Early Wisconsiners will never forget the Limburger Rebellion in Green County, when the people rose in protest against the Limburger caravan that was accustomed to park in the little town of Monroe where it was marketed.  They threatened to stage a modern Boston Tea Party and dump the odoriferous bricks in the river, when five or six wagonloads were left ripening in the sun in front of the town bank.  The Limburger was finally stored safely underground.

Livarot

Livarot has been described as decadent, “The very Verlaine of them all,” and Victor Meusy personifies it in a poem dedicated to all the great French cheeses, of which we give a free translation: 

    In the dog days
    In its overflowing dish
    Livarot gesticulates
    Or weeps like a child.

Muenster

    At the diplomatic banquet
    One must choose his piece. 
    All is politics,
    A cheese and a flag.

    You annoy the Russians
    If you take Chester;
    You irritate the Prussians
    In choosing Muenster.

Victor Meusy

Like Limburger, this male cheese, often caraway-flavored, does not fare well in England.  Although over here we consider Muenster far milder than Limburger, the English writer Eric Weir in When Madame Cooks will have none of it: 

I cannot think why this cheese was not thrown from the aeroplanes during the war to spread panic amongst enemy troops.  It would have proved far more efficacious than those nasty deadly gases that kill people permanently.

Neufchatel

    If the cream cheese be white
    Far fairer the hands that made them.

    Arthur Hugh Clough

Although originally from Normandy, Neufchatel, like Limburger, was so long ago welcomed to America and made so splendidly at home here that we may consider it our very own.  All we have against it is that it has served as the model for too many processed abominations.

Parmesan, Romano, Pecorino, Pecorino Romano

Parmesan when young, soft and slightly crumbly is eaten on bread.  But when well aged, let us say up to a century, it becomes Rock of Gibraltar of cheeses and really suited for grating.  It is easy to believe that the so-called “Spanish cheese” used as a barricade by Americans in Nicaragua almost a century ago was none other than the almost indestructible Grana, as Parmesan is called in Italy.

The association between cheese and battling began in B.C. days with the Jews and Romans, who fed cheese to their soldiers not only for its energy value but as a convenient form of rations, since every army travels on its stomach and can’t go faster than its impedimenta.  The last notable mention of cheese in war was the name of the Monitor:  “A cheese box on a raft.”