Pineapple

Pineapple cheese is named after its shape rather than its flavor, although there are rumors that some pineapple flavor is noticeable near the oiled rind.  This flavor does not penetrate through to the Cheddar center.  Many makers of processed cheese have tampered with the original, so today you can’t be sure of anything except getting a smaller size every year or two, at a higher price.  Originally six pounds, the Pineapple has shrunk to nearly six ounces.  The proper bright-orange, oiled and shellacked 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: