arrel once a year to set in the buttery and
eat. A classic dish is crackers, broken up in a bowl of cold
milk, with a hunk of Vermont cheese like this on the side. Grand
snack, grand midnight supper, grand anything. These crackers are
not sweet, not salt, and as such make a good base for
anything--swell with clam chowder, also with toasted cheese....

Tillamook

It takes two pocket-sized, but thick, yellow volumes to record the
story of Oregon's great Tillamook. _The Cheddar Box_, by Dean Collins,
comes neatly boxed and bound in golden cloth stamped with a purple
title, like the rind of a real Tillamook. Volume I is entitled _Cheese
Cheddar_, and Volume II is a two-pound Cheddar cheese labeled
Tillamook and molded to fit inside its book jacket. We borrowed Volume
I from a noted _litterateur_, and never could get him to come across
with Volume II. We guessed its fate, however, from a note on the
flyleaf of the only tome available: "This is an excellent cheese, full
cream and medium sharp, and a unique set of books in which Volume II
suggests Bacon's: 'Some books are to be tasted, others to be
swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.'"

Wisconsin Longhorn

Since we began this chapter with all-American Cheddars, it is only
fitting to end with Wisconsin Longhorn, a sort of national standard,
even though it's not nearly so fancy or high-priced as some of the
regional natives that can't approach its enormous output. It's one of
those all-purpose round cheeses that even taste round in your mouth.
We are specially partial to it.

Most Cheddars are named after their states. Yet, putting all of these
thirty-seven states together, they produce only about half as much as
Wisconsin alone.

Besides Longhorn, in Wisconsin there are a dozen regional competitors
ranging from White Twin Cheddar, to which no annatto coloring has been
added, through Green Bay cheese to Wisconsin Redskin and Martha
Washington Aged, proudly set forth by P.H. Kasper of Bear Creek, who
is said to have "won more prizes in forty years than any ten
cheesemakers put together."

To help guarantee a market for all this excellent apple-pie cheese,
the Wisconsin State Legislature made a law about it, recognizing the
truth of Eugene Field's jingle:

Apple pie without cheese
Is like a kiss without a squeeze.

Small matter in the Badger State when the affinity is made legal and
the couple lawfully wedded in Stat