cked surface is more apt to be a sickly
lemon.
Always an ornamental cheese, it once stood in state on the side-board
under a silver bell also made to represent a pineapple. You cut a top
slice off the cheese, just as you would off the fruit, and there was a
rose-colored, fine-tasting, mellow-hard cheese to spoon out with a
special silver cheese spoon or scoop. Between meals the silver top was
put on the silver holder and the oiled and shellacked rind kept the
cheese moist. Even when the Pineapple was eaten down to the rind the
shell served as a dunking bowl to fill with some salubrious cold
Fondue or salad.
Made in the same manner as Cheddar with the curd cooked harder,
Pineapple's distinction lies in being hung in a net that makes
diamond-shaped corrugations on the surface, simulating the sections of
the fruit. It is a pioneer American product with almost a century and
a half of service since Lewis M. Norton conceived it in 1808 in
Litchfield County, Connecticut. There in 1845 he built a factory and
made a deserved fortune out of his decorative ingenuity with what
before had been plain, unromantic yellow or store cheese.
Perhaps his inspiration came from cone-shaped Cheshire in old England,
also called Pineapple cheese, combined with the hanging up of
Provolones in Italy that leaves the looser pattern of the four
sustaining strings.
Sage, Vermont Sage and Vermont State
The story of Sage cheese, or green cheese as it was called originally,
shows the several phases most cheeses have gone through, from their
simple, honest beginnings to commercialization, and sometimes back to
the real thing.
The English _Encyclopedia of Practical Cookery_ has an early Sage
recipe:
This is a species of cream cheese made by adding sage leaves and
greening to the milk. A very good receipt for it is given thus:
Bruise the tops of fresh young red sage leaves with an equal
quantity of spinach leaves and squeeze out the juice. Add this to
the extract of rennet and stir into the milk as much as your
taste may deem sufficient. Break the curd when it comes, salt it,
fill the vat high with it, press for a few hours, and then turn
the cheese every day.
_Fancy Cheese in America, lay_ Charles A. Publow, records the
commercialization of the cheese mentioned above, a century or two
later, in 1910:
Sage cheese is another modified form of the Cheddar variety. Its
distinguishing fe
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