Only then could cheese-making begin to change from an art to a process.

According to an official publication of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, processed cheeses are “made by grinding fine, and mixing together by heating and stirring one or more cheeses of the same or two or more varieties, together with an added emulsifying agent, into a homogeneous plastic mass.”

The homogeneous plastic mass (the Department of Agriculture certainly has a way with words) is then cut into uniform chunks or squeezed by rollers into thin sheets, cut into squares, and packaged. The result is a nearly sterile, absolutely consistent product whose chief virtue is a notably long shelf-life. Of course, by this point processed cheese is to real cheese about what military music is to music.

But, if the technology of processed cheese is very new, the history of natural cheese is very ancient. It doubtless was discovered by accident and came to be exploited as a way to extend the period of the year in which dairy products could form a part of the human diet. Originally milk was available only when the herds were bearing young in the spring. Turned into cheese, however, it remained edible for months, in some cases years.

When Europeans began settling the New World, they brought with them the cheese-making know-how that had developed over many thousands of years. Each immigrant group also brought a taste for the particular cheeses it had known at home, and cheese makers necessarily catered to these tastes. That is why this country has always produced so many excellent imitations of European cheeses and so few native American ones.

One major immigrant group in the nineteenth century was the Germans, many of whom settled in New York City, especially in an area of Manhattan that was once known as Kleindeutschland—Little Germany—and is now called the East Village. As early as the 1850’s German immigrants accounted for more than half the city’s bakers, confectioners, tobacconists, and, of course, delicatessen owners.

Many of these middle-class Germans were partial to a cheese they had known in the old country called Bismarck Schlosskäse (castle cheese). Schlosskäse is a soft, ripened cheese that is molded in brick-shaped molds about four inches by one and a half by one. It is intensely flavorful and, at least for those who don’t like it, intensely smelly.

New York City delicatessens began importing the cheese to meet demand, but unfortunately, like all soft cheeses, Schlosskäse has a very limited lifespan. In the late nineteenth century, it was often spoiled and unsalable by the time it arrived in New York by ship from Germany.

Adolph Tode, the owner of a very popular deli in New York, wanted to do something about that. Tode also owned the Monroe Cheese Company, in Monroe, New York, about 25 miles northwest of the city. In 1889, he asked his cheese-makers to try to duplicate Bismarck Schlosskäse.

A 22-year-old Swiss immigrant named Emile Frey took on the challenge, although he

had been with the company only a year. He tried for two years to come up with an acceptable substitute. Then, in one of the inspired accidents with which the history of cheese is littered, he inadvertently invented a whole new cheese. It had the same soft, creamy texture as Schlosskäse and an equally pronounced aroma but quite a different, indeed unique, flavor.

Tode thought it was delicious and ordered more, but Frey, to his horror, found he could not duplicate it. For the next two years, Frey searched for the gastronomic equivalent of the lost chord, and at last, in late 1892, he found it again.

Tode tried the new cheese out on his fellow members of a German singing club in New York called the Liederkranz Society. A distinguished group, the society included Theodore Roosevelt and Carl Schurz among its members. They were enthusiastic, and Tode promptly named Prey’s discovery in their honor.

He started selling the new Liederkränz cheese in his deli, and soon other deli owners were ordering it from the Monroe Cheese Company as well. By the 1920s, demand around the country had become so great that Monroe’s local milk supply was no longer adequate to meet it. In 1926, the company decided to move to Ohio and set up a brand-new, state-of-the-art cheese factory in the town of Van Wert, to produce the cheese that had made it famous and that now had a national market.

But, when the new plant produced its first batch of Liederkranz, the result was a disaster. It not only didn’t taste like Liederkranz but tasted terrible. Emile Frey realized that the company’s new spic-and-span facilities were a little too spic-and-span for their own good.

He quickly had the wooden parts of the old factory, deeply embedded with countless generations of the right microorganisms, dismantled and shipped to Van Wert, where he installed them in the new factory. Then he spread Liederkranz cheese all over the gleaming walls in hopes of permeating the very fabric of the new factory with the right bugs. To Prey’s immense relief the second batch tasted like Liederkranz.

In 1929, the Borden Company bought out the Monroe Cheese Company. Although Liederkranz only amounted to a tiny part of Borden’s vast product line, the company continued to produce it with all the care and passion a great cheese demands.

Nor did Borden sell it only at fancy stores. For nearly 60 years, as mom-and-pop grocery stores gave way to supermarkets, and Fannie Farmer to Julia Child, one of the world’s great cheeses could always be found, most improbably, at the nation’s ordinary dairy counters, nestled right between the waxy, bright orange processed American cheese slices and the equally bright orange slabs of Velveeta.

But today, a hundred years after its invention, Liederkranz is no more. In

the corporate restructuring that so marked the 1980s, Borden sold its natural cheese division to General Foods in 1982. In 1985, General Foods was bought by Philip Morris, and, four years later, was merged with Philip Morris’s Kraft division into Kraft General Foods. At some point in this process, General Foods stopped making Liederkranz. The decision was apparently taken so casually that there is not even a record of it in the corporate archives. Unless, somewhere, there is some frozen Liederkranz that could be used to re-create it, the cheese is lost forever.

It is ironic that, just as the country was beginning to develop a serious gastronomy of its own and a rapidly increasing interest in American, not imitation-European, cheeses, one of the quiet glories of the American table vanished in the snap of a corporate decision. Hardly anyone even noticed.

In France, it would have brought down the government.