MARGARINE CHEESE. 323 



not able to buy the higher-priced butters, to have at their disposal, 

 instead of bad butter, a good, healthy, and cheap substitute. But 

 the demand for cheeses is, on the whole, by no means very great, and 

 the already limited area for the manufacture of cheeses abundantly 

 suffices for it. The demand for the finer kinds of cheeses is still 

 comparatively brisk, but it is not so for cheeses of the medium and 

 poorer kinds, such as skim-milk cheeses. In connection with the 

 consumption of cheese, the taste of the individual is an important 

 factor, and in large districts of Germany cheese is no longer a 

 popular food. The reason of this is not due to the fact that there is 

 a lack of good skim-milk cheeses, and that good cheeses have not 

 been successfully prepared from milk which has been skimmed by 

 means of centrifugal force. Where skill is not awanting, it is 

 possible to make good skim-milk cheese possessing a piquant 

 flavour. That this art has not yet become widely known cannot 

 be doubted, especially in Middle and North Germany, but as the 

 demand increases it will certainly be rapidly developed. In dis- 

 tricts in which a taste for cheese is awanting, or where the people 

 have not become accustomed to eating cheese, no market would be 

 found for margarine cheese, even although which is a doubtful 

 point margarine cheese excelled milk cheese in flavour. Nor can 

 the small use of skim-milk cheeses be explained on the ground that 

 they are too dear, since there have been times when the J kilo, of 

 skim-milk cheese of good quality was, owing to a scarcity of demand, 

 to be had for 15 to 20 pfennig, a price at which a similar weight 

 of appetizing margarine cheese could not be supplied. It cannot 

 therefore be asserted that the preparation of margarine cheese meets 

 a pressing demand for public food, and that it has proved a benefit 

 to the working classes. 



It must be noted that cheese in which nitrogenous matter ip 

 present, along with a considerable amount of fat, is more easily 

 digested than a skim-milk cheese poor in fat. This is certainly 

 true, but it does not mean that margarine is required in order to 

 increase the digestibility of skim-milk cheese. Whoever desires to 

 render this cheese more digestible, through the addition of fat, 

 would be better to do so by adding to his piece of cheese a piece of 

 good bacon fat, and eating this along with it, than by buying it in 

 margarine of a dubious origin. 



Therefore it is not to be understood, after all that has been 

 said, that the preparation of margarine cheese can be economically 



