In 1918, Frey invented Velveeta, which incorporated whey, unlike other cheeses where the whey was pressed out of the curd. It was marketed as a velvet-textured cheese—hence the name Velveeta—and touted for its extreme meltability. It was so successful that a separate Velveeta cheese company was formed in 1923. It, too, was acquired by Kraft, in 1927.
With an abundant availability of factory-made American cheeses that melted well, America developed a melted-cheese cuisine—cheeseburgers, grilled cheese, macaroni and cheese—that became quintessentially American. But melted-cheese cooking was not new, nor was it uniquely American. In Italy there was pizza, and in Brittany, cheese crepes. The Swiss national dish, dating from the sixteenth century, is melted cheese and wine in the form of fondue. Americans started to embrace them all.
There was also Welsh rabbit, which in the twentieth century became popular in a number of countries, including the United States. Today the melted cheese dish is usually called “rarebit,” meaning a tasty morsel, because it so obviously isn’t a rabbit. It is assumed that “rabbit” was an erroneous label. The earliest record in 1725 called it rabbit and no one used “rarebit” until 1780. It is also not clear if it is originally Welsh. The English like to use the term “Welsh” pejoratively—when something is second-rate or fake, they call it Welsh. So calling the dish a Welsh rabbit might have been a bad English joke. Was the dish originally English? The cheese traditionally used to make it is either Gloucester or cheddar, which are both English cheeses.
1960 advertisement for Velveeta cheese.
But the Welsh are also famously passionate about melted cheese. In the fourteenth century a humorous tale was written in which the Welsh were all loitering in heaven. To get rid of them, Peter stood outside the gates and shouted “Caws pobi!” which means “toasted cheese” in Welsh. The Welsh all ran out to get some, and Peter slammed the gates closed.
The Scots are equally fond of toasted cheese, as recalled in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel, Treasure Island. The wretched castaway Ben Gunn longs for cheese, saying, “Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese—toasted, mostly.”
Hannah Glasse offered recipes for Scotch, Welsh, and English rabbit. This is her Scotch rabbit:
Toast a piece of bread very nicely on both sides. Butter it. Cut a slice of cheese, about as big as the bread, toast it on both sides, and lay it on the bread.
Glasse’s Welsh rabbit was almost identical but added mustard. The English added wine. Today the dish is usually made with beer.
The French love Welsh rabbit, which they always call un Welsh. They love it because even more than the Americans, the Scots, the Welsh, and the Swiss, the French love melted cheese. French literature is full of melted cheese. Alphonse Daudet included a story in his Contes du Lundi about the impact on a room of the smell of cheese soup—“Oh! La bonne odeur de soupe au fromage.”
The Americans could not have eaten all these melted cheese dishes until the Industrial Revolution. Only after they had an abundance of factory-made cheese did the dishes become widespread. Here is a cheese soup made by Chef Stanley Hamilton at his restaurant in Union Station, St. Louis. President Harry Truman frequently dined there, and this soup was said to be a favorite of his. Hamilton called the recipe “Cream of Wisconsin Cheese Soup”:
12 saltine crackers
1 qt beef broth
3 cups grated sharp cheddar cheese
3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp all-purpose flour
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 cup light cream
¼ tsp white pepper
Place saltines in oven to warm. In a saucepan cook two cups of broth over medium heat. Add cheese, stirring constantly as it melts. Add remaining broth and simmer until smooth. Meanwhile, in a small skillet over medium heat, make a roux with butter and flour. When smooth add to first mixture. Continue stirring as you slowly add cream, Worcestershire, and pepper. Stir constantly at simmer for fifteen minutes. Serve with toasted crackers.
Even before industrialization, the French produced enough cheese—much of it of the Gruyère or Swiss type—to indulge in their passion for cooking with it. Whether it was onion soup or fish or scallops in a savory tart, there was always the possibility of presenting the dish au gratin, that is, with melted grated Gruyère on top.
Claude Terrail, the tall and elegant owner of Paris’s La Tour d’Argent restaurant, was one of that melted-cheese-loving generation of Frenchmen. His old-fashioned cuisine, served in a restaurant with one of the best nighttime views of Paris, brought him three Michelin stars in the 1950s. In time including an abundance of melted cheese seemed old-fashioned, and his rating was downgraded.
Best known for his pressed duck, Terrail also made dishes such as filet of sole topped with béchamel sauce and melted cheese. He loved Welsh rabbit and insisted that it be made with Gloucester cheese:
You begin with 250 grams of this cheese cut in small cubes or grated, a half-teaspoon of English mustard, and a deciliter of English ale. Put on low heat and stir with a fork: when heated the cheese is liquefied and it is not difficult to blend it with the beer.
Once perfectly blended, you can pour it over English bread, sliced and buttered.
Broil under high heat.
In 1848, Ferdinand Hédiard returned to Paris from the tropics, bringing with him such exotic fruits as mangoes, bananas, and pineapples. He then opened a store on the Place de la Madeleine, where Parisians have been shopping for exotique products ever since, despite the fact that many of these wonders are now commonplace. Hédiard and his wife and daughter also created recipes to show Parisians how they might use these strange and interesting fruits. And of course one way was to serve them with melted cheese. Here is his recipe for gratin de bananes:
Cut off the ends of plantains and cut them lengthwise and boil them for five minutes in their skins. Once they are cooled peel them and sauté them in hot butter and with that butter make a light béchamelle with 1 liter of milk seasoned with cinnamon; add a pinch of cayenne pepper. Cut the plantains into discs and place them in a buttered mold or gratin dish. Pour béchamelle over and then sprinkle with grated gruyère cheese. Put it in the oven for five minutes and serve hot.
One of the impacts of industrializing dairies and cheesemaking was that it took jobs away from women. On farms around the world, women had traditionally been responsible for milking the cows and making the cheese and the butter. The work was hard and the hours were long, but the dairymaid was romanticized, as in an 1830 American song about Fanny the milkmaid entitled “Pretty Maidens Here I Am.”
Milk below Maids by Luigi Schiavonetti (1765–1810), milk vendors on a London street. (HIP/Art Resource, NY)
In cities, most milk vendors were also women—hardy women who went out on the streets with seventy-pound buckets and worked long days. In London they famously cried out “Miow,” which meant “Milk below.” Even on more affluent farms with employees, women were hired for the dairy-related tasks, and they answered to the lady of the house.
The dairymaid was always a selling point for milk products. She was an idealized, vaguely sexual image of wholesome femininity. In the mid-seventeenth century, Izaak Walton, who aspired to the literary heights of his friend John Donne, in his book on flyfishing, The Compleat Angler, apropos of absolutely nothing, midbook has an entire chapter of various poems and discussions he wrote on the wonderfulness of milkmaids. He spoofs his contemporaries—Christopher Marlowe, Walter Raleigh, and John Donne—suggesting their love poems were about milkmaids, and makes the curious observation: “our good Queen Elizabeth did so often wish herself a Milkmaid all the month of May, because they are not troubled with fears and cares, but sing sweetly all the day.” In the romantic version of milkmaids there is never mention of how hard they worked.
M for Milkmaid by William Nicholson, from an alphabet in lithographs from an original series of woodcuts, 1898. (Author’s collection)
In 1784 Josiah Twamley, a writer concerned with quality and
efficiency in English dairies, wrote:
Nothing is more commendable in a dairy-maid than cleanliness, nor will anything cause them to be more esteemed; everyone who perceives extreme neatness in a dairy, can not help wishing to purchase butter or cheese from so clean and neat a place.
But with industrialization, women were gradually pushed out of dairies, except on small family farms. The trend had begun even earlier, in the eighteenth century. Cheddar was a forerunner of industrial cheese because of an early-nineteenth-century cheddar maker, Joseph Hardy, who wanted to produce as much cheese as possible as efficiently as possible. Many of his ideas led to the cheese factory, and he was one of the first to employ male cheesemakers. Part of their large-scale production was to make huge individual cheeses that were thought to be too big and heavy for women to handle.
It was then, too, that some dairies began switching to male managers, something new at the time. Women could do farm work, but industry was for men. There was a widely held prejudice against women in factories. In some countries there were laws against women working in factories at all, or working on Sundays, or working night shifts. Initially, many cheese factory owners objected to these new laws. In Holland, cheesemakers said that cheese could not be made without the expertise of women. Gradually, though, they learned that cheese could be made effectively with an all-male staff.
The central technology that allowed the dairy industry to become truly an industry was machine milking. Hand milking is a slow and difficult process. The reason why most pre-nineteenth-century herds seldom grew to more than forty cows was that a family would not have enough time to milk them unless they hired a large staff, which would cut into their already narrow profit margin.
In the nineteenth century, Catherine Beecher gave a good description of milking, a process that had not changed since ancient times:
In milking, put the fingers around the teat close to the bag; then firmly close the forefingers of each hand alternating, immediately squeezing with the other fingers. The forefingers prevent the milk flowing back into the bag, while the others press it out. Sit with the left knee close to the right hind leg of the cow, the head pressed against her flank the left hand always ready to ward off a blow from her feet, which the gentlest of cows may give almost without knowing it, if her tender teats be cut by long nails, or if a wart be hurt or her bag be tender. She must be stripped dry every time she is milked, or she will dry up; and if she gives much milk it pays to milk three times a day, as nearly eight hours apart as possible. Never stop while milking till done, as this will cause the cow to stop giving milk.
Why would this description be included in a book called The American Woman’s Home? Perhaps sometimes small-scale farmers with no dairy experience decided to take on a cow or two.
As complete as Beecher’s description seems, she does not include a few things, such as how much your hands and forearms ache when you cannot let up, or how a grumpy or playful cow can hurt you. Cows are very large. And if you have several cows and only eight hours between milkings, there is little time between finishing the last cow and remilking the first one.
In the nineteenth century, when a new machine seemed to appear every month, many people began trying to develop a machine that could milk cows. But how could a machine accomplish this sensitive and complex task? The closer the inventors came to achieving this goal, the more it was questioned. In 1892, S. M. Babcock, famous for inventing a very usable device for measuring the fat content of milk, wrote in the National Dairyman that “milking machines would result in poorer quality of milk and lowering the standards of dairy animals.”
The first milking machine idea, developed midcentury, was crude—insert a tube up the cow’s teat, forcing open the muscle and allowing the milk to flow down the tube into a bucket. The original tubes were wood, but better ones made of silver, bone, or ivory were later used, and some were still selling in the early twentieth century. The British developed the first patent on tube milking in 1836. But tube milking spread disease in both cows and humans, and it often injured cow teats so badly that some permanently leaked milk.
Then the British became interested in the use of pumps. Between 1860 and 1862, a number of inventors took out patents on machines with cups for the teats and a pumping suction. In 1889 Scotsman William Murchland built a well-functioning vacuum pump milker that hung under the cow. Many other machines with hand pumps were also invented.
In 1898 much attention was paid to William Mehring’s milker because it could milk two cows at once. After all, the entire object was to milk more cows faster. The Mehring milker was operated by using foot pedals to create a vacuum, and it was still in use in the early decades of the twentieth century.
It is odd that in the age of steam power, no one thought of inventing a steam-powered milker until 1898. (The first steam-powered tractor was invented in 1868.) Called the Thistle Milker, it was designed by Alexander Shields of Glasgow and featured a steam-powered vacuum. But like all early mechanical milkers, it had a serious drawback—it could not compensate for the changing size of the cow’s teat, which becomes smaller as the milking progresses. The mechanical milkers also pumped some of the milk back into the udder.
In the 1890s the problem was solved by a number of inventions including a machine by Alexander Shields that massaged fluid from the teats and a double-chambered teatcup, which was also a teat-massaging device. Now farms could have far larger herds without maintaining a large staff of workers. Twenty or forty or more cows could be herded into a milking parlor. In the front of each milking stall was a tray filled with forage for the cows to nibble on so that they would enjoy their milking. Four cups were placed on the four teats of each cow. The cups were removed—with today’s modern machines, they fall off automatically when done. The cows were herded out and a new group herded in. The parlor could be operated around the clock with some time off for cleaning. This serviced a lot more cows than ever dreamed of by Mrs. Beecher.
Certified milk producers were still interested in showing that their dairying ways were the best, and at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Walker-Gordon Certified Milk Dairy, a New Jersey certified milk company, displayed a new milker called the Rotolactor, quickly dubbed “the cow merry-go-round.” The milking parlor was a revolving disk with fifty stalls around it. Cows lined up and were led one by one into a stall. A milker washed her udder with a clean cloth and attached four cups to her teats. The milking machine was turned on and the cow rode around the disc for ten minutes until her stall arrived back at its starting point, where the cow’s cups were detached and she was led off. In this manner the merry-go-round milked three hundred cows every hour.
At the World’s Fair, the new invention was proclaimed to be the milking machine of the future. Walker-Gordon’s had wanted to demonstrate the high standards of cleanliness used in the production of certified milk. They did not care about manufacturing their display machine or promoting it as the milker of the future. Yet today, one of the most expensive and sought-after high-tech milking machines is the rotary milking parlor, built on very much the same idea as the Rotolactor.
Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, the dairy industry became focused on the quantity of milk being produced. Given the very small profit margins of the industry, quantity was essential. And in the twentieth century, too, everything dairy related, including farm bulletins, agricultural college research, and advice to farmers, emphasized the importance of becoming larger—of investing in a larger herd of cows.
The smaller dairy farms were failing. In the nineteenth century, a larger dairy had meant forty cows, but in the twentieth century, it meant a hundred cows and then several hundred cows. By the end of the twentieth century in America, the world’s largest milk-producing country, a large farm meant thousands of cows.
Milk prices had always been low relative to the cost of production. That has always been one of the incentives in cheesemaking. During the Great Depression, the public could not afford milk even at low pr
ices and demand declined. Then prices sank and angry farmers across the country went on strike. The federal government stepped in to stabilize milk prices and that system has remained. The government establishes a milk price. It is usually affordable for large farms, but for small ones, it sometimes falls below their cost of production. They can charge more, but that milk would not be competitive with the milk priced at government levels. And once the interstate highway system was built in the 1960s, milk did not necessarily have to be locally produced.
Before World War II, 80 percent of milk in America was hand-delivered to doorsteps. Not until the second half of the twentieth century were deliverymen replaced by stores. Giant supermarket chains that worked with giant dairies and sold cheap milk took over. Cartons replaced bottles. They could be thrown away and didn’t have to be washed and they didn’t break. The milk inside them was no longer visible, but since homogenization, there was nothing to see anyway.
“The milk will get through.” This image of a milkman delivering in the London Blitz, 1940, is staged, with the photographer’s assistant dressed as a milkman. (HIP/Art Resource, NY)
In the twentieth century, cows were expensive to buy and expensive to maintain. The number of cows per farm in the United States has been increasing, but the total number of cows in the country has been declining because many of the smaller farms have closed. At the same time, the amount of milk produced has been dramatically increasing. According to the U.S. government, in 1944 the country had 25.6 million dairy cows. By the twenty-first century there were only 9 million, but those 9 million produce far more milk than did the 25.6 million in 1944. In 1942 the average cow produced less than 5,000 pounds of milk in her lifetime. Today that average is up to 21,000 pounds. At the same time, milk consumption, even with a far larger human population, has declined. This was not expected. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, milk consumption rose fairly steadily.
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