“Oh, boy! Stinky cheese!”

Dad sure knew how to clear a room. He was crazy about pungent cheese and all the drama his eating it entailed.

Maybe it was the Frenchy-Frenchman side of him?

We kids would run for cover while he all but inhaled chunks of Camembert, Munster, and Feta. Phew! As a child, I remember begging Mom to let me wait for her outside of a food shop in Pittsfield, a store that specialized (or so it seemed) in stinky imports. That was one of our pre-holiday stops. Mom thought the aroma was heavenly. “Someday you’ll appreciate it,” she assured me. Nope.

When our James was a little guy, he found a jar of Limburger cheese in a grocery store and insisted we buy some for his Papa. It was much appreciated.

When middle-child John texted me the link to this delightful video last night, it was clearly time to blog about cheese:

But it doesn’t end with The Cheese Tax. We’re a dairy farm family after all.

But first, it turns out Mom wrote at least two poems involving cheese:

Perspective

A mouse in the house of cheese went mad
in August. Upon a bed of bleu he lay delirious,
then dead, the shop laid waste around him. Two streets away the watchman cat was bending
over fishheads in a backyard barrel.

His cousin came to pay respects in her best
gingham. He was laid out in scarlet satin, but she
went home to haylofts and her Christmas cheese.

~ Joan Vayo September 25, 1972

While reading Mom’s poem, my memory flashed back to the 1960s and The Cheese House, which we’d drive by each summer on vacation in Maine. Next to The Fudge Shop in Ogunquit and the beach (of course), I think this was Dad’s favorite vacation venue.

Farmer Gary got up early the other morning, hoping to finish planting soybeans before Mother Nature moved in with several days of storms. (He says he’s semi-retired, “just” a crop farmer now.)

Gone are the days when he had cows to milk and calves to feed twice daily.

Gary Werne: human pacifier:

I asked if he would kindly jot down a few Dairy Fun Facts for us to chew on.

Just a few, mind you:

• Milk is sold by the 100# (“hundred pound”)
• Milk weighs 8.6 pounds per gallon
• Cheese yield is affected by the percent of butterfat in the milk
• 100# of milk will yield approximately 10 pounds of cheese
• Milk from Holstein cows is about 3.7% butterfat
• Milk from Jersey cows is about 4.7% butterfat (you gain about one pound extra cheese from Jersey milk, compared to Holstein)
• Whole milk you find in the store is 3.25% butterfat
• Cheese price to a great degree sets the price for fluid milk (milk is a perishable item, while cheese can be stored)
• Cheese prices used to be set at the Green Bay Wisconsin Cheese Exchange (Green Bay being ground zero for milk/cheese production)
• Pricing is now set at the Chicago Board of Trade
• About 10% of milk production in Wisconsin is for fluid milk and 90% for cheese
• 85% of milk production in Florida is for the fluid market
• Cheese is traded in 40# blocks, to be sliced for retail trade, and 640# barrels to be used in food service and industrial trade (Cheetos, packaged M&C)

And finally, Gary gives us a fun math problem: Take the wholesale price of cheese (about $1.80/#), multiply by 10 and that is the approximate payment the farmer receives for producing milk.

Here’s the second of Mom’s poems that mention cheese:

The Cutting Board Christmas

We had to hold it in our hands
and with our eyes
thinking of bread and cheese and apples
olives and radishes for her college salads
and an onion for almost everything
who else but Becky would want
a cutting board for Christmas
on call for any occasion
its force of knives attending

~ joan vayo May 31, 2005

Of course, Becky is Mom and Dad’s culinary granddaughter, the founder of Tin Pot Creamery.

I’m half surprised Dad didn’t talk Becky into creating a private-label Stinky Cheese Ice Cream, just for him. He would have licked the bowl clean and asked for more.

“Perspective” © 1972 and “The Cutting Board Christmas” © 2005 Joan Vayo. All rights reserved.

Please drop in your email address below (we never share lists – promise!) and we’ll send you a notice with each new story: