that cheddar was key to understanding cheese in the United States.”
Gordon Edgar, author