Bees Knees and Cheese

Cheesy and Fondue learn about bees knees and cheese. We talk about the history of honey and cheese and find out how to pair them. We hear about a drink called the bees knees cocktail, bees knees the saying and literal bees knees. 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://cheeseknees.com/about/

The Cheese Professor / Exploring the Magic of Honey Paired with Cheese

The Cheese Traveler / Honey, I Love You

Paxton and Whitfield / The Perfect Pairing: Cheese and Honey

Culture Cheese Magazine / Pairing Cheese and Honey

Culture Cheese Magazine / Honey Harmony: Balance Your Beverage and Cheese Pairings

Ain't Too Proud to Meg / Cheese and Honey Pairing Guide

Raw Artisan Honey / Honey and Cheese Pairing

Discover Texas Real Food / Honey and Cheese Pairing

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022030225000864

https://www.arthritis.org/health-wellness/healthy-living/nutrition/healthy-eating/dairy-and-inflammation

https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/do-bees-have-knees-and-if-so-whats-so-special-about-them

https://www.livescience.com/do-bees-have-knees

https://carolinahoneybees.com/do-bees-have-knees/

https://beeswiki.com/do-bees-have-knees/

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-bees-knees.html

https://www.etymonline.com/word/bee%27s%20knees

https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/qdtarchive/the-bees-knees/

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_bee%27s_knees

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Just Cheesy the podcastpresented by Just Cheesy Productions.
Hi there. I'm your host, Fondue.
I'm Cheesy.
This week we're going to learnall about the history of honey and
cheese, and we're going tofind out how to pair them. We're
talking about a cocktail.Knees, literal bees. And we're going

(00:24):
to hear the origin of asaying. And of course, we're going
to tell a very cheesy joke.Stay tuned for bees, knees and cheese.
Cheese on Just Cheesy thepodcast. I love cheese. I love honey.
It's salty. It's sweet. Andthey go together.
Yeah, they do. In fact,they've gone together since ancient

(00:44):
Rome. According to the CheeseTraveler and the National Honey Board,
the story of honey is olderthan written history.
It is?
There is an 8,000-year-oldcave painting in Spain. The painting
itself depicts honeyharvesting, which makes honey, one
of the very first foods thathumans deliberately sought out. And.

(01:04):
And they say here, lucky forus, bees make more honey than their
colony needs, and beekeepersremove the excess and bottle it.
Yum.
They say on average, a hivewill produce about 65 pounds of surplus
honey every year. The combo ofcheese and honey goes all the way
back to ancient Rome.
It does?
According to the cheeseprofessor and Paxton and Whitfield,

(01:25):
a Roman epicure named MarcusApicus left behind cookbooks.
He did?
These included recipes fordrizzling honey over cottage cheese
with coriander sprigs, and foran early cheesecake called Libam.
I don't know if I've butchered that.
Sure.
And this was soaked in honeyafter baking Culture Cheese magazine
says that honey is consideredone of the very first condiments,

(01:46):
and cheese was always one ofthe foods it found its way to. And
they say the reason that thisworks, it comes down to balance.
Cheese is naturally salty andtangy. Honey is viscous and sweet.
The sweetness of the honeycuts through the fat and the salt
of the cheese, while thecheese tempers the intensity of the
honey, according to a cheeseprofessional quoted on the site.
Texture. Naturally speaking.And in terms of just sheer senses,

(02:09):
honey is always going to work.
Yum.
There is also a terroirconnection. Terroir. A lot of times
this is a wine term. It is acombination of factors including
soil, climate, and sunlight.It's a similar combination of factors
that affects thecharacteristic flavor of other beverages
or foods or their ingredients.At least that's what Merriam Webster
says. Yeah, but bees and dairycows living in the same region, they're

(02:33):
grazing on and near the same plants.
Oh, yeah.
The livestock eat the foliage.The bees collect the nectar from
the same flowers. And thatshared landscape creates flavors
in both the cheese and thehoney that echo each other. According
to the Cheese professor, asone expert put it, when you pair
a local honey with a localcheese, you're tasting the same piece
of land twice. And accordingto multiple sources, including the

(02:55):
Cheese Professor, Paxton andWhitfield, and the Culture Cheese
Mag, you should try to matchthe intensities of both the honey
and the cheese you do. So ifthe honey is mild, the cheese should
be mild. And if the honey isbold, the cheese should be bold.
Bold.
So let's take a fresh cheeselike ricotta, Ricotta burrata. And
then you would go with a lightfloral honey like clover or orange
blossom. For semisoft cheeseslike Brie or Camembert, you would

(03:19):
try lime blossom honey orlavender honey. They say the floral
notes complement the butteryrichness and the earthy rind. For
sharp aged cheese likeCheddar, Gouda or Gruyere, you reach
for a darker honey, buckwheator wildflower. If you try the blues,
like Roquefort, Gorgonzola orStilton, acacia honey would work
beautifully. And forParmigiano Reggiano, according to

(03:42):
PAXT in Whitfield, a robusthoney like truffle honey works exceptionally
well. Parmigiano Reggiano andHoney are not sponsors, but if they
were, their ad would go right here.

(04:45):
There is a website calledcheese knees.com cheese knees. This
is a food website featuringhundreds of delicious cheese inspired
recipes. They have someawesome stuff here. They've got breakfast,
lunch and dinner snacks,dessert, drinks.
Yeah,
they've got something calledthe peanut butter cheesecake milkshake.
They've got Bloody Maryskewers of cheese and they've even

(05:06):
got the best beer and cheesepairings. But if you think about
cheese and knees. Well, therehave been some studies. There has,
yeah.
Believe it or not,ScienceDirect.com has something they
call the protective effects ofcheese intake on joint pain and underlying
biomarkers. At the core ofthis abstract, the finding was that

(05:27):
higher cheese consumption isassociated with a lower risk of joint
pain.
Eat more cheese.
It's possible that cheesechanges things in your body, like
inflammation levels, bloodfats and hormones. And those changes
may help keep joints healthierand reduce irritation. It's not that
cheese directly fixes thejoints. It's more like it kind of
pushes your body in adirection that could lower pain risk.

(05:48):
But it's early evidence. Soit's more of a this might help than
a proven treatment.
Right.
According to Culture Cheesemagazine, there is a Portuguese sheep's
milk cheese called. Oh, boy,here we go. You guessed it. I'm going
to butcher it. This one,Ovella Amontigado.
Oh, no.
Pairs remarkably withsomething called the bee's knees
cocktail.
Bee's knees.

(06:08):
This is a prohibition era gincocktail made with lemon juice and
honey syrup.
Yummy.
It was invented specificallyto cover the taste of bathtub gin.
And the honey did such a goodjob of that that the drink outlasted
prohibition by a century.
Wow.
So that cheese, the one Ican't pronounce from Portugal, well,
it's custardy and runny andhas a sharp undertone that contrasts

(06:32):
with the lem. And its sweetfloral finish brings out the botanical
notes in both the honey andthe gin. That sounds so good.
Yeah, it does.
I couldn't very well do abee's knees episode without talking
about literal bee's knees. Anddo they actually have them?
Do they?
According to LiveScience andCarolina Honeybees, the answer is
technically yes. Bees have sixlegs, and each leg contains a joint

(06:54):
between the femur and thetibia, which is the same anatomical
definition as a knee in anyother creature. So bees have six
knees total. However,according to BBC Science Focus, a
bee does not have a kneecap.It has a simple ball and socket joint.
And according to Live Science,that joint helps the bees move their

(07:14):
legs, groom themselves,dislodge pollen, and even perform
the waggle dance tocommunicate the location of food
sources to their hive mates.According to Beeswiki and Carolina
Honeybees, there is a pollenbasket. It's not on the knee itself,
but on the tibia of the hindlegs in a structure called the corbicula.

(07:35):
When a bee lands on a flower,it's scrapes the pollen with its
front legs, it passes it tothe middle legs and packs it in those
hind leg baskets. So theactual pollen is on the tibia, not
the knee. And I mean, thatmakes the knees pretty cool, I guess.
Yeah.
But why did we get a sayingcalled the bee's knees?
Yeah, why?
According to the phrase finderand the online etymology Dictionary,

(07:57):
the expression originallymeant almost exactly the opposite
of what it means today. Ofcourse, in the late 18th century,
a bee's knee was used to referto something tiny in insignificant.
The earliest documented use,according to multiple etymology sources,
is from a letter written in1797. It cannot be as big as a bee's

(08:20):
knee. By 1870 in Ireland,there was a phrase weak as a bee's
knee, but there was atransformation that happened in the
1920s, according to phraseFinder in the Quick and Dirty Tips
language column, during theRoaring Twenties, flappers and jazz
enthusiasts in the UnitedStates participated in what I think
is a unique fad. They like tocoin absurd animal anatomy phrases

(08:44):
to describe excellence.
Really?
According to Book Browse,American cartoonist Tad Dorgan is
often credited withpopularizing several of them, including
the bee's knees, of course,and the cat's pajamas. The full roster
from the period includedthese. The cat's whiskers, the cat's
meow, the snake's hips, themonkey's eyebrows, elephant's adenoids,

(09:05):
the gnat's elbow, the kipper'sknickers, the canary's tongue tusks,
and the flea's eyebrows.
I love those.
According to the Phrasefinder, the first printed use of
the bee's knees in itscomplementary form appeared in the
Buffalo Times in February1922. It was in a spoof account of
a royal wedding. The writerdescribed a princess as being the
bee's knees when it came to dancing.

(09:26):
Wow.
According to BBC ScienceFocus, the most likely reason the
phrase survived while most ofthe others faded is simply because
bees and knees rhyme. Thebee's knees might have been popular
for another reason.
Really?
According to Wiktionary, therewas dancer named Bea Jackson. And
Bea was celebrated in the1920s in New York for popularizing

(09:47):
the Charleston. Bea wascredited by some with introducing
the dance to Broadway in 1924.She went on to become the world champion
Charleston dancer. Somebelieve the phrase referred to her
and her very active knees. Andwhile the theory is plausible, the
phrase was already incirculation before her rise to fame.
In either case, she wasdefinitely the bee's knees.

(10:09):
I'm ready for a joke fondue.
Okay. What do you call a beewho makes cheese?
Oh, I don't know.
A Brie keeper.
That wasn't bad.
Oh. Oh, I like this one. Ithink it was funny and a little bit
cheesy. Thanks for listeningto Just Cheesy, the podcast episode,

(10:29):
Bees, Knees and Cheese.
Thank you.
You know, we're on TikTok,Instagram and Pinterest.
Yeah, we are.
Come find us, share theepisode. And if you try a honey and
cheese pairing this week, tagus. We want to see what you put together.
And stay cheesy everybody.