And, true to the American way, we’ve organized cheese-eating.  There’s an annual cheese week, and a cheese month (October).  We even boast a mail-order Cheese-of-the-Month Club.  We haven’t yet reached the point of sophistication, however, attained by a Paris cheese club that meets regularly.  To qualify for membership you have to identify two hundred basic cheeses, and you have to do it blindfolded.

This is a test I’d prefer not to submit to, but in my amateur way I have during the past year or two been sharpening my cheese perception with whatever varieties I could encounter around New York.  I’ve run into briny Caucasian Cossack, Corsican Gricotta, and exotics like Rarush Durmar, Travnik, and Karaghi La-la.  Cheese-hunting is one of the greatest—­and least competitively crowded—­of sports.  I hope this book may lead others to give it a try.

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Chapter Two

The Big Cheese

One of the world’s first outsize cheeses officially weighed in at four tons in a fair at Toronto, Canada, seventy years ago.  Another monstrous Cheddar tipped the scales at six tons in the New York State Fair at Syracuse in 1937.

Before this, a one-thousand-pounder was fetched all the way from New Zealand to London to star in the Wembley Exposition of 1924.  But, compared to the outsize Syracusan, it looked like a Baby Gouda.  As a matter of fact, neither England nor any of her great dairying colonies have gone in for mammoth jobs, except Canada, with that four-tonner shown at Toronto.

We should mention two historic king-size Chesters.  You can find out all about them in Cheddar Gorge, edited by Sir John Squire.  The first of them weighed 149 pounds, and was the largest made, up to the year 1825.  It was proudly presented to H.R.H. the Duke of York. (Its heft almost tied the 147-pound Green County wheel of Wisconsin Swiss presented by the makers to President Coolidge in 1928 in appreciation of his raising the protective tariff against genuine Swiss to 50 percent.) While the cheese itself weighed a mite under 150, His Royal Highness, ruff, belly, knee breeches, doffed high hat and all, was a hundred-weight heavier, and thus almost dwarfed it.

It was almost a century later that the second record-breaking Chester weighed in, at only 200 pounds.  Yet it won a Gold Medal and a Challenge Cup and was presented to the King, who graciously accepted it.  This was more than Queen Victoria had done with a bridal gift cheese that tipped the scales at 1,100 pounds.  It took a whole day’s yield from 780 contented cows, and stood a foot and eight inches high, measuring nine feet, four inches around the middle.  The assembled donors of the cheese were so proud of it that they asked royal permission to exhibit it on a round of country fairs.  The Queen assented to this ambitious request, perhaps prompted by the exhibition-minded Albert.  The publicity-seeking cheesemongers assured Her Majesty that the gift would be returned to her just as soon as it had been exhibited.  But the Queen didn’t want it back after it was show-worn.  The donors began to quarrel among themselves about what to do with the remains, until finally it got into Chancery where so many lost causes end their days.  The cheese was never heard of again.