The Sundarban
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It’s February 1837, and the White House is about to bear gape to one in all the greatest feeding frenzies in this nation’s proud historical past of aggressive consumption. As evening falls, the voters of Washington, D.C., are going to make a 1,400-pound cheese disappear in a matter of minutes. And they’re going to accomplish it at the behest of incumbent President Andrew Jackson.
The battle of the Presidential cheddars
Curiously, the cheese devoured that evening was no longer the primary colossal cheddar to grace the White House at some level of the 19th century. In fact, aggressive caseiculture unites two presidents who had tiny or no in basic in any other case: Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.
The first photographs in the Ample Cheese Wars of the 1800s were fired by one John Leland, the pastor of Cheshire, Massachusetts. To celebrate Jefferson’s victory in the 1801 Presidential election, Leland organized for Cheshire’s dairy farmers to pool their resources in the creation of an spacious wheel of cheddar. The resultant wheel of cheese was named “The Cheshire Mammoth Cheese,” and for factual reason. It weighed 1,235 kilos: about as essential as an adult brown bear.
A generation later, in 1829, Jackson was elected president. He and Jefferson are usually the discipline of comparisons, and Jackson himself usually presented himself as Jefferson’s spiritual inheritor. This scrutinize, it have to be said, was no longer shared by Jefferson himself: On hearing of Jackson’s victory in the 1829 election, Jefferson reportedly remarked: “I feel essential alarmed at the chance of seeing General Jackson President. He’s one in all probably the most unfit men I know of for such a place.”
Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States from 1829 to 1837. Image: Public Domain
It was perhaps because of Jefferson’s disdain for Jackson that on the latter’s re-election in 1833, his supporters made up our minds that “each honor which Jefferson had ever obtained need to smooth [also] be paid [to Jackson].” Amongst other things, that meant getting maintain of an spacious wheel of cheese—ideally, an even greater one than Jefferson’s.
Jackson’s cheesemongers came upon the man for the job in Colonel Thomas S. Meecham, a veteran of the War of 1812, who had spot up a dairy farm in Sandy Creek, Original York, a small village impartial correct south of Kingston. Meecham obtained to work, and in late 1835, he unveiled a wheel of cheddar that was even larger than the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese. Exactly how essential Meecham’s cheese weighed depends on which provide you watched—some say 1,400 kilos, others 1,600—nonetheless both way, it was certainly greater than Jefferson’s. Which was the level.
A sizable cheese, the White House, and a massive farewell party
The Jacksonian colossus traveled south on a barge, stopping at Syracuse, Albany, and Original York City earlier than arriving in Washington in early 1836. Perhaps Jackson was too busy attempting to deal with the various scandals that plagued his 2nd time frame, along side the industrial depression that became identified as the Panic of 1837, or perhaps he impartial correct didn’t fancy cheese, nonetheless for whatever reason, Jackson appears to be like to have been less enamored of the cheddar than his supporters. Once it arrived at the White House, the cheese impartial correct…sat there, slowly stinking up all the building.
Jackson’s tenure in Washington was characterized by, amongst other things, his fondness for throwing parties. The White House’s East Room was accomplished in 1829, the year he took place of job, and hosted many a festive evening over the next decade. So as Jackson’s 2nd time frame drew to a shut in 1837, it gave the impression handiest becoming to mark the occasion with one final party—a party that also, as it happened, provided a neat answer to the quiz of what to accomplish with the spacious hunk of cheese that had been hanging around in his lobby for the last year.
Andrew Jackson held many public receptions, launch to all and sundry from senators to Washington locals. Perhaps his most famous was in February 1837 when crowds devoured a massive 1,400-pound wheel of cheddar. Image: The White House Historical Association / Public Domain
The final party of Jackson’s presidency was on February 22, 1837, in honor of George Washington’s birthday. As the party approached, the cheese was dragged from the White House lobby into the East Room. On the day of the party, Jackson declared launch season on the cheese.
The 19th century journalist Benjamin Perley Poore described the carnage that ensued in his book Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis. According to Poore, Washington’s cheese enthusiasts descended on the capitol, and, a matter of hours later, the cheese was no extra: “The air was redolent with cheese, the carpet was slippery with cheese, and nothing else was talked about at Washington that day.”
How long can a cheese impartial correct sit down there?
Perhaps the main takeaway here is that you can apparently impartial correct leave an gigantic cheese sitting in the launch air for 2 years and then feed it to the masses with out causing a mass meals poisoning outbreak. So what actually happens to an absurdly large cheese when it’s left to impartial correct…mature?
Brooklyn-based cheesemaker Caroline Hesse explains that cheese maturation entails a total lot of chemical processes. “On a scientific level, you have lactose breaking down into lactic acid, [along with] fats and proteins breaking down.”
These processes play a key perform in imparting flavor and richness to the cheese—and the longer a cheese sits, the additional these processes are able to growth. Here’s why aged cheeses are generally stronger and extra flavorful than their extra energizing, youthful counterparts. But no longer all cheeses are equal. Whereas relatively hard cheeses, fancy Jackson’s cheddar wheel, can be left to mature for months or years,
