US Cheese Day
<p>In the spring of 1851, a dairy farmer named Jesse Williams pooled the milk from his own farm in Rome, New York with that of his son’s nearby farm and began making cheese under one roof, to one standard, in uniform sizes. It sounds unremarkable now. At the time it was a small revolution: the first cheese factory in the United States. Until then, American cheese had been a farmhouse product, made kitchen by kitchen, wildly inconsistent in quality and size. Williams’s factory pointed the way to an entire industry. US Cheese Day, kept on 20 January, is best understood not as a generic food holiday but as an annual nod to that long American journey from farmyard curd to one of the world’s great cheese cultures.</p>
<h2 id="origins-of-the-day">Origins of the day</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
<span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span>
<ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center"
data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946"
data-ad-slot="3291553914"
data-ad-format="auto"
data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>
<script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script>
</div>
<p>The date is the same one widely observed in the United States as National Cheese Lovers Day, an unofficial food holiday with no single founder and no organising committee, the kind of grassroots observance that food enthusiasts, dairy producers and the occasional marketing department keep alive between them. Its origins are genuinely murky, and no individual can credibly claim to have invented it. What it has instead is a clear function: an excuse, in the depths of January, to celebrate American-made cheese and the people who make it.</p>
<p>That vagueness about provenance is common to most modern food days, and it would be dishonest to dress it up. The more interesting history is not the day’s but the food’s, and on that there is a great deal that can be pinned to specific people, places and dates.</p>
<h2 id="the-long-history-behind-the-curd">The long history behind the curd</h2>
<p>Cheese itself is ancient. Scientists have identified cheese residue on 7,000-year-old pottery from what is now Poland, and a lump of solid cheese, thought to be over 3,200 years old, was recovered from an Egyptian tomb. The technique almost certainly arose by accident: milk carried in vessels made from animal stomachs, which contain the enzyme rennet, would curdle into curds and whey, and someone, somewhere, decided the curds were worth keeping. From that happy mishap came a method of turning perishable milk into something that could be stored and carried.</p>
<p>The American chapter began with European settlers who brought their cheese-making traditions across the Atlantic, but it was Jesse Williams who industrialised it. His Rome factory produced an extraordinary 100,000 pounds of cheese in its first year, more than five times the output of a typical farmstead, and crucially it produced cheese of consistent quality and size, solving the very inconsistency that had been dragging down the market value of New York cheese. The model spread fast: within fifteen years there were some five hundred such factories in New York State alone. In 1864 Williams’s circle helped found the New York State Cheese Manufacturers’ Association, an organisation that fed into what became the American Dairy Association.</p>
<h2 id="how-wisconsin-took-the-crown">How Wisconsin took the crown</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
<span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span>
<ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center"
data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946"
data-ad-slot="3291553914"
data-ad-format="auto"
data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>
<script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script>
</div>
<p>New York led first, but the centre of gravity moved west. Wisconsin, “America’s Dairyland”, became and remains the country’s dominant cheese producer, responsible in recent years for around a quarter of all US cheese. The state guards its craft with unusual seriousness: Wisconsin is the only US state that legally requires a licensed cheesemaker to supervise commercial cheese production, and it runs the only Master Cheesemaker programme in the country, one of only two such schemes in the world, modelled on European apprenticeship traditions and demanding years of experience before certification.</p>
<p>That investment in skill has produced cheeses that compete with anything in the world. Uplands Cheese Company’s Pleasant Ridge Reserve, an alpine-style cheese made only in summer when the cows graze fresh pasture, has won Best of Show at the American Cheese Society’s competition three times, the only cheese ever to do so, and is widely called the most-awarded cheese in American history. The story that began with Jesse Williams chasing mere uniformity has arrived, a century and a half later, at genuine artistry.</p>
<h2 id="why-the-day-matters">Why the day matters</h2>
<p>Beneath the lightheartedness, US Cheese Day points at something real about the dairy economy. Artisan cheesemakers tend to operate on a small scale and live or die by public interest in their work; a day that nudges shoppers towards locally made cheese over commodity blocks is, in a modest way, an act of economic support for rural producers and the farms that supply them. Cheese is also a major pillar of the wider dairy industry, and its fortunes ripple through farming communities.</p>
<p>There is a cultural argument too. Each region’s cheese encodes its climate, its herds and its history, and traditional methods survive only as long as someone keeps buying the result. The day is an invitation to taste widely enough to understand that “cheese” is not one food but a vast family, and to value the patience and craft that separate a thoughtfully aged wheel from an industrial brick.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-celebrated">How it is celebrated</h2>
<p>People keep the day in straightforward, pleasurable ways: assembling a cheeseboard that runs from soft and bloomy to hard and aged, seeking out a variety they have never tried, or cooking something built around cheese, from a bubbling gratin to a properly made macaroni cheese, a dish so central to the American table that it has earned its own place in the country’s comfort-food canon. Specialist cheesemongers host tastings; the more adventurous attempt a simple fresh cheese at home, discovering how little it takes, a little acid, gentle heat, to turn milk into curds.</p>
<p>The day sits comfortably alongside the rest of the American food calendar’s dairy entries, sharing a spirit with observances such as the <a href="/specialdate/us-national-mac-cheese-day/">US National <a href="/story/mac-and-cheese/">Mac and Cheese</a> Day</a> and the more pointed <a href="/specialdate/us-national-grilled-cheese-sandwich-day/">US National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day</a>, both of which celebrate cheese in its most beloved cooked forms rather than on the board.</p>
<h2 id="what-american-cheese-really-means">What “American cheese” really means</h2>
<p>The phrase “American cheese” carries an unfair burden. To much of the world it conjures the individually wrapped orange slice, the processed cheese product invented in the early twentieth century, and James L. Kraft’s patenting of a pasteurised, blended, shelf-stable cheese in 1916 is genuinely part of the story, a piece of food engineering that fed soldiers, schoolchildren and a fast-growing nation. But to reduce American cheese to that single invention is like judging French cooking by a tin of pâté. The same country produces Vermont’s sharp, crumbly clothbound cheddars, the washed-rind stinkers of small Midwestern creameries, and California’s award-winning blues.</p>
<p>The tension between these two faces, the industrial slice and the artisan wheel, is in many ways the real subject of a day like this one. Jesse Williams’s nineteenth-century innovation was standardisation, making cheese reliable and uniform, and that impulse led in time to both the processed slice and the licensing rigour of Wisconsin. The artisan revival that gathered pace from the 1980s onwards was a deliberate swing back the other way, towards the irregular, the seasonal and the place-specific. US Cheese Day, knowingly or not, celebrates both halves of that inheritance.</p>
<h2 id="the-science-worth-tasting-for">The science worth tasting for</h2>
<p>Part of what makes cheese rewarding to celebrate is that almost every distinctive feature is the visible result of biology at work. The holes in a Swiss-style cheese are gas bubbles left by bacteria that produce carbon dioxide as they ferment; the blue veins in a Roquefort-style cheese are colonies of Penicillium mould, deliberately introduced and then fed with air through piercing needles; the bloomy white rind on a Brie-style cheese is another mould entirely, coaxed to grow on the surface. Ageing concentrates and transforms flavour as enzymes slowly break proteins and fats into ever more complex compounds, which is why a cheese tasted young and the same cheese tasted at eighteen months can seem like distant relatives rather than the same food.</p>
<p>To spend the day tasting attentively, then, is to sample the output of a controlled, centuries-refined collaboration between human craft and microbial life. It is a useful thing to remember while standing at a cheese counter: the cheesemaker is less a cook than a steward of organisms, nudging milk down one of a thousand possible paths.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>Fresh cheese curds squeak against your teeth because their long, elastic protein strands have not yet broken down; the squeak fades within a day or two, which is why Wisconsinites prize curds eaten the same day they are made.</li>
<li>Pleasant Ridge Reserve is the only cheese ever to win the American Cheese Society’s Best of Show three times (2001, 2005 and 2010), making it the most-decorated cheese the country has produced.</li>
<li>Wisconsin is the only US state that requires a licensed cheesemaker to oversee commercial production, and the only one with a multi-year Master Cheesemaker certification, one of just two such programmes anywhere on earth.</li>
<li>The oldest solid cheese ever found, recovered from a 3,200-year-old Egyptian tomb, was still identifiable as cheese; analysis suggested it had once been a sour, crumbly style.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>It is worth remembering, on a day that can look like an excuse for a snack, that almost everything on a good cheeseboard is the product of managed decay, the holes, the blue veins, the bloomy rinds, all the deliberate work of microbes coaxed by a cheesemaker’s patience. Jesse Williams set out in 1851 to make cheese merely consistent; what American cheesemaking has become since is something he could hardly have predicted, a craft confident enough to make its own classics rather than only copy Europe’s. The squeak of a fresh curd is a small, perishable reminder that the best of it is still made by hand, and still meant to be eaten soon.</p>
Advertisement
Related Content
Advertisement
