acker barrel, shoo
the cat off and help himself to the old-time crackers that can't be
beat today.

At that time Wisconsin still belonged to the Indians and Vermont was
our leading cheese state, with its Sage and Cheddar and Vermont
Country Store Crackers, as Vrest Orton of Weston Vermont, calls them.
When Orton heard we were writing this book, he sent samples from the
store his father started in 1897 which is still going strong. Together
with the Vermont Good Old-fashioned Natural Cheese and the Sage came a
handy handmade Cracker Basket, all wicker, ten crackers long and just
one double cracker wide. A snug little casket for those puffy,
old-time, two-in-one soda biscuits that have no salt to spoil the
taste of the accompanying cheese. Each does double duty because it's
made to split in the middle, so you can try one kind of cheese on one
half and another on t'other, or sandwich them between.

Some Pied Piper took the country cheese and crackers to the corner
saloon and led a free-lunch procession that never faltered till
Prohibition came. The same old store cheese was soon pepped up as
saloon cheese with a saucer of caraway seeds, bowls of pickles,
peppers, pickled peppers and rye bread with plenty of mustard,
pretzels or cheese straws, smearcase and schwarzbrot. Beer and cheese
forever together, as in the free-lunch ditty of that great day:

I am an Irish hunter;
I am, I ain't.
I do not hunt for deer
But beer.
Oh, Otto, wring the bar rag.

I do not hunt for fleas
But cheese.
Oh, Adolph, bring the free lunch.

It was there and then that cheese came of age from coast to coast. In
every bar there was a choice of Swiss, Cottage, Limburger--manly
cheeses, walkie-talkie oldsters that could sit up and beg, golden
yellow, tangy mellow, always cut in cubes. Cheese takes the cube form
as naturally as eggs take the oval and honeycombs the hexagon.

On the more elegant handout buffets, besides the shapely cubes, free
Welsh Rabbit started at four every afternoon, to lead the tired
businessman in by the nose; or a smear of Canadian Snappy out of a
pure white porcelain pot in the classy places, on a Bent's water
biscuit.

SANDWICHES AND SAVORY SNACKS

Next to nibbling cheese with crackers and appetizers, of which there
is no end in sight, cheese sandwiches help us consume most of our
country's enormous output of Brick, Cheddar and Swiss. To attempt to
classify and describe all of the