There's something innately disturbing about the short memory of popular culture, the impetuous hastiness with which celebrated things can be completely and utterly forgotten, a reminder that most people’s legacies don’t extend too far beyond their lifespans. So while it’s nice to imagine we have an adequate picture of what life was like 50 or 60 years ago, a sampling of hit movies and TV shows, icons and stars, fashions and trends, there’s really a huge amount of now-vanished information which leaves this image incomplete. Take for example Bob, Rose and Cora Brown, a by-all-accounts moderately famous husband, wife and mother team of food explorers, who wrote several impressive tomes on the joys of adventurous eating. All of these are now out of print, and the Browns can no longer even boast a Wikipedia entry to their name. Bob, the trio’s de facto leader (if only by virtue of having lived the longest and wrote the most) still has a few scant clippings accessible, including this 2010 NYTimes piece, which seems to completely misinterpret an obvious joke about an idea for an automated reading machine. This disappearance is a shame, since the Browns’ gourmand legacy, the concept of combing the globe for new flavors rather than clinging to the comfortable tastes of home, seems especially relevant today. I discovered the Browns’ work accidentally, receiving a copy of the alluringly titled 10,000 Snacks as a birthday present after a friend found it languishing at a flea market. It’s an amazing book (and surely the topic for a future post), by turns silly and informative, and it inspired me to purchase Bob’s so-called Complete Book of Cheese, which I scooped up for a mere two bucks on Amazon. It was worth it, and below I’ll share some invaluable gleanings from this useful guide to mid-century cheese mores, along with some accompanying illustrations, the first of three entries devoted to this unusual turophile bible. THE CRACKER BARREL Before it was attached to a country-store-themed chain famous for olde-time stick candy and old-fashioned homophobia, the cracker barrel was a neighborhood institution, the 19th century equivalent of the water cooler. The omnipresence of its modern-day iteration, a chain which put a premium on falsely authentic nostalgia for clean, home-style cooking while reminding us that most of this cooking probably wasn't that good in the first place, also makes it really hard to Google this term. This doesn't mean it wasn't important; Brown connects these local conversation spots to the birth of American cheese culture itself: In America cheese got its start in country stores in our cracker-barrel days when every man felt free to saunter in, pick up the cheese knife and cut himself a wedge from the big-bellied rattrap cheese standing under its glass bell or wire mesh hood that kept the flies off but not the free-lunchers. Cheese by itself being none too palatable, the taster would saunter over to the cracker barrel, shoo the cat off and help himself to the old-time crackers that can't be beat today. He goes on to link the country store tradition, which grew to prominence as the stationary, slow-placed equivalent to the traveling peddler, selling sundry goods stacked high inside of dark, cavernous stores, as the precursor to the infamous free lunch, by which would tavern owners would lure in early 20th century drinkers, often under false pretenses. STEWED CHEESE A recent episode of the Planet Money podcast revealed that Swiss fondue has the same general function as the Scottish kilt, a small, regionally-focused domestic practice turned into a symbol of national pride by a savvy marketing campaign. The gist of this history is that fondue wasn't something for well-off Swiss in cable-knit sweaters to enjoy while louchely lounging around their ski chalets, but a quick and dirty dinner option for dairy-farming peasants with excess cheese on their hands. I imagine the same applies to with stewed cheese, an 18th century pub food, and forerunner to Welsh Rarebit, which involves cheese and butter slow-stewed to perfection in a chafing dish. Such a meal seems rich now, but it has low-culture roots, likely devised as a way to mask moldering cheese by turning it into goo, a pub-food precursor to shocking yellow slicks of modern-day nacho sludge. From this original toasting of the cheese many Englishmen still call Welsh Rabbit "Toasted Cheese," but Lady Llanover goes on to point out that the Toasted Rabbit of her Wales and the Melted or Stewed Buck Rabbit of England (which has become our American standard) are as different in the making as the regional cheeses used in them, and she says that while doctors prescribed the toasted Welsh as salubrious for invalids, the stewed cheese of Olde England was "only adapted to strong digestions." BAYERISCHER BIERKASE “It is the only cheese that is commonly melted into steins of beer and drunk instead of eaten. It is usually studded with caraway seeds, the most natural spice for curds.” The idea of cheese created to be melted down into steins of beer seems both classically German and possibly apocryphal, and I can’t find any information proving this actually occurred as a common practice. I’m still inclined to trust Brown, an inveterate traveler who claimed to have lived in 40 different foreign cities, and the possibility remains that this Bavarian custom simply hasn't been documented much outside of the region. I can say that the caraway-studded cheese refers to kümmelkäse, another German cheese that seems to be barely documented in the English language, further proof that the mythical dunking cheese may be a reality. There's also Weisslacker, a Bavarian style also known as 'beer cheese', which is intended to be dipped in your brew, and obatzda, which is apparently ubiquitous in the region's beer gardens.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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