People have been turning milk into cheese for about 7,000 years, and the results have been buried in gardens, launched into orbit and chased down hills. These stories visit caves where blue cheese ripens, a Dutch guild in colorful hats and a Wisconsin couch cushion. You will meet a Danish dairy pioneer, a Canadian cheese that broke a floor, a truckload of cheese that burned for days and a president who opened the White House to a 1,400-pound wheel.
Every tile in a Cheese game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Cheeses
nine stories
1Philadelphia cream cheese was born in New York
On the tile: Philadelphia1880
Philadelphia Cream Cheese was born in New York, not Pennsylvania. It began in Chester, New York, where dairyman William Lawrence boosted the cream in his recipe and made something richer than the Neufchâtel cheese of the day. In 1880 a New York cheese broker, Alvah Reynolds, began selling it under a borrowed name, because Philadelphia was then widely considered the country's top spot for high-quality dairy. The branding worked so well that Reynolds brought in more dairies to make the cheese, all of them in upstate New York.
Norway's brunost, or brown cheese, is made backward. Most cheesemaking keeps the curds and throws away the whey; brunost keeps the whey, and the result is sweet with a hint of caramel. All that fat and sugar made news in January 2013, when a truck carrying 27 tons of brunost caught fire inside a road tunnel near Tysfjord, in Arctic Norway. A police officer said the mix burns almost like gasoline once it gets hot enough. Firefighters needed four days to put it out, and the driver was not hurt.
Limburger is famous for smelling like feet, and malaria mosquitoes seem to agree. In the 1990s Dutch biologists put Limburger in a wind tunnel with the malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae and were surprised to find the females drawn to it. Bart Knols and Ruurd de Jong later won a 2006 Ig Nobel Prize for showing that the mosquito is attracted equally to Limburger and to human feet. The likely reason is that the cheese contains bacteria closely related to some that live on human skin. Researchers have since tested Limburger as bait in mosquito traps.
Havarti is often said to have been invented by Hanne Nielsen, a 19th-century Danish farmer. She was a genuine dairy pioneer: she studied cheesemaking in Sweden, Norway, England, Switzerland and France, brought styles such as gouda, brie and gorgonzola to Denmark, supplied the royal court and trained about 1,000 students at her farm, Havarthigaard. But the cheese now called Havarti was known as Danish Tilsiter until 1952, when it was renamed in her honor. Denmark's national encyclopedia says it was never produced at her farm's dairy.
Camembert was once a regional cheese whose main markets were Normandy and Paris. Two things carried it much farther. In 1890 a light poplar-wood box, credited to Eugène Ridel, let the soft cheese survive long journeys, and the box is now required for Camembert de Normandie. Then, during World War I, Camembert's makers negotiated a contract to supply French troops, hoping to win new customers. The cheese became part of the daily meals of some two million soldiers, and when they came home they asked for it in shops across France.
Processed cheese, the kind that melts so smoothly on a cheeseburger, has Swiss roots. In Thun, Switzerland, in 1911, Walter Gerber and Fritz Stettler found a melting process that made cheese last longer, founding the Swiss processed cheese industry. In the United States, James L. Kraft, who grew up on a farm in Ontario and started out in Chicago in 1903 with a rented horse and wagon, perfected his own process in 1914. He received a U.S. patent for it on June 6, 1916, and his cheese could be packed in cans and tins for easy shipping.
Halloumi, from the island of Cyprus, is the cheese you can sear like a steak. Traditionally made from sheep's or goat's milk, it gets an unusual extra step: the curd is cooked in a bath of hot whey. That heat kills the bacteria and switches off the leftover rennet, leaving a rigid protein network that browns over a flame instead of melting. Its official name is bilingual. In April 2021 the European Commission registered Halloumi / Hellim, its Greek and Turkish names, as a protected designation of origin for cheese made on Cyprus.
In Europe, Gruyère is a protected name for a cheese from a particular region of Switzerland and France. In the United States, it is not. Swiss and French producers tried to register "Gruyere" as a U.S. certification mark, but American dairy groups objected. In March 2023 a federal appeals court in Virginia ruled that the word is generic in the U.S., because cheese made in many places had been labeled and sold as gruyere in America for decades. The record showed that one cheesemaker had been making gruyere in Wisconsin since 1991.
For almost two decades, Europe argued over who could call a cheese feta. Germany and Denmark, backed by France and Britain, said the name had become generic, and Denmark was producing about 30,000 tons of feta a year, most of it for export. Greece disagreed. In 2002 the European Commission sided with Greece, citing the ewes and goats grazing on Greek terrain, and in October 2005 the European Court of Justice upheld the decision. A Danish Dairy Board official called the ruling "grotesque and political," while one Danish company simply promised to sell under other names.
Traditionally, cheesemakers set milk with rennet made from the lining of a young calf's fourth stomach. Its key enzyme, chymosin, makes milk curdle. By the 1960s calf stomachs were running short. The lasting fix came from genetic engineering: scientists copied the calf gene for chymosin into bacteria, yeasts and molds, which then churned out the pure enzyme. Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1990, it became the first product of genetic engineering in the nation's food supply. Today more than 80 percent of North American cheese is made with it.
Cheesemakers call the holes in Swiss cheese "eyes," and for about a century the standard explanation was carbon dioxide made by bacteria. The gas is real, but in 2015 researchers at Agroscope and other Swiss institutes found that a bubble needs somewhere to start: microscopic particles of hay. As milk stopped being collected in open buckets and began flowing through sealed milking machines and fine filters, the hay dust vanished, and makers of Emmental found fewer and fewer eyes. Adding trace amounts of hay powder to the milk brought them back.
No cow gives orange milk. Orange cheddar usually gets its color from annatto, a natural dye made from the seeds of the achiote tree. The custom likely began in the pasture: cows grazing spring and summer grass took in beta carotene, which tinted their milk and cheese golden. When dairymen skimmed off cream to make butter, the cheese left behind turned paler, and coloring could disguise it. Buyers came to link a deeper color with quality, and by the 18th century many cheeses were dyed no matter how rich they were.
After 12 months of aging, every wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano faces an inspection. Besides checking the outside, inspectors tap each wheel with a hammer and listen, judging the texture hidden inside. Wheels that pass are branded with a hot iron. Those with minor flaws still count as Parmigiano Reggiano but get parallel grooves cut all around the rind, marking them as medium grade. Wheels with major defects lose their identity entirely: a few millimeters of rind are shaved off to erase every mark of origin.
Mimolette, a bright orange French cheese, owes its pitted rind and distinctive flavor to cheese mites, microscopic creatures encouraged to nibble the rind for a few years. They are blasted off with compressed air and brushed away before the cheese is sold. In 2013 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, whose informal target was no more than six mites per square inch, detained about a ton of imported Mimolette in New Jersey. A producer's representative noted the irony: Mimolette is rumored to exist because 17th-century France wanted to stop buying Dutch cheese.
For more than 70 years, U.S. rules have required cheese made from raw, unpasteurized milk to age at least 60 days at no less than 35°F before it is sold. The reasoning was practical rather than precise. Harmful microbes tend to die off as cheese ages, and no outbreak had been reported from cheese held 60 days or more, but nobody knew exactly how long was needed; 50 days might have worked just as well. Soft and fresh cheeses feel the rule most, because they are meant to be eaten young.
Joseph Harding, born in Somerset, England, in 1805, is known as the father of modern cheddar. He traveled as far as Scotland to teach his methods and taught visiting American and Australian cheesemakers, and for years the English way of making cheddar was called "the Joseph Harding Method" in the United States. Today, cheddaring means stacking and restacking slabs of curd to press out whey. But when Westcombe Dairy re-created Harding's method from an 1860s booklet in 2021, there was no stacking at all: the curds were simply pulled to one side of the vat to drain.
The crunchy white specks in well-aged Parmigiano Reggiano are not salt. They are crystals of tyrosine, an amino acid set free as enzymes break down milk proteins during aging, and the longer a wheel matures, the more and bigger they grow. Aged cheddar can form a different kind, calcium lactate, which usually appears as a white smear on the surface and is easily mistaken for mold. The Parmigiano Reggiano consortium adds another surprise: it says bacteria convert all of the cheese's lactose within about 48 hours, so it is naturally lactose-free.
The blue in Roquefort began on bread. Traditionally, cheesemakers around Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, in southern France, grew the mold Penicillium roqueforti by leaving bread in the caves for six to eight weeks, until the mold had consumed it. They dried the inside of the bread into a powder to seed their cheeses. Bread was the original medium for raising the mold, and geneticists have found that the Roquefort strain still produces more spores on bread than other cheese strains do, a trait suited to old-fashioned production.
Rules for the cheese carriers of Alkmaar, in the Netherlands, were first set down on June 17, 1593, and their guild still works the town's cheese market. Carriers wear white clothes and straw hats in the colors of four companies: red, yellow, green and blue. Their boss, the cheese father, wears an orange hat and carries a cane with silver mountings. If he forgets them, the carriers shout that their father is walking naked. And if a cheese rolls off a barrow, a rival carrier may shout "Owl," the only insult the guild allows.
True Roquefort must ripen in one place: the caves of Mont Combalou, beneath the village of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon in southern France. Long faults in the rock, called fleurines, channel air in and out and keep the cellars at about 95 percent humidity and 10°C (50°F) all year. In 1411 King Charles VI granted the villagers a monopoly on ripening the cheese in their caves. A French court ruled in 1961 that the cheese may be made across a wide area of southern France, but only wheels ripened in these natural caves are true Roquefort.
Cheddar cheese is named for its home district in Somerset, England, and some of it still ages in Cheddar Gorge. Inside Gough's Cave, which holds a steady 11°C (about 52°F) all year, shelves of maturing cheese sit in the dark. The cave has a much older resident. In 1903, work to improve its drainage uncovered Cheddar Man, a hunter-gatherer who lived about 10,000 years ago and is the oldest almost complete skeleton of a modern human found in Britain. Ancient DNA suggests he had dark skin and blue eyes.
In 1926 a New Yorker calling himself Dr. Joseph Knirim arrived in Vimoutiers, Normandy, to honor Marie Harel, traditionally credited with creating Camembert. He said Camembert had been the only food his stomach could absorb during months of indigestion, and he offered $20 toward a statue. It was unveiled two years later, only to be beheaded in World War II when American bombers, acting on faulty intelligence, hit the town. Workers at a Borden cheese factory in Van Wert, Ohio, then raised $2,000 for a new statue. Both now stand in Vimoutiers, the original still headless.
In September 1892, curd from a dozen factories in Lanark County, Ontario, was hauled to a freight shed in Perth and pressed into a steel casing nine feet across. Made from 207,200 pounds of milk, the cheese was estimated at 22,000 pounds, though nobody ever weighed it. Canada sent it to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago to promote its cheese industry, and it crashed through the floor on arrival, which only brought more publicity. Judges scored it 95 out of 100. The tea merchant Sir Thomas Lipton bought it but backed out, and in 1894 a London caterer cut it up.
After the Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl in 1986, some Illinois fans mocked Wisconsin fans as cheeseheads. Milwaukee's Ralph Bruno, then 26, decided to wear the insult. In 1987, while reupholstering his mother's couch, he cut a wedge from a cushion, burned holes in it and painted it the color of cheddar, then wore it to a Brewers game against the Chicago White Sox. Because it resembled no real cheese, he could trademark it. He built a company, Foamation, around the hat, and in 2023 the Green Bay Packers bought it.
High in France's Jura Mountains, work on the Fort des Rousses began in 1843 and lasted about twenty years. With more than 50,000 square meters of vaulted rooms and miles of underground tunnels, it was designed to hold 3,500 soldiers and ranks as France's second-largest fortress. The army left in 1997, and the fort found a new garrison: wheels of Comté cheese. The vaults were converted into aging cellars that year, and today the thick stone keeps the air cool, damp and steady for well over 100,000 wheels.
The story goes that quesillo, the stringy cheese of Oaxaca, Mexico, was born of a mistake in Reyes Etla. A teenager named Leobarda Castellanos García was minding the milk when she got distracted and it curdled too far. Hoping to avoid a scolding, she added hot water and found she could work it into an elastic paste. Local lore dates the accident to 1885, though there is no official record of it. The cheese is still pulled into long strings and wound into balls, and making it is a major source of income in Reyes Etla.
Cheese has been made in Appenzell, in northeastern Switzerland, for more than 700 years; a document from 1282 records its people giving cheese as a tithe to the monks of the Abbey of St. Gall. Appenzeller's spicy flavor comes from an herbal brine applied to the rind as it ages. Farmers once each had a family recipe. Today the formula is under lock and key and known to only a few people, and it is said to include about 25 herbs, roots, leaves, petals, seeds and barks. The makers call their cheese Switzerland's tastiest secret.
For more than 30 years, archaeologists suspected that pottery fragments pierced with small holes, found in the Kuyavia region of Poland and about 7,000 years old, came from cheese strainers. They looked just like modern ones. In 2012 chemists led by the University of Bristol analyzed fats trapped in the clay and found milk residues, the earliest evidence of cheesemaking in northern Europe. The discovery suggests why people bothered: most adults then could not digest lactose, and turning milk into cheese reduced it, letting them eat dairy without becoming ill.
The oldest known cheese was not found in a jar or a cellar but on the dead. At the Xiaohe cemetery, a Bronze Age burial ground in the Tarim Basin of northwest China, mummies were buried with pale clumps of cheese scattered on their heads and necks. In 2024 a team led by paleogeneticist Qiaomei Fu sequenced DNA from the 3,600-year-old cheese and identified it as kefir cheese, made with microbes still found in kefir grains today. Its bacteria were closely related to a group from Tibet, a hint of contact between the two regions.
On September 4, 1666, with the Great Fire of London spreading, the diarist Samuel Pepys buried his valuables in the garden of his house on Seething Lane. First went papers from his office. That evening he and his neighbor, Admiral Sir William Penn, dug another pit for their wine, and Pepys added, in his own spelling, "my Parmazan cheese." The area escaped the flames. Penn has a second claim to fame: Pennsylvania, founded by his son William, was named in the admiral's honor.
In 1836 President Andrew Jackson accepted a gift from Colonel Thomas Meacham, a dairy farmer near Sandy Creek, New York: a wheel of cheese weighing 1,400 pounds. It sat ripening in the White House for more than a year. In 1837 Jackson threw open the doors and invited the public to help themselves. The crowds finished it in two hours, and even members of Congress left their seats for a taste. The stain and smell in the Entrance Hall lasted much longer. The story later inspired the White House's online "Big Block of Cheese Day" in 2014.
America's cheese factories may owe their start to a wedding. In 1851 George Williams, son of the prize-winning cheesemaker Jesse Williams of Rome, New York, got married, and his father brought him into the business. Instead of each farm making its own cheese, they pooled the milk of both farms in one central building, in what is believed to be the first cheese factory in the United States. In its first season it made 100,000 pounds of cheese, more than five times a typical farm's output, and within 15 years New York had 500 such factories.
During World War II, milk that once made hundreds of British cheeses went to factories to make a product known as Government Cheddar. The Ministry of Food promoted cheese as a substitute for meat, and its leaflets even claimed it would help you see in the dark. Cheese was rationed from 1941 until 1954, and only a few efficient types were allowed, so there was no creamy Lancashire, no Stilton and no Caerphilly. Before World War I Britain had more than 3,500 farmhouse cheesemakers. By the end of World War II, barely 100 remained.
In December 2010 SpaceX's Dragon capsule became the first commercial spacecraft to be recovered from Earth orbit, and it carried a secret cargo. After the launch, company chief Elon Musk would only hint: "If you like Monty Python, you'll love the secret." The payload was a wheel of Le Brouère cheese, a tribute to Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch, in which a customer tries to buy cheese from a shop that has none. Sealed in a metal drum whose cover showed a cow in galoshes from a 1984 comedy film poster, it rode from launch to splashdown.
Cartoon mice adore cheese, but real ones are not so keen. In 2006 David Holmes of Manchester Metropolitan University in England explained that mice mostly go for grain, dried fruit and sugary foods such as chocolate, and that the strong smell of some cheeses can put them off. His best guess at the myth's origin: early pantries held only a few dried foods, such as grain, bread and perhaps cheese, and when mice raided them, people drew the wrong conclusion. Cartoonists kept the image alive because people recognize it instantly.
Nobody is sure where "the big cheese" came from. One theory runs through British India, where "the real chiz," from a Persian and Urdu word for "thing," meant the genuine article; back home, the unfamiliar chiz became cheese, and "that's the cheese" was in use by 1818. Another theory is literal. Giant display wheels of cheese were common in 19th-century America, and one announcement promised that President Taft would be invited to "cut the big cheese" at a show. Either way, "big cheese" meant an important person by the 1910s.