In August of 2021, I went to a fancy cheese shop and ordered from the ever-intimidating "big girl counter" for the very first time.
I didn't know what I wanted, so I ended up with four ounces of Appenzeller, some Gruyere with black truffles in it, and a cast-iron mouse I named Tony Squeak.
The Appenzeller took some- sorry, a lot of getting used to. It smelled like cat pee and feet with a hint of jasmine. It's kind of a miracle that humans smell that and think, "edible".
But then I got used to it. And boy, did I ever.
I went from hating the rind, the smelliest part with all the mold on it, to actively seeking it out whenever I got myself a slice. You'd have to experience it to believe it.
I became obsessed with cheese that month. I looked for any free resources I
could find on making it, eating it, whatever. This lead me to
The Complete Book of Cheese
by Robert Brown, which I found on Project Gutenberg.
Published in 1955, The Complete Book of Cheese documents the history and culture, as well as recipes including pretty much every type of cheese made in the West.
Brown briefly mentions cheeses from other countries that we imitate here, then writes, "We have our own legitimate offspring too, beginning with the Pineapple, supposed to have been first made about 1845 in Litchfield County, Connecticut.”
When I read that I said, "Connecticut? You mean literally just the bridge between New York and Boston? The state of insurance and Noah Webster? That Connecticut?" Yes, apparently even the Nutmeg state had its own original cheese.
(I was gonna call it "The Most Boring State in New England", but I felt that would have been overly cynical, closed-minded and unfair. It's really more like "The State in New England That Isn't Known For Any One Famous Thing and All of Its Famous Things Are Now Merely A Part of Its History And Basically Forgotten".)
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| Image credit: The Newtown Bee, Aug. 9, 1895. |
Pineapple was a cheddar-style cheese, hung in nets to give it diamond-shaped indentations, pressed in a pineapple-shaped mold and brushed with boiled flaxseed oil, or linseed oil as they called it back in the day. After oiling, it was shellacked, creating a hard shell around the cheese.
I think it's important to note that you can still find "boiled linseed oil",
or BLO, for treating wood. As far as I can tell it's NOT the same as what they
used for the pineapple cheese, because today's BLO is treated with chemicals
either instead of or in addition to heat.
Pineapple cheese was popular back in the 1800s, at least in Connecticut, New
York and Maryland where you could actually get it. It may have been available
in other states, but my sources don't mention them.
People
would cut the top off the cheese and scoop it out with a spoon, eating it from
the inside out. Sometimes it was kept in a silver stand, which is not illustrated here.
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| Also from Newtown Bee. |
It was rumored that the cheese had some pineapple-y flavor, especially when you got closer to the rind, but there was no pineapple in it.
I think the flaxseed oil tasted less unlike pineapple than the inside, and the name "pineapple" made people think of pineapple. I've never tasted flaxseed oil straight-up, but I could see people making this mistake with grapeseed or some other "woody-tasting" oil.
There are a few blog posts and articles about pineapple cheese. They're mostly
from history-related websites rather than food-related ones, like
Victorian Passage
and the
Connecticut history website
from CTHumanities. I commend these people for knowing pineapple cheese existed
at all, but I didn't find their information very useful.
Why would I think I can do better, though? Didn't they already use all the
publicly available knowledge?
I was determined to find out, so I went further.
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| Use "Search Text Contents" to, well... |
I found The Chronicle of The American Industries Association,
The Rushford Centennial, and Fancy Cheese in America.
I should also mention that I searched for PDFs with exact phrases using DuckDuckGo.
The screenshot below is from searching "pineapple cheese" filetype:pdf.
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Page 2 of DuckDuckGo shows me a relevant news clipping when I search for
PDFs of "pineapple cheese". |
I also found
"Dam Rescued 'Hill' Town From Obscurity" and a PDF called
"Attica Historical Society Hulls Notes".
The latter is a MEGA link because I forgot where I found it. That reminds me:
I downloaded EVERY FILE I deemed relevant in case I could use it. Even if I
couldn't, I'd know where my copies were.
Now here's a slightly more comprehensive history of pineapple cheese.
THE HISTORY
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Deacon Lewis Mills Norton. Image credit: History of Goshen, Connecticut. |
Deacon Lewis Mills Norton was born in 1783. He came from a long line of
clergymen, but I can't seem to find what church he became the deacon of. When his
father died, he was taken out of school and had to learn from his family
members. Nonetheless he ended up well-educated due to his thirst for
knowledge.
In 1808, Lewis Norton's uncle, a carpenter, gave him a piece of cheese he got
in New York that was imported from Holland. This cheese was pineapple shaped,
and Lewis really liked it.
Lewis' other uncle, Alexander Norton, used annatto coloring in his own cheese,
giving it an orangey-yellow color. This convinced his customers that the
cheese was "of English manufacture", therefore better. The colored cheese sold
for 15 cents a pound rather than 10 cents a pound, even though it tasted the
same.
These ideas combined gave Lewis the idea for his pineapple cheese. The shape combined with the "imported color" would make it aesthetically pleasing, unique and marketable. The issue then was making such a cheese at a high quality with cheap equipment.
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| Half of a pineapple cheese mold. Image credit: Litchfield, CT Historical Society. |
Being a man of innovation, Norton got over this issue just fine. He invented wooden pineapple-shaped molds for the cheese, which would be arranged in a gang press that shaped many "pineapples" at once.
"There were several wooden molds, similar to the first wooden square ones, which were set in line so that each stopper was connected by the same rod and each mold in the press received pressure from above and from the sides at the same time."- Chronicle of The Early American Industries Association, Volume 2, #13, February 1940
Norton obtained the patent for the mold in 1810. The patent was signed by
then-president James Madison.
In 1814, Norton joined Walter Cobb and Company, a wool cloth manufacturer.
During his time with the company, he invented a "power loom" that, while not
perfect, worked faster than the hand-weavers at the company. The workers got
so mad that Norton "had reason to fear that his life was in danger."
The company failed, and Norton willingly paid his portion of the debt. He took up side hustles producing pyroligneous acid, a smoke flavor and preservative for meat, and woad dye, a substitute for indigo dye.
Cobb and Co's debt was finally paid off 30 years later in 1844. The Norton
family only made pineapple cheese from that point forward. This was the same
year the Nortons started buying curd from local farmers and making the cheese
in one centralized building attached to their house.
In 1850, Lewis' son Robert Norton built his own factory in Rome, New York. Robert would manage this factory until 1857, when C.J. Elmer took over.
Lewis Norton died in 1860, when he was 77 years old. It's unclear how he died,
but here's how his death is described in
History of the town of Goshen, Connecticut:
That may have been the end of Lewis Norton's life, but it wasn't the end of
the pineapple cheese story.
In 1864, C.J. Elmer bought a cheese factory in Rushford, New York and
physically had his old one moved and attached to it. His son, H.C. Elmer, had
fond memories of his ride in the factory as it moved slowly up the hill. H.C.
recalled those memories in a speech he delivered, which was recorded in the
Rushford Centennial.
While Rushford's cheese was good, C.J. Elmer felt it could be better. In 1873, he went to England to study their cheesemaking methods. These methods were then applied to the Rushford cheese, and since then the Rushford factory was said to have made the best cheese in America.
In 1883, the practice of buying curd to make cheese was switched over to
buying milk instead.
Finally, the Nortons sold out to Kraft cheese company in 1931. I haven't found anything on the Kraft version of pineapple cheese, but they may not have sold it under the Kraft name. I don't know how companies work.
Pineapple cheese has fallen into obscurity ever since. I wish it still existed, but then I'd have nothing to write about.
Well, that's not necessarily true. Biggy Iggy is obscure, and that
still exists. If pineapple cheese was still around, I think it would remain
Weird, Natural, and/or Obscure, so it could've been worthy of a post. I just
wouldn't have gone down such a rabbit hole.
RECIPE?
Weirdly enough, I did actually find a written record of the pineapple cheese process in Fancy Cheese in America. My PDF viewer does allow me to select the text, but with, uh... this result.
So no copy-pasted text. Instead, here are PNGs of the pages. My PDF editor
captured them directly as transparent PNGs, so I added the white behind the
text. Just so you know why it looks different.
Here it is, folks. This may be the only publicly available recipe for
pineapple cheese.
Don't pretend not to know what I'm thinking. The patent did expire by now... right?
As you can see, though, these are unreasonably large quantities of ingredients
for the mere mortal. Maybe I could coordinate with one or more cheesemakers on
the Internet to adapt this recipe into something more... possible.
Then again, that might be in vain. There's nothing all that special about pineapple cheese other than its shape and the flaxseed oil. I assume someone could recreate it using a really good English cheddar recipe with some extra features.
SOURCES AND NOTES
My general timeline of events was largely borrowed from the
Chronicle of The Early American Industries Association, Volume 2,
Issue 13
from February 1940. This is also where I got the "gang press" quote.
The Chronicle is a quarterly publication about... well, early American industries. They're still going today, and I suggest you check them out here.
The History of The Town of Goshen, Connecticut opens with a mini-biography on Lewis Norton, and has the only picture of him I could find. This is where all the minor direct quotes came from (AKA all direct quotes except the big honkin' one in bold). It's also where I got slightly more specific information on Alexander Norton.
The Complete Book of Cheese is how I learned pineapple cheese existed in the first place.
Other minor sources include:
Attica Historical Society Hulls Notes
I wanted to put together more details, but it started to really hurt my brain.
I tried my best on this one to relay information that was neither addressed
previously by other websites, or a confusing mess of minutiae.
Naturally, there are inconsistencies in the information I've found, since all
of it was a second-, third- or fourth-hand account of any of the
Nortons' experiences.
There were many pineapple cheese factories, at least some of which moved several times, so I'm not totally sure which move H.C. Elmer witnessed.
A letter from Robert Norton (which I found in the Rushford Centennial) says the patent for the cheese mold was issued in 1808, but Chronicle and Attica say 1810.
Chronicle says the Rome factory started in 1847, not 1850.
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