THE NEW EARTH 



butter. "The making of first-quality cheese," 

 in the words of a bulletin from the New York 

 Agricultural Experiment Station, "is undoubt- 

 edly the most interesting and most difficult ope- 

 ration in dairying. It is more interesting than 

 butter-making, since the limits which include 

 'good butter' are narrow, while 'good cheese' 

 may mean any one of a hundred products. By 

 slight alteration in the process of manufacture, 

 milk, a liquid with a mild sweet taste and 

 characteristic, delicious aroma, may be trans- 

 formed into cheeses of paste-like consistency, 

 like Camembert, or the hard and stone-like 

 Parmesan, may result in a product as mild-fla- 

 vored as sweet cream or pungent enough to 

 bite the tongue, as fragrant as perfect Cheddar 

 or as repellant as Limberger. . . . The art of 

 cheese-making has, possibly, touched its high- 

 est point in the hands of a few makers and at 

 rare intervals, for occasionally a cheese is met 

 with that the scorers pronounce perfect; but 

 the time is evidently still to come when even a 

 few cheese-makers can produce perfect cheese 

 all of the time, or most makers some of the 

 time. To explain this, we must admit that the 

 science of cheese-making is not abreast with 



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