Queen of cheese
To us it is a glorious theme
To sing of milk and curds and cream
While cataloguing some poetry books I came across a book called Pegasus descending : a book of the best bad verse / edited with notes and an introductory dialogue by James Camp, X.J. Kennedy and Keith Waldrop. In it is a superb poem, written in Canada in the 19th century by James McIntyre, called Queen of cheese. It was written about a prize 4 ton cheese made in Ingersoll, Canada, which later went on a tour of Toronto, New York, and Britain. The third stanza particularly appealed to me:
Cows numerous as a swarm of bees
Or as the leaves upon the trees
It did require to make thee please
And stand unrivaled, queen of cheese.
Now that's poetry! McIntyre became known as the Cheese Poet. Wikipedia quotes one of his other poems about cheese in Canada called Oxford Cheese Ode:
The ancient poets ne'er did dream
That Canada was land of cream,
They ne'er imagined it could flow
In this cold land of ice and snow,
Where everything did solid freeze
They ne'er hoped or looked for cheese.
Interestingly, the last stanza of the Oxford Cheese Ode also re-uses the comparison of many cows to a swarm of bees:
Cows numerous as swarm of bees
Are milked in Oxford to make cheese.
If you want to read more, which I am sure you do, Poemhunter has the full text of James McIntyre's poems, including the two above, although beware of pop-ups, even with Firefox with the pop-up blocker on.
A.D. IV KAL. DEC. MMVII
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Strange smoked cheese ingredient
Below are the ingredients of some Austrian* smoked cheese I bought earlier today. See if you can figure out which one freaked me out. Hint: it is not the E number.
CHEESE, WATER, BUTTER, MILK PROTEIN, EMULSIFYING SALT (E 452), STARCH, SALT, LIQUID SMOKE.
*As opposed to Bavarian smoked cheese which is, of course, completely different.
A.D. VII KAL. MAI. MMVII
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Tom