In 1891 a young Swiss-born cheesemaker employed by the company, named Emil Frey (no relation to the disreputable caterers of Game of Thrones’s infamous Red Wedding, we presume), was trying to concoct a domestic imitation of a delicate German cheese called Bismarck, which tended to spoil during transatlantic shipping. But a strain of bacteria lurking in the Monroe cheeseworks fortuitously intervened, and Frey came up instead with a brand-new cheese type with a thick golden rind and a pungent-smelling spreadable center, similar in flavor to the French Epoisses. He named it Liederkranz, meaning “Wreath of Songs,” after the German singing circles popular in New York back in his day.
By 1915, writes Nelson, “over 1,000 boxes of Liederkranz were shipped from the factory in a two-day period.” In 1926, when many dairies in the Hudson Valley were being converted to other uses, production of Liederkranz was relocated to a new factory in Van Wert, Ohio, where milk supplies were cheaper. But it didn’t taste right until Frey brought in the old wooden shelving and smeared the walls of the Ohio site with cheese culture from the closed Monroe facility.
In 1929 the entire Monroe Cheese Company operation was sold to the Borden Company. But Frey had already spun off another cheese product that he had developed – a soft, mild yellow/orange loaf made from melted-down broken bits of Colby, Swiss and Cheddar – into a separate company in 1923. It took over the Monroe plant when the Monroe Cheese Company moved to Ohio in 1926, and a year later the Velveeta Cheese Company was sold to Kraft. The Monroe factory was then sold to a fruit beverage bottler, who got into a spot of trouble during Prohibition by turning the place into a distillery.
For his part, cheese whiz Emil Frey kept landing on his feet. Borden kept him on as the general manager of the Ohio factory until 1938, and Liederkranz kept selling briskly, even being exported to Europe. Borden expanded its line, and by 1945 the Van Wert plant was the largest cheese factory in the world.
In 1981, 30 years after Frey’s death, Borden decided to get out of the business of making natural cheese altogether and closed the Ohio plant. The Fisher Cheese Company bought it a year later, reviving the making of Liederkranz only to curtail it again after the discovery of bacterial contamination in 1985. Fisher sold off the franchise and the proprietary bacterial culture, but Liederkranz was not made again for 25 years. It was reintroduced to the market in 2010 by the DCI Cheese Company of Richfield, Wisconsin. Homely Velveeta, of course, can be manufactured anywhere – in fact, its “healthful” sterility was an early selling point – and it remains a ubiquitous fixture in supermarkets across the continent.
While commercial cheesemaking is no longer practiced in Monroe, earlier generations of many local families were employed by the Monroe Cheese Company, or by auxiliary businesses such as the manufacture of wooden cheese boxes or the weaving of reed mats to strain the curds. Some local streets were named for structures associated with the old cheesemaking operation – like a long-vanished bridge that enabled factory workers to take a shortcut to work across the millpond in the center of town.
In sum, Monrovians – like their neighbors in the town of Chester, where the Philadelphia Cream Cheese Company was founded – have every right to be proud of their cheesemaking heritage. So they celebrate it with a sprawling street festival each September, with one stage presenting live music all afternoon and another hosting demonstrations of dance and martial arts, plus carnival attractions and a magic show for kids and cheese-sampling tents for grownups.
It’ll be too late by the time this edition of Almanac hits the streets to enter the Monroe Idol vocal contest, but you may still be able to get your cherished grilled cheese recipe into competition. To register, call (845) 774-1727, leave your name, telephone number and sandwich description, and check out the rules on the official Monroe Cheese Festival website at www.monroecheesefestival.com.
Monroe Cheese Festival events get underway at 10 a.m., right in the center of town, and admission is free, so go rub shoulders with some fellow caseophiles.
Monroe Cheese Festival, Saturday, September 7, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., free, Stage Road/Route 17 M, Monroe; (845) 774-1727, www.monroecheesefestival.com.
