Today is Cheese Day. Which is a bit confusing, since there is a Cheese Lovers Day in January and International Cheese Day in March. But you probably can’t celebrate cheese too much.
Cheese Day, as a celebration, seems to have begun in 1914 in Wisconsin, who were trying to get people to travel there and eat cheese. The original one day celebration has now turned into a weekend. And really, with the number of cheeses available, it should be even longer.
Cheese is one of those thing that puzzles me a bit. Particularly as to how it started, which they feel goes back as far as 8000 B.C.E. It is felt that people started making cheese shortly after domesticating animals. But still, you have to think it was a pretty strange thing to come up with.
I mean first, so person had to discover that if you squeeze certain parts of some animals, you get liquid shooting out. Not sure how that happens, but somewhere, at some time, some one said, “go give that cow a squeeze and see what happens. Not the whole thing. Just the dangly bits.” They then discovered milk. But they maybe weren’t sure what to do with it, because someone later came up with the idea to take a large amount of milk, put it in a cave and come back later and see what had happened. Then they had to have the guts to eat what the milk had turned into.
I have to give them credit. My first inclination when faced milk that has turned lumpy is certainly not to stuff it into my mouth. I tend to throw it away. So a big thumbs up to the first person to eat the stuff. Because I do like cheese.
And there are many different types. So obviously, people not only thought it was good, they found different ways to make it.
I was a bit surprised as to the most popular cheeses. As a long time Monty Python fan, I naturally thought that Brie was the singular most popular cheese in the world. The cheese sketch, however, is a bit out of date. It seems Mozzarella is considered the most popular. Largely because of pizza.
But I do like a number of cheeses, from mild cheese like Brie, to stronger cheeses like Blue and Stilton. And I have been experimenting with a few different cheeses on burgers lately. I actual kind of like Provolone on a burger. Although I will admit I first tried it because it is round. It fits, and tastes good.
But there are so many different cheeses in the world. It’s hard to pick a favourite. Although a nice, sharp, aged cheddar is pretty hard to beat in my books.
