The Cheese That Wouldn't Quit

In the humid haze of a Pennsylvania summer in 1916, amid the clatter of cheese vats and

the sour tang of fermenting milk, Emil Frey stared at a mountain of ruined wheels.

The Swiss immigrant, his hands callused from decades of coaxing curds in the Alps and now

in the factories of upstate New York, had already made a name for himself. At the Monroe Cheese

Company in Monroe— a sleepy village just north of New York City, where the Ramapo

River murmured past dairy barns—he'd invented Liederkranz, a pungent American twist on Limburger

that sold out faster than bootleg whiskey during Prohibition's shadow. But this?

This was waste on a biblical scale.Jacob Weisl, the sharp-eyed New York grocer who