An Abomination: Is American Cheese Steampunk?

[J. Wilhelm]

This forum has been relatively quiet and controversial free for so long, that I thought I'd rattle the cage a bit.  So today I'm going to write about...

AMERICAN CHEESE

WOT?!?  It cannot be!  All the humanity!  The Horror! What is that abomination doing in this section??

Now, now, don't panic; the good news is that Kraft American Cheese *just missed* entry into the Victorian Foods list...

The bad news is that it so very narrowly missed it that it still qualifies for the Steampunk Era, being a solidly Edwardian product.

Try not to heave. Breathe calmly and slowly. Inhale, keep the air in, and slowly exhale.  We'll get through this, I promise.

§§§

Furthermore, whether we like it or not, it turns out that American Cheese is still cheese, even if the United States' own Food and Drug Administration prohibits the product from being called cheese. The main distinction is the process of making said product.  It's a modified cheese, but it actually starts as real cheese.

If you haven't fainted yet, like our friend next to me, then let me tell you that American Cheese wasn't the first processed cheese.  The first processed cheese was a derivative of Emmentaler developed by Gerber.

By the way, Emmentaler style cheese is known as "Swiss Cheese" in the United States, and Emmentaler was the first type of cheese to be subjected to this process. That makes processed cheese a European invention, not American.

Alright, the rest of you can faint now. Just try not to mess-up the carpet too much.

But are you really shocked that processed cheese would be developed so close to the Victorian Era?  When so many other 20th Century foods were invented by Victorian scientists?  I guess this was the proverbial elephant in the room that We, the Steampunk, refused to see when we wrote about Steampunk food and derided that yellow substance! We never considered history!

So what is American Cheese you ask?  You thought it was only made from milk solids and oil?

No, not exactly. The short answer is that the original Edwardian Era American Cheese is real Cheddar style cheese that has been treated with emulsifiers to allow it to combine with water. A lot more water than regular cheese would allow.

Emulsifiers are naturally occurring substances that are found in other foods and which were discovered by Victorian Era food scientists. Immediately these substances were employed in the processing of food, including chocolate, before the 20th Century. And the milk solids mentioned above are just dried milk that is added for flavour, and of course, that dried milk was also developed in the Victorian Era and it was incorporated into chocolate as well during that period.

Naturally, I'll have to issue a disclaimer, because parting from the point of the invention of American processed cheese, the food industry in the 20th Century greatly modified the original concept.  But I'm talking about the classic Vicwardian method, rather than the contemporary industrial variations...

These two videos below explain what American Cheese is, how to make it, and how it came about.

The History of Processed Cheese and American Cheese

What is American Cheese?

[Sir Henry]

Next in the series of Lovekraftian culinary delights: American Chocolate 

I hadn't thought of processed cheese being Steampunk (to be honest I hadn't thought of processed cheese at all in a few decades) but it does seem to have just the right mixture of horror, history, absurdity and whimsy. And horror, stomach-churning horror.¹

It is easy to assume that adulterating foods to hold more water (or air) so they are cheaper to produce was a 20th century development, but as with so many things, it turns out to just be 'improvements' on Victorian ethiclessness. Ho hum.

¹ The first time I saw the cover of Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Nausea' I assumed that it was a Dutch/German edition of a book about the North Sea. 

[J. Wilhelm]

Next in the series of Lovekraftian culinary delights: American Chocolate 

I hadn't thought of processed cheese being Steampunk (to be honest I hadn't thought of processed cheese at all in a few decades) but it does seem to have just the right mixture of horror, history, absurdity and whimsy. And horror, stomach-churning horror.¹

It is easy to assume that adulterating foods to hold more water (or air) so they are cheaper to produce was a 20th century development, but as with so many things, it turns out to just be 'improvements' on Victorian ethiclessness. Ho hum.

¹ The first time I saw the cover of Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Nausea' I assumed that it was a Dutch/German edition of a book about the North Sea. 

Well, it's not all bad, to be perfectly honest.  I think milk chocolate turned out well (clearly a Victorian and European invention), as well as condensed and evaporated milk.

Have you ever tried to make hot chocolate with coarse ground, unmilled unfiltered and unemulsified cacao nibs?  It's an awful lot of work for just a cup of hot chocolate.  Even the traditional Mexican/Spanish chocolate, the first hot chocolate that ever was, is emulsified nowadays, though they still leave the cocoa and cinnamon fibers in it for authenticity (you find a little grit to chew at the end of your cup).

[RJBowman]

American cheese will never be steampunk. I don't care how many gears you glue to it.

[Sir Henry]

Next in the series of Lovekraftian culinary delights: American Chocolate 

I hadn't thought of processed cheese being Steampunk (to be honest I hadn't thought of processed cheese at all in a few decades) but it does seem to have just the right mixture of horror, history, absurdity and whimsy. And horror, stomach-churning horror.¹

It is easy to assume that adulterating foods to hold more water (or air) so they are cheaper to produce was a 20th century development, but as with so many things, it turns out to just be 'improvements' on Victorian ethiclessness. Ho hum.

¹ The first time I saw the cover of Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Nausea' I assumed that it was a Dutch/German edition of a book about the North Sea. 

Well, it's not all bad, to be perfectly honest.  I think milk chocolate turned out well (clearly a Victorian and European invention), as well as condensed and evaporated milk.

Have you ever tried to make hot chocolate with coarse ground, unmilled unfiltered and unemulsified cacao nibs?  It's an awful lot of work for just a cup of hot chocolate.  Even the traditional Mexican/Spanish chocolate, the first hot chocolate that ever was, is emulsified nowadays, though they still leave the cocoa and cinnamon fibers in it for authenticity (you find a little grit to chew at the end of your cup).

It was the milk chocolate (particularly Hershey's) that I was thinking of. Spoiling the milk before making chocolate with it makes it keep for much longer. Hershey's won't admit that they do it, but most people can taste the butylic acid that this creates: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/hersheys-chocolate-tastes-like-vomit_l_60479e5fc5b6af8f98bec0cd

As for making cocoa with nibs, surprisingly I have. My son is a bit of a 'foodie' and bought some cocoa nibs for a recipe. The simplest recipe I could find to use some of the leftover nibs was cocoa. It's an interesting, earthy flavour and while I could see why they stuck with it and developed it, it tasted a bit watery and one-note to me. As you say, the emulsification makes a bit difference sensually and the addition of vanilla and bucketfuls of sugar over the centuries has definitely made it more palatable to modern tastes.

[J. Wilhelm]

Next in the series of Lovekraftian culinary delights: American Chocolate 

I hadn't thought of processed cheese being Steampunk (to be honest I hadn't thought of processed cheese at all in a few decades) but it does seem to have just the right mixture of horror, history, absurdity and whimsy. And horror, stomach-churning horror.¹

It is easy to assume that adulterating foods to hold more water (or air) so they are cheaper to produce was a 20th century development, but as with so many things, it turns out to just be 'improvements' on Victorian ethiclessness. Ho hum.

¹ The first time I saw the cover of Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Nausea' I assumed that it was a Dutch/German edition of a book about the North Sea. 

Well, it's not all bad, to be perfectly honest.  I think milk chocolate turned out well (clearly a Victorian and European invention), as well as condensed and evaporated milk.

Have you ever tried to make hot chocolate with coarse ground, unmilled unfiltered and unemulsified cacao nibs?  It's an awful lot of work for just a cup of hot chocolate.  Even the traditional Mexican/Spanish chocolate, the first hot chocolate that ever was, is emulsified nowadays, though they still leave the cocoa and cinnamon fibers in it for authenticity (you find a little grit to chew at the end of your cup).

It was the milk chocolate (particularly Hershey's) that I was thinking of. Spoiling the milk before making chocolate with it makes it keep for much longer. Hershey's won't admit that they do it, but most people can taste the butylic acid that this creates: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/hersheys-chocolate-tastes-like-vomit_l_60479e5fc5b6af8f98bec0cd

As for making cocoa with nibs, surprisingly I have. My son is a bit of a 'foodie' and bought some cocoa nibs for a recipe. The simplest recipe I could find to use some of the leftover nibs was cocoa. It's an interesting, earthy flavour and while I could see why they stuck with it and developed it, it tasted a bit watery and one-note to me. As you say, the emulsification makes a bit difference sensually and the addition of vanilla and bucketfuls of sugar over the centuries has definitely made it more palatable to modern tastes.

Oh! Butyric acid, I see... Oh well. The assumption is that they're spoiling the milk, but I think they're not admitting that. As to whether all American chocolate may taste like Hershey's... that's debatable.  I can taste significant differences between manufacturers.

The formulation of chocolate can sometimes follow the acquisition of a brand by another company. And today you're no longer talking about "national" companies. Today these are transnational conglomerates. For example, the largest baking conglomerate in the world is Grupo Bimbo from Mexico, and they own a number of important brands in the US! This means that products are now being reformulated away from the "American Standard." And even between domestic companies you can have a change in philosophy depending on who the owner is.

Recently, to give you another example, I noticed an important change in an American candy bar known as "Butterfinger."  Butterfinger is a comprised of a crumbly solid peanut-caramel center covered in a layer of chocolate. The brand has been passed around among a plethora of conglomerates through the decades since its inception in 1923.  Its latest owner,  Ferrero SpA, bought it from Nestle in 2018, and let me tell you it was a great improvement. Gone were artificial colors, stabilizers and the partially hydrogenated oil used for the caramel core. Much to my surprise the ingredient list shrank to less than 6 natural sources like plain sugar cane and regular cocoa. The thing is that Nestle didn't change the formulation when they bought it in 1990. The formula was nearly the same since I was a small kid in the 1970s/80s when the bar was owned by Standard Brands and Nabisco. But by then the bar had been composed of myriad food chemicals for decades. It is very rare to have a manufacturer go "all natural" when they purchase a product but Ferrero did! I can only hope that Ferrero will hold on to that brand for a long time.

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The traditional way to get around that wateriness in hot chocolate in Mexico (and I imagine Spain since colonial times) is to use boiling milk, rather than water (milk has lecithin which is a set of various chemical emulsifiers), which makes the chocolate more full bodied, smoother and much frothier. Then you can use the wooden "molinillo" to "attempt" to create the froth and eliminate as many cocoa globules as you can.

On additives: Mesoamerican Natives did have vanilla, which is native to the coastal areas in the Gulf of Mexico.  Cinnamon ("false" cinnamon as opposed to Ceylon's Cinnamomum verum) is also native to Mexico, and today is -always- used in hot chocolate, which may bring an extra dimension to it, since you noted it'd be rather bland with vanilla, but I don't know if vanilla had ever been used alone with cocoa (I'll have to check, but I don't think so).

Along those lines, the use of chili peppers in cocoa or chocolate really only belongs to the original Native cocoa + water drink, and it's a bit of a fad, used by contemporary chocolatiers today, since we don't even know how much and what kind of sweetener (if any) was ever used in prehispanic times, or how much chili was added. I'd avoid the use of chili unless you're trying to reproduce a known specific Native recipe.  One additive that is never mentioned for the Native cocoa and which has a lot of written  evidence for it as well as archeological evidence is Annato (Sp. "Achiote") which adds a reddish color and a faint nutty flavor. I haven't seen anyone mention that at all or use it in modern chocolate*

ERRATA:  I just saw that Ferrero lists Annato in the Butterfinger ingredients list too!

[Cora Courcelle]

I knew one couple who moved to the USA and made quite a good living importing and selling British brands of chocolate and confectionery ...