On 1/23/12 5:36 PM, Margery Allcock wrote:
I give in - what's colby?
A mild cheese of buttery flavor, usually dyed bright orange. It's slightly softer and a good bit smoother than cheddar. If you look closely, there are a few small holes, but these are gaps between curds, not bubbles as in swiss cheese. White colby exists, but is almost unobtainable. The full name is "longhorn colby", but I haven't heard that phrase in decades. The traditional package of cheese was half of a wheel cut off a long horn, or you could get it sliced off the horn in the deli section. (I suppose the "longhorn" part of the name was dropped when they started selling it in other shapes.)
What's a horn?
A whole cheese -- shaped like a long, narrow cylinder; I suppose some stretch of the imagination could make it look like a straight section of an animal's horn. And what's County Line? When I was a child, it was a cheese factory located on the boundary of two northern-Indiana counties (I've forgotten which ones). I was full grown before I learned that "County Line cheese" was longhorn colby; Mom never bought any other brand of colby. Nor did anybody else -- at one time the distribution of County Line included a few towns in Florida where elderly Hoosiers spent the winter. Late in the twentieth century, County Line was bought out by a company that wanted only the trademark, which was slapped onto common cheese -- now there are *many* brands of colby cheese in Hoosier supermarkets. I got my last batch at Aldi, pre-sliced. I must remember to pick up one of Kroger's mini-horns the next time I go to Owen's. (Owen's is an odd story: Kroger bought the local supermarket -- and closed the Kroger store.) -- Joy Beeson http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/ http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/ http://n3f.home.comcast.net/ -- Writers' Exchange http://www.debeeson.net/LakeCam/LakeCam.html west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. Where the rest of the lake thawed last night. To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [email protected]. For help, write to [email protected]. Photo site: http://community.webshots.com/user/arachne2003/albums/most-recent
