Cheese, glorious cheese

Delicious varieties make this treat a choice gift for everyone on your list.

By Sally Cappon

South Coast Beacon

OK, cheese may not be the first thing most people think of at Christmas.

But I will place my annual holiday cheese order from The Swiss Colony in Monroe, Wis. — and not just because of the chocolate-macadamia clusters that come free with it.

Meanwhile, I was a first-day customer at a new cheese store, C’est Cheese that opened Saturday on Santa Barbara Street a couple doors from the long-running Our Daily Bread. Bread and cheese — is anything sweeter?

True, it’s hard to imagine a store in Santa Barbara devoted exclusively to cheese. In Wisconsin, maybe. But don’t underestimate those California talking cows.

I’m a cheese junkie. It’s in my blood.

Every day, my grandfather took the milk from his large Holstein herd on his farm outside Juda, in Wisconsin’s Green County a few miles from Monroe, to the nearby cheese factory.

Swiss immigrants, who pioneered prosperous dairy spreads in the picturesque, fertile hills and valleys just north of the Illinois border, settled Green County in the 1800s. A cheese industry sprang up, and by the mid 1900s produced two-thirds of all Swiss cheese made in America. A classmate of my mother at tiny Juda High School, Ray Kubly, founded the Swiss Colony mail order cheese business still run by his son Ray Jr.

As a child, I would drive with my parents past large red barns and silos in summer twilights at milking time, sometimes hearing a yodel float through warm air perfumed with new-mown hay. Black and white Holsteins and large cocoa-colored Brown Swiss cows grazed in lush green pastures.

Next to the Sugar River off Highway 11 a dozen miles east of Monroe was a favorite Swiss cheese factory. We’d descend concrete steps of the modest wood building into a damp, warm cellar filled with huge wheels of cheese. The cheesemaker, a large, muscular man, would slice off giant chunks of the delicacy, which he put in our hands for us to taste. It was pure heaven.

When I was growing up in Milwaukee, cheese was invariably our Sunday night supper. Since my mother worked, I did the grocery shopping from the time I was 9. Mom insisted on the best cheeses, so I’d ride a bus to Stanz Dairy Store, waiting my turn in the immaculate, fragrant shop, where I’d select a chunk of cheese and carefully count out the money. Wedding receptions and holidays invariably bought out huge platters of cheeses and sausages (along with raw ground round steak to be served with onion, salt and pepper on rye bread).

At one time, it was reportedly illegal for a restaurant in Wisconsin to serve apple pie without a slice of cheese, most always cheddar.

In those days, I only knew three kinds of cheese: cheddar (usually called American), brick and Swiss — plus stinky Limburger for the non-faint of heart.

I marvel at the cheese choices available today. In markets, I can barely pass mountains of smoky goudas, bries, havarti, blues, muenster, feta, jacks, provolone, mozzarella, even beer kaese, without stopping and tossing one or two in my basket. At the new C’est Cheese, I eagerly explored wheels of handmade cheeses from France, England, Switzerland and Italy as well as Northern California, taking home a superb Vacherin Fribourgeois from Switzerland and a British Stilton.

Still my absolute favorite has to be a small wheel of succulent Green County Swiss — and for that I go home to a factory.

Tastes have evolved. While brick cheese was never my favorite as a child, perhaps because I can’t find it here, I hunger for the piquant taste and it is always on my Christmas list.

Living in New Mexico, I discovered chile con queso (chile with cheese) which, served warm with fresh tortilla chips, remains my favorite appetizer.

Say cheese? You betcha.

Please e-mail your favorite recipes or column suggestions to Sally at scappon@scbeacon.com