Oh, and its a bit of a cultural difference too - food is viewed differently in Ontario than in Quebec. Regarding cheese platters (and true, this is just one example) I happen to know of a particular golf club (think this year’s Canadian Open Golf Tournament) which up until a couple of years ago, at least, served on its cheese platter the following:
White Cheddar, Orange Cheddar, Marble and Swiss.
It made me want to cry.
[sub]Yes, I worked there[/sub]
I guess I’ll have to repeat myself here. “American cheese” is by definition processed. There is no such thing as unprocessed American cheese. The reason American cheese was created was to supply a cheddar-like cheese that would melt at a relatively low temperature (which cheddar doesn’t) but retain a consistent body and texture, and not separate out or coagulate when melted (which cheddar does). American cheese is essentially young cheddar cheese, made of pasteurized cows’ milk, which then goes through a shredding and heating process.
The hierarchy, from good to bad:
Can you still buy that “Squeaky Cheese” at the cheese factory in Bandon? Odd stuff, but good for snacking, even if it does come in a big plastic sack.
Incidentally, there are a number of fine genuine American Cheeses still in the stores, but they don’t call themselves “American Cheese”, due to the pernicious marketing influence of (mostly Kraft) American Process Cheese food (I should note that Kraft, and subsidiaries it later purchased really did revolutionize the cheese industry, especially inthe US, before corrupting it with process cheese food).
I had a slice of Hoffman’s Extra Sharp on a sandwich yesterday, with a flavor halfway between a cheddar and a Muenster… Some might call it unremarkable in many ways, but it was a very serviceable and legitimate ‘real cheese’ and really hit the spot. “Unremarkable” is hardly an insult in this context: there are many many cheeses, on a multi-axial continuum, and somebody has to be in the middle. In fact many more people are going to want that middle cheese than any one exceptional cheese.
Similarly, with the rise in the popularity in cheddar, many ‘0American cheeses’ are labelled (mild) cheddar, which is considered more ‘special’ than American - but Cheddar isn’t a newcomer to our shelves, as a lifelong lover of cheddar in all its varieties, I know firsthand that it was common in large East Coast suburban supermarkets in the early 60s. As a toddler, I spent many a happy hour tasting and trying to characterize the exact difference between Colby vs. New York vs. Wisconsin vs. Longhorn vs… I didn’t realize that the difference was due more to the brand than the type, and face it, toddlers can be enlessly fascinated by a oddly shaped rock.
Of course back then the true middle class mecca for cheeses was the national chain “Hickory Farms”. I can’t tell you how disappointed I am with their current products (mostly overpriced additive-flavored cheeses and pseudocheeses, and badly spiced meat-like products) now that I am an adult and can afford to buy whatever I want
I’m sure many a Doper recalls their “free sample trays” and ‘exotic’ (or so it seemed) selections with the awe of childhood.
I just want to say, as a red-blooded American, that in general, we American’s are ashamed of American cheese.
We realize there is “better cheese” out there. We even like a small of fraction of “foreign” cheeses.
Give me sharp cheddar or give me death. Give me some Monterey Jack. Give me Colby.
I don’t know if an American invented the individually wrapped slice, but it flows with our mentality. Simple, quick, and make some garbage in the process. (Anybody see “Fight Club”?)
But at least our cheese is DEAD before we eat it.
Sadly, not in the least. Whickering Farms is simply some of the worst crap to come floating down the culvert in donkey’s years. When they label something “beef log,” they may as well be referring to a timber product. The term “chipped” is far too generous and the descriptor “log,” harkens far too much of the steer’s business end.
According to the American Cheese Society awards American Originals are:
“Cheese recognised by the Judging Rules and Awards Committee as uniquely American in their original forms. Monterey Jack, Brick Muenster, Colby, Brick Cheese, Teleme, Liederkranz, Oka etc.”
Did you actually make this up? Coz UK cheddar is usually white - the bog-standard orange stuff is Red Leicester.
The Gaspode writes:
> Huerta88’s link from a texas supermarket confirms this. The
> selection is on par with the mom&pop convenience store
> around the corner from me. Any ordinary grocery store will have
> twice the amount and a big Supermarket will easily stock 20-25
> sorts of hard cheese, and then different brands. When it comes
> to soft and fresh cheese, we easily get up into the hundreds.
>
> To continue the hijack: I’ve had great food in restaurants in
> Chicago and San Fransisco. To my sorrow, I’ve never been to
> NY, and I woshed through L.A. in 32 hours. I’ve driven around a
> lot of midwestern and southern states, and with the exception
> of stand alone diners, which are quickly becoming extinct, the
> only thing available (for the traveller) is chain/franchise
> restaurants, where most of the time, the food is incredibly
> bland. This goes hand in hand with the boring cheese selection.
I live Prince George’s County, which is the least affluent of the suburbs of Washington, D.C. (Which is not to say that it’s remotely poor. In comparison with much of small-town America, it would be considered mostly middle-class to upper-middle-class. It’s just not as well-off as Montgomery County or Fairfax County.) The big supermarket a half-mile from me, whose customers are a mix of blue- and white-collar people, with a fair number of recent immigrants, sells at least 50 varieties of cheese, most of them imported. There are a number of supermarkets and specialty shops in Washington and its suburbs that sell more than 100 varieties of cheese. I suspect that the same could be said of any of the dozen or so largest metropolitan areas in the U.S.
Are there rural areas of the U.S. where you would have to drive a hundred miles to find a good cheese selection? Of course there are. What does that have to do with anything? Small-town America is only a part of the U.S., and it’s not even proportionally that much of it. The notion that most Americans live in isolated small towns or on farms is on the same level as the assertions that most people in the British Isles live in picture-pretty old-fashioned little villages or that most Australians live in the Outback with kangaroos occasionally hopping through town or that most Scandanavians live in fishing villages near the Arctic Circle. Like it or not, the fact is that most of us live in big cities or at least within commuting distance of them.
Please don’t forget the most American of all American Cheeses, and one in which no foriegn persons have hopefully ever partaken. I refer here to the petroleum based orange nightmare of Government Cheese! Kind of like Velveeta, this is the cheese that our American Government passes out for free as part of welfare care packages. You just can’t get more American than that…
What Wendell said. When we’ve gotten to the point where Gaspode is decrying the “mere” 50 cheeses available in the suburban American wasteland, I think we’ve factually established that America is not (if it ever was) the land where everyone is relegated to munching on Kraft singles on white bread. I don’t think anyone here has claimed that the U.S. cheese selection is superior to that in Europe, and I accept Gaspode’s representations that he has even more choices – but at some point, it’s like arguing over the differences between Pol Roger and Dom Perignon.
America fell in love in a big way with technology in the '40s-'60s. It also had a market big enough to sustain mass-produced national brands. It also had a comparatively large population of people from backgrounds fairly or unfairly associated with comparatively bland foods (English, Irish, German, Scandinavian). These factors converged to form a (relatively brief) period in U.S. history where mass-produced, “high tech” food seemed like the very epitome of progress (and remember, in essentially the first generation that was not predominantly agrarian, processed cheez slices or bright orange margarine might have seemed a lot more attractive than something you yourself had to milk and churn and age and prevent from rotting). And the '40s and '50s were an era when achieving successful nationwide distribution of sufficient food calories for most of the population to prevent malnutrition, or prevent crop failures from threatening starvation, was a pretty new achievement. If it took frozen and processed and preserved foods to do this, you can see how, at the time, those processed foods seemed more miracle than abomination. So no, Americans since 1970/80 are no longer so enthusiastic about frozen vegetables or cheez food or tv dinners or Tang or turkey loaf as they once were – but nor were they for most of their history pre-1950.
I also like Wendell’s point about location. When you’re in the sticks options are limited – this is true in Britain, where I’ve had many a mushy-pea filled pub meal in the hinterlands. It’s no doubt correspondingly true in any number of culinary meccas. And hey – at least in the sticks in the U.S., you can get something to eat after 8:30 p.m., albeit it may not be haute cuisine. Try that in rural France in late November (we ended up finally getting chips at an autoroute gas station).
I wrote:
> The big supermarket a half-mile from me, whose customers are
> a mix of blue- and white-collar people, with a fair number of
> recent immigrants, sells at least 50 varieties of cheese, most of
> them imported.
I counted, and this was an underestimate. There are at least 80 varieties of cheese.
My g/f from Wisconsin tell me about something called Head Cheese, which qualifies as an American cheese, but is in fact made from the ‘lips and assholes’ of random animals…gross.
American cheese in general doesn’t taste like much of anything and is sold in Ireland as Calvita (like Velveeta). No character whatsoever. Give me Wenselydale mmmmmmm please give me some.
I suspect this si not quite entirely coincidental. I think most American Cheddars taste slightly more Red Leicestery than English Cheddary anyway. Could it be that American Cheddar actually is Red Leicester, but got misnamed somewhere along the way?
Maybe you need to be a leeetle more skeptical about what your girlfriend tells you. Head cheese no more qualifies as a cheese than sweetbreads would as bread. It is traditionally made by boiling the heads of pigs until the meat falls off the bone. When the bones are boiled, they make gelatin, which is what holds the whole mass together. I don’t believe it’s a particularly American invention, either.
These days the stuff you find in the deli counter is doubtless made by a more automated process, but it’s still just gelatin and pork from the pigs’ heads. Lips, probably, assholes, no.
Tasted it on a dare when I worked in a deli, by the way. It tastes okay, bland really, but the gelatin gives it a slimy texture that I did not care for.
The U.S.D.A. now allows head cheese to include edible parts of the feet, tongue, and heart of a pig or calf, besides the head meat.
Can I just say I really like “Huntsman” cheese (Double Gloucester layered with Blue Stilton.)
Philadelphia!
Philadelphia!
Philadelphia!
American Cheese (not “cheese that is American” but the specific variety named American Cheese), American Cheese in every region of the U.S. is orange EXCEPT in Philadelphia! (and the surronding areas including South Jersey). In the Philadelphia area American Cheese is WHITE! (not an entirely different kind of cheese but a slight variation on the other- two slightly different kinds of American Cheese).
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a packaged individually wrapped “cheese food” or “cheese product” version of white American Cheese. We would always get it sliced fresh at the deli.
White American Cheese is SO MUCH BETTER than yellow American Cheese. I moved away from Philadelphia about ten years ago and I never eat American Cheese now EXCEPT when I am visiting Philadelphia. If you are only familiar with the yellow variety, try the white variety sometime- it’s great! I don’t know how it is that it never became the standard.
I don’t know about that. I’ve seen white American cheese in delis here in the NYC area for as long as I can remember (always had to specify if you wanted white or yellow American at the deli counter - you wouldn’t find this cheese in the dairy case or in the cheese section). The taste IS slightly different, and I’ve always liked the white variety better myself. I think Land O’ Lakes is the brand I’ve seen before; frankly it’s been a while since I bought anything but Swiss at the deli counter. 
One other note about american cheese is that it’s is usually sold in slices, not in blocks. Can anyone confirm/refute this for me? I’ve normally seen it either in pre-sliced form next to the Kraft Singles or in the deli for the person to slice for you. Pre-sliced form is just a stack of slices, different than the individually wrapped slices you get from Kraft cheese food. I can’t recall ever seeing american cheese in a solid block like you would see for cheddar.
The processing and mildness also seems to help slices stay together, thin slices of cheddar would have a tendency to fall apart.