230 Mammoth Cheeseball

Cheesy and Fondue celebrate National Cheeseball Day! We talk cheeseball history, a couple of gigantic balls of cheese, a cheeseball club and a world record. We find some places to buy cheeseball spices. And of course, we tell a very cheesy joke!

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Why is cheddar the most dangerous of all the cheeses? Because it is very sharp!

Show Notes

https://nationaltoday.com/national-cheeseball-day/

https://www.amazon.com/Great-Balls-Cheese-Michelle-Buffardi/dp/1118497201

https://eatshistory.com/globi-sweet-fried-dough-balls/

https://betterhalvespecans.com/do-you-know-the-history-of-cheeseballs/

https://culturecheesemag.com/cheese-bites/cheese-ball-history/

https://www.etymonline.com/word/mammoth

https://www.foodservicenews.net/article-archive/culinary-curiosities-the-cheese-ball/article_c01733c3-34a4-5f00-8e9f-a46b3df40dd8.html

https://recorder.com/2024/12/30/the-surprisingly-fascinating-history-of-cheese-balls-58642228/

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/27228/andrew-jacksons-big-block-cheese

https://boundarystones.weta.org/2017/11/30/biggest-cheese-washington-mammoth-cheeses-white-house-history

https://www.popsci.com/science/andrew-jackons-cheese-party/

https://archive.org/details/colonelmeachamsg0000nesb/page/n3/mode/2up?q=%22Colonel+Meacham%27s+Giant+Cheese%22

https://snackstack.net/2022/01/06/the-snack-that-took-over-the-white-house/

https://www.foodservicenews.net/article-archive/culinary-curiosities-the-cheese-ball/article_c01733c3-34a4-5f00-8e9f-a46b3df40dd8.html

https://www.cheeseprofessor.com/blog/your-guests-will-love-this-modern-take-on-the-classic-cheese-ball

https://www.saltsisters.com/collections/cheeseballs

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Just Cheesy the podcastpresented by Just Cheesy Productions.
Hi, there. I'm your host, Fondue.
I'm Cheesy.
In this week's episode, we'regoing to celebrate National Cheeseball
Day.
My special day.
That's right. We're gonna talkabout cheeseball history, a couple
of gigantic balls of cheese, acheeseball club, and a place where

(00:26):
you can buy a mix to make aball of your own. And we're gonna
tell a cheesy joke. Stay tunfor mammoth cheese ball on Just Cheesy,
the podcast. According toNationalToday.com National Cheeseball
Day is April 17th.
It's my day.
It sure is.
What is a cheese ball?
The website describes it as akind of freestanding dip, and its

(00:48):
basic ingredients ofteninclude cream cheese, cheddar cheese,
green onion, and spices.
Yummy.
But in the 1980s, the termcheese ball had become synonymous
with an insult.
What?
We wanted to find out howsomething went from celebration and
deliciousness to insult.
Yeah.
And for that, we're gonna jumpback to ancient times. Something

(01:09):
I think is called globby. Oh,I'm not sure. It looks like globby.
G L, O B I. Globby.
Sure.
This is an ancient Romancheese ball, circa 160 BC. According
to eatshistory.com the Romanshad their own version of the cheese
ball. The word globi literallymeans spherical in Latin. They were

(01:31):
fried balls made from freshcheese mixed with spelt flour and
in hot fat, then drizzled withhoney and sprinkled with poppy seeds.
Sounds delish, right?
The recipe comes from Cato theElder's d', agricultura, written
around 160 BC.
Right.
This is one of the oldestsurviving works of Latin prose. The
instructions were veryminimal. Mixed cheese and spelt make

(01:54):
balls cook in hot fat. TheRomans ate them at their winter festival,
and food historians believethey may be a distant relative of
a donut. But the first recordthat we really have to today's sort
of cheese ball comes to us inthe 1800s according to Better Halves,
Pecans, and Culture Cheesemag. In the 1800s, a farmer named

(02:15):
Elijah Brown Jr. GiftedPresident Thomas Jefferson a cheese
that was so large, it became anational spectacle. This bad boy
weighed 1235 pounds.
1235.
That's right. 1235 pounds. Itwas called the mammoth cheese, and
it was reported reportedlydisplayed at the White House for

(02:36):
two years.
Two years.
I don't think you understandhow important this cheese ball was.
No.
The cheese ball was so largethat it literally changed American
English language.
What?
Let that sink in this cheeseball was so awe inspiring, according
to Greenfield Recorder, thatit marks the first recorded use of
the word mammoth as anadjective in American English.

(02:59):
Holy cow.
This was born from anationwide fascination with prehistoric
bones being discovered in theNew World at the time. There was
even a poem written by ThomasKennedy called An Ode to the Mammoth
Cheese. And this next oneisn't quite a cheese ball, but it
is mammoth. Andrew Jackson hada party. His supporters thought that

(03:21):
he needed an even biggercheese. In 1835, Colonel Thomas Meacham
of Sandy Creek, New Yorkcrafted a 1400 pound wheel of cheddar,
4ft in diameter, 2ft thick,wrapped in a belt inscribed with
the union it must be preserved.
Whoa.
I can't even fathom this much cheese.
Nope.
I love cheese. This is a lotof cheese.

(03:42):
A lot.
The other one, the 1200pounder, took 900 cows just to make
it.
Holy cow.
Mental. Floss.com talks aboutthis cheese being the crown jewel
of a larger collection of tendifferent cheeses that appeared in
an 1835 patriotic celebration.To give you an idea, there were two
other big cheeses. They werealso very big. They were each £750.

(04:04):
What?
Apparently it took 24 horsesto pull this giant cheese.
24.
And it was so big that Jacksondidn't know what to do with it. So
he just left it in the Whitehouse entrance for two years. Boundarystones.weta.org
says that this cheese was,quote, viciously fragrant and that
Washingtonians could smell itblocks away from the White House.

(04:28):
So what do you do when youhave that much cheese? Well, you
invite everybody all around tocome and help and eat it. So the
people in Washington did justthat. They didn't miss the chance
to help consume it. And therumor goes that the party was so
crowded that people who couldnot fit through the doors were climbing
through the windows. There wasa crowd of 10,000 people. 10,000.
They took turns eating piecesof it and taking away large hunks

(04:51):
with them. And in only twohours, the 1400 pound wheel of cheese
had been demolished. They sayhere, and I quote, the air was redolent
with cheese, the carpet wasslippery with cheese, and nothing
else was talked about atWalmart Washington that day.
Slippery with cheese.
Slippery. According to SnackStack, there was an aftermath to

(05:11):
this big old block of cheese.The next president, Martin Van Buren,
he had to rip out the curtainsin the cheese room and have all the
walls sanded and whitewashed.And he also banned food at all future
White House public functions.
Good call.

(06:18):
Big Hunks of cheese are notsponsors. But if they were, their
ad would go right here. Let'sFast forward to 1933. Okay, we're
in Wisconsin. A man namedHubert Fassbender. He's packing leftover
cheese scraps from hisfather's factory into crocks. He
adds milk, spices, and asplash of alcohol. He began to give
them away as bonus gifts tohis best beer customers. It was so

(06:42):
popular that it became Ka KanaClub Cheese, a brand that's still
on shelves today. But by thelate 1980s, the cheese ball as we
know it had fallen from grace.The term had become a cultural insult.
It was synonymous with badtaste, tackiness, and a lack of originality.
I personally beg to differ.

(07:02):
Yeah, me too.
And according to Wikipedia, aNew York Times writer described it
as associated with shag rugsand tinsel.
What's wrong with that? Right?
Who doesn't like a shag rugand tinsel? Hello. It seems that
trash talk about cheese ballslasted all the way to 2016, when
the new York Times called acheeseball the culinary equivalent
of a Rorschach test. Meaningpeople's reaction to it tells you

(07:25):
everything about who they are.
They're awesome.
Well, we're cheese balls atheart, so that should tell you quite
a bit.
Yeah, awesome.
If you take a look at ourInstagram, you're going to see a
lot of beautiful cheese balls.And there's even a book out there,
not ours, but a really goodbook called Great Balls of Cheese
by Michelle Bifarty.
Amazing.
We here at Just Cheesy, thePodcast love a good cheese ball.

(07:46):
In fact, we found a placeonline that actually sells mixes
to go in your cream cheese.It's called saltsisters.com.
Yum.
They've got a few differentkinds. They've got an Italian garlic
charmel bruschetta. They'vegot one called Mediterranean olive
roasted red pepper in thyme,Tuscan herb, and the salt sister
signature.
I'm ready for a joke Fondue.

(08:08):
Okay. What does a cheese balland a clock have in common?
I have no idea.
They both need a little time.Oh, get it. You know, time. T H Y
M e like the spice. You couldput that in a cheese ball. I get
it.
Not funny.
I don't care what you thinkabout it. I thought it was a little
bit cheesy. Thanks forlistening to Just Cheesy, the podcast

(08:31):
episode Mammoth Cheese.
Thank you.
Make sure to like andsubscribe anywhere you can. And check
us out this week. We're goingto have a brand new blog post.
And stay cheesy, everybody.