Cheddar

The best-known cheese in the English-speaking world, named after a small village called Cheddar in the English county of Somerset. It gained its fame in the 17th century when, thanks to the pooling of milk from individual farmers, whose cows grazed on the warm, fertile soil south of the Mendip Hills in Somersetshire, huge cheeses weighing from 20 to 120 pounds (9 to 55 kg) were produced. They were aged from two to five years, until the cheese was flaky, sharp and mellow, as only a fully mature cheese can be. A Cheddar weighing 1,100 pounds (500 kg) - a striking thing to behold - produced as a bridal gift for Queen Victoria was made from the milk of 780 cows. Victoria herself never had so much as a wedge of it; the farmers who made it were so proud of their creation, they wanted it put on exhibit. Afterward, the queen permitted them to keep it, but the farmers quarreled as to who should have it. The ownership controversy ended in court, and the final disposition of the cheese remains a mystery.

Large as Victoria's bridal Cheddar was, it was dwarfed by comparison by a Wisconsin Cheddar produced especially for the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. Weighing more than 17 tons (15 tonnes) - 34,951 pounds (16,000 kg) to be exact - the cheese was 61⁄2 feet (2 m) wide, 51⁄2 feet (1.6 m) high and 141⁄2 feet (4.4 m) long. A crew of 20 worked in round-the-clock shifts for 43 hours to produce it, using 367,000 pounds (167,000 kg) of milk. Altogether, this represented the daily milk production of 16,000 cows. The cheese was so huge that a special trailer truck with glass sides, appropriately called the "Cheesemobile", was built to transport it to the fair. Although free samples of the cheese were handed out to fair visitors, there was still enough of the cheese left at the end of the fair to bring it back to Wisconsin, where it was cut into thousands of 2-pound (1 kg) souvenirs.

In 1860, a cattle disease that struck England and Wales caused such a shortage of milk that the English started importing Cheddar from North American factories, and even today a very large portion of the Cheddar consumed in England is made in North America.

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