[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE GREAT PARMESAN CHEESE ENIGMA  
[[link removed]]


 

Willa Paskin
September 2, 2025
Slate
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ According to historian Alberto Grandi, if you want to eat the
original Parmigiano like our great-grandparents used to eat, you
should go to Milwaukee or Madison. _

Italian historian Alberto Grandi found numerous inventions in the
history of many quintessentially Italian foods.,
jeannetteferrary.photoshelter.com

 

If you’ve ever been to Rome, perhaps you’ve had the signature
experience of slipping into a side-street restaurant, ordering a
beautiful plate of pasta carbonara, and thinking to yourself: This is
the good stuff. Finally, I’m eating like real Italians have for
centuries.

Except you’d be wrong. Although pasta carbonara is widely thought to
be a historic dish from Rome, it likely wasn’t invented until 1944.
That year, an Italian chef making a meal for members of the U.S. Army
used the military’s rich cream, milk, butter, and bacon to whip up a
new pasta dish. A legend was born.

We know this in part because of Alberto Grandi, an Italian historian,
author, podcaster, and professional rabble-rouser who studies how
traditions are invented. When he started looking into the history of
many quintessentially Italian foods, he found numerous inventions.
He’s done debunkings of tiramisu, panettone, cheese pizza, and olive
oil; the latter, he says, wasn’t popular in Italian cooking before
the 1950s. When he told me through a translator that people in
southern Italy used olive oil for lamps, not for eating, I shouted
back at him in disbelief.

Needless to say, Grandi’s work is controversial. Marianna Giusti,
who wrote a viral article about him for the Financial Times, said that
when she interviewed him at a restaurant in Parma, a city in
north-central Italy, “he was literally checking behind him as we
spoke, being like, Man, people hate me here.”

People hate him specifically in Parma because the city is a bastion of
Italian cuisine. Prosciutto di Parma is from there, as is Parmalat,
the industrial food giant. And, naturally, so is Parmesan cheese.
Parma, in fact, is the center of the only region in the world that
makes Parmigiano-Reggiano, those big blond wheels of cheese you see at
gourmet food stores that have an official trademark stamped into their
sides.

You can make Parmesan elsewhere, but there are restrictions. Namely:
You can’t call it Parmigiano-Reggiano—it has to be labeled
Parmesan. Parmigiano-Reggiano is a brand. Parmesan is just a cheese.

That is why I had been speaking to Grandi—and why what he has to say
about Parmesan is so surprising. “I always say we have the best
Parmigiano ever,” the Italian expert told me, “but if you want to
eat the original Parmigiano like our great-grandparents used to eat,
you should go to Milwaukee or Madison.”

It sounds unthinkable—that Wisconsin Parmesan is more authentic than
what you might get in Parma. I’ve walked right by Wisconsin Parmesan
hundreds of times while grocery shopping. It’s a staple of American
supermarkets, usually tucked between sliced meats and other
plastic-wrapped cheeses in the deli case. I’ve always assumed it was
a pale copy, more affordable but not as good as the crumbly, complex,
Italian real thing.

Had I been snubbing a delicacy? My journey to find out spanned
centuries, continents, and the outer edges of taste.

By the time Wisconsin became a state, in 1848, Parmesan was already
600 years old. It originated in the region of Emilia-Romagna, which
sprawls across north-central Italy. It’s one of the country’s
wealthiest areas, with a rich culinary and cultural tradition. Its
cities include Bologna, Modena (the home of balsamic vinegar), and
Parma, all of which dapple the Po River Valley, where Parmesan was
first made.

The 13th- and 14th-century monks who made the cheese from their
cow’s milk got so good at producing it that they soon had enough to
sell. Parmesan became an early European luxury food, the so-called
king of cheeses, eaten and admired by the likes of Henry VIII, Thomas
Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.

In the 1930s, a consortium of producers and traders began to oversee
the Parmesan industry. They demarcated an area around the cities of
Parma and Reggio Emilia and essentially trademarked the cheese coming
out of that region as Parmigiano-Reggiano.

It has since become an Italian export par excellence, known and
celebrated all over the world for, among other things, the traditional
manner in which it is made. There are all sorts of quaint aspects to
the Italian Parmesan-making process you would never see in American
mass production: like an essential cutting tool called a spino, which
looks like a cross between a giant whisk and a honey dipper, or
workers gathering the early cheese in a kind of cheesecloth hammock
and leaving it nestled inside to drain over copper vats like a
bulbous, white cheese baby. There’s even a special metal hammer that
Italian cheesemakers use to knock on the aging cheese wheels to gauge,
by sound, whether they’re developing properly.

And there’s one more distinctly un-American ingredient: time. An
official Parmigiano-Reggiano must be aged for at least two years, and
many are aged for longer. The result is a coarse, almost grainy
cheese, flecked with white crystals, that has a salty, nutty
intensity. Like good wines, no two wheels will be exactly the same.

Global sales for these golden cheeses recently crossed $3 billion
annually, and at roughly $1,000 a pop at a minimum in America, these
80-plus-pound cheeses are worth stealing.* In 2016 CBS News reported
that $7 million in Parmigiano-Reggiano had been swiped in the previous
two years.

No offense to Wisconsin Parmesan, but I have never heard of anyone
trying to make off with it. The Wisconsin variety is not made
according to any of these exacting Italian specifications. Forget two
years—it has to be aged for only 10 months to call itself Parmesan!

Because producing generic Parmesan is so much less exacting, it’s
much cheaper than Parmigiano-Reggiano. There’s also a lot more of
it. The global market for plain old Parmesan was estimated at $16
billion in 2022, and Wisconsin alone makes 83 million pounds of the
stuff. Eighty-three million pounds that, according to the Italian
debunker Alberto Grandi, come out of a venerable tradition.

Grandi told me that the story of American Parmesan dates back roughly
a century. Between the two world wars, Italian immigrants who had
experience making cheese in Italy “found themselves in America and
headed to what they heard was the dairy states,” then started making
cheese similar to Parmigiano.

Back in Italy, meanwhile, starting in the 1960s, Parmigiano-Reggiano
“had an evolution,” undergoing a process of relative
standardization that made it what it is today. Grandi said that before
this shift, Italian Parmesan used to be softer and fattier, and that
it looked different too. The rind was totally black, instead of the
deep yellow that now characterizes Parmigiano-Reggiano. It was also
more of a cylindrical shape, not a wheel.

Grandi said that Wisconsin Parmesan, not Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano,
has “stayed more or less true to the original recipe.” He also
told me the name of a Wisconsin company that he thought was making
just this type of old-school classic Parmesan: Sartori.

Sartori, founded in 1939, is now a fourth-generation company
headquartered between Milwaukee and Green Bay. It sells a variety of
cheeses that are likely available in your local supermarket, as well
as 72 countries worldwide. And Sartori’s Parmesan does look very
different from contemporary Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano. It’s
smaller, with that black rind. It also appears to have a different
texture.

Frankly—I had to have it.

After I ordered the Sartori Parmesan online, I dived into how
Wisconsin and Parmesan became two words you could say next to each
other and have them make any sense. It all has to do with taste,
inventiveness, and the business acumen of Italian immigrants.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 3.5 million
Italians crossed the Atlantic Ocean bound for America. Many of them
were from southern Italy and spoke regional dialects. They would not
necessarily even have identified as Italian—Italy had become a
unified nation only in 1861. They were also coming out of poverty,
from homes with dirt floors, with no running water, and where cooking
still happened over fireplaces. Their diets would have been heavy in
vegetables they could grow themselves. Meat was a luxury. Upon
arriving in New York City, some of these immigrants would move on to
cities like Chicago and Philadelphia, establishing Italian enclaves
across the country.

And in those urban enclaves, these new Americans had to start doing
something they had never really done before: buy, instead of grow,
their food—something they could, at least, now afford to do. “The
food that the American food industry provided them even if they were
poor—the white flour, the butter, the eggs, coffee, sugar, beef, and
pork—was something that was really special-occasion food for them
back in southern Italy,” said Simone Cinotto, a professor of modern
history at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy.

Using these newly accessible ingredients, southern Italian women
started to reimagine dishes from back home. In the process, they began
to create Italian–American red-sauce cuisine, in which abundance
itself is a kind of ingredient. Think of restaurants with
red-checkered tablecloths serving fried chicken cutlets the size of
plates and baked pastas slathered in cheese.

It wasn’t just American largesse that fueled this new cuisine. Food
companies in Italy also started exporting products to the Italian
diaspora, things like canned tomatoes and durum wheat pasta. Many of
the newly arrived immigrants had never seen these products
before—not even in Italy. And for Italian Americans, they helped
create a sense of identity. “The importers had all the interest in
convincing the immigrants that they could prove to be Italian,
actually for the first time, buying their products,” Cinotto
explained.

Meanwhile, immigrants were sending money back to their families. That
meant that a lot of these food products were becoming more affordable
and available not just in America, but in Italy itself.

Italian cheese was part of this back-and-forth. By the 1920s, America
was importing between 40 and 45 million pounds of it annually. And
Italian immigrants in the U.S. were starting to make cheese in their
new country. And the center of that effort was in what we now call the
Cheese State.

Wisconsin has a long and proud dairy tradition. It makes many
excellent cheeses, though it is probably best known for its cheddar,
its squeaky cheese curds, and the giant yellow foam cheese wedges that
adorn the heads of Green Bay Packers fans.

The state’s Parmesan tradition is a little more niche. The man who
seems to have been instrumental in first bringing Parmesan to
Wisconsin was named Count Giulio Bolognesi—which, incredibly, you
say exactly like the meat sauce.

Bolognesi was an Italian diplomat who became the consul general in
Chicago in 1912. He was from northern Italy, not too far from
Parma—and he seems to have been a huge hit with Chicago society.
There are a lot of newspaper articles about him, his strapping blond
good looks, and his willingness to participate in charity tennis
tournaments despite never having played tennis. He married the
daughter of an Italian immigrant and started looking for land in
northern Wisconsin. In 1918 Bolognesi bought a 1,700-acre farm, and
pretty soon articles were referring to the kind of cheese he was
making there: a Parma cheese.

Bolognesi first sold his Parmesan locally, but with 100,000 Italians
living in northern Wisconsin and northern Michigan, there was a bigger
market to tap. So he teamed up with another Italian, this one based in
Minnesota. Bolognesi’s new business partner had attended
agricultural school in the Po River Valley—where Parmesan comes
from. In 1929 they opened the largest Italian cheese factory in the
United States.

Bolognesi and his partner made frequent trips to Italy to study
cheesemaking and even brought 10 northern Italian cheesemakers back
with them. They also staffed their business with immigrants. One of
them was Paolo Sartori, who eventually left to found his own cheese
company: Sartori, which made the Parmesan I bought online.

Alberto Grandi’s story was checking out. There really were Po River
Valley immigrants thriving in Wisconsin by re-creating Italian
Parmesan!

But remember what else Grandi said: that Wisconsin Parmesan hadn’t
changed. That, after a century, it was still being made the same way,
while Parmesan in Italy had evolved. Did that check out? Although I
couldn’t go back in time 100 years to taste them both, I could taste
the current versions side by side.

So that’s what I decided to do—with the help of the cheesemonger
Aaron Foster. Foster has been in the cheese business for over two
decades, and he owns Foster Sundry, a café and upscale grocery in
Brooklyn with big glass windows and a long, well-stocked cheese
counter. In an office in the basement, one of the employees of Foster
Sundry had put together a blind cheese tasting for us. There were two
plates laden with eight different Parmesans in all shades of yellow.
While we tried all eight—including Argentina’s own Parmesan
descendant—I was going to stay laser-focused on the two cheeses this
whole test had been set up for: the Parmigiano-Reggiano and the
Sartori Parmesan.

Though we tried a number of cheeses that looked like
Parmigiano-Reggiano, early on, we tried a craggy hunk of pale crumbly
cheese with some white flecks in it that sure looked particularly like
an Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Foster detected some floral notes. He also said that it was on the
younger side, and still quite moist.

I observed, sophisticatedly, that it was “like Parmesan.”

“Not only is it Parmesan, it’s good Parmesan,” Foster said. “I
hope that it’s good Parmesan.”

Remember, this was a blind taste test, so we didn’t want to be
overconfident. But this was good, with a lovely, crumbly texture.

And then there was the other cheese, a perfectly smooth isosceles
triangle.

“Unremarkable appearance,” Foster said.

My review: “Weird. Very sweet, and a weird package-y taste.”

As you might’ve guessed, the first cheese—the “good
Parmesan”—was indeed a Parmigiano-Reggiano. The other, somewhat
disappointing cheese was the Sartori Parmesan.

After tasting these two cheeses side by side, I found it hard to
believe that Italian Parmesan had ever tasted like today’s
Sartori—so smooth and sweet. They were just so different.

All my research had convinced me that a century ago, Italians and
Italian Americans had been going for the same thing: How had they
diverged so dramatically? And where did that leave Grandi’s claim
about Wisconsin Parmesan—that it was the one that tasted most
similar to that 100-year-old ancestor?

The answer to these questions could be found in the mid–20th
century, in the moment that would turn Parmesan into a
multibillion-dollar business.

Parmigiano-Reggiano became famous globally after World War II, during
a period known as the “Italian economic miracle.” After the war,
Italy experienced tremendous economic growth, and millions of Italians
became middle class in a hurry. But in the years leading up to this
“miracle,” Italians had lived through multiple periods of
incredible disruption, including endemic poverty and war. Now, amid
all this dizzying growth, tradition—or the idea of it—became very
alluring.

It was during this period that a number of dishes came to be seen as
traditionally Italian, even though they had been created or
popularized thanks to the new (or newly affordable) ingredients the
economic miracle provided. Think of the aforementioned carbonara, made
with luxe ingredients regular Italians would not previously have been
able to afford. Or tiramisu, which is made with a supermarket cookie
first introduced in 1948.

It was also during this period that a consortium of producers and
traders that oversees Parmigiano-Reggiano began running advertising
campaigns for it. “The first advertising after the war, in the
1950s, more or less said that the Parmigiano-Reggiano is made as it
was made seven centuries ago,” said Stefano Magagnoli, a professor
of economic history at the University of Parma. “Of course, it is
not true. It was a marketing to attract and to communicate the idea of
tradition.”

Believe me, I’m not trying to insult Parmigiano-Reggiano—to
dethrone the king of cheeses. But of course it’s not being made the
way monks in the 13th century made it! Those monks didn’t have
electricity; they didn’t have running water; they didn’t have
copper vats; they didn’t have an international trade network and a
million other things besides.

More to the point, Parmigiano-Reggiano is not being made exactly how
it was when that Italian consortium of producers and traders first
standardized it in the 1930s. Back then, the process was barely
industrialized. One very visible example of this is the black rind
that Grandi has mentioned, and that Magagnoli has confirmed the cheese
used to have.

Magagnoli said this color formed naturally on the surface of the
cheese. But in 1963, the consortium members decided to start scraping
it off so they could leave markings directly on the now blond rind.
The rationale for this change was that it made Parmigiano-Reggiano
harder to counterfeit. The consortium changed the cheese so it could
keep control of it and help grow it into a bigger business.

Meanwhile in America, something else was changing for Parmesan in the
postwar period: the people eating it.

When Italian immigrants had first started arriving earlier in the
century, they were derided as swarthy garlic eaters. But as they
became assimilated, so did their food. By the 1950s, you have Dean
Martin—born Dino Crocetti in Ohio—crooning “That’s Amore”
and Disney’s Lady and the Tramp smooching over a shared piece of
spaghetti. Pizza was spreading out of cities and into the heartland,
and frozen lasagna too. Magazines had to teach people how to pronounce
these words.

These new mass-produced products, like Chef Boyardee spaghetti sauce,
made it possible for everyone to bring a little bit of Italy into
their kitchen. These products didn’t necessarily taste Italian, or
even particularly good. One notable example: green cans of pre-grated
Kraft Parmesan cheese that didn’t even have to be refrigerated.

Those Kraft canisters, which became available after World War II, were
a staple of American life, nearly as recognizable as a Campbell’s
soup can and advertised all over TV. “Think we’re only good on
Italian food?” says the voice-over in one commercial from 1969. The
ad then shows the green can getting shaken over soup, salads, and
pizza before finishing with the line “Kraft Parmesan is as American
as pizza pie.”

Italian Americans had created the domestic market for Parmesan, but
then an American company started selling a homogenized version of it
to the rest of the country: simply as American food.

By the 1970s and ’80s, Italians had something to say about this
Americanization of Parmesan.

The Parmigiano-Reggiano consortium and famous cookbook authors like
Marcella Hazan began to tell Americans that this cheese they thought
was Parmesan was not very good and that they should try the real
thing. There were waves of articles about Parmigiano’s pronunciation
and virtues—how excellent it was, how gourmet, how authentic.

The Wisconsin cheese company Sartori had to navigate these new
circumstances. Mike Matucheski, a retired master cheesemaker who was
born and raised in Wisconsin, told me that when he started at Sartori
in the 1990s, the company was experimenting. It wanted to make
something yummier than Kraft’s pre-grated Parmesan, a cheese that
was up to Sartori standards and that also pleased American consumers.
But the company’s customers weren’t necessarily familiar with the
taste of Parmigiano-Reggiano. They’d hadn’t grown up eating it.

“There’s always a battle between the cheeses for who’s better or
whatever,” Matucheski said. “And it’s just like, Well, people in
different places have different taste.”

Matucheski laughed at the idea, put forward by Grandi, that the
Parmesan being made in Wisconsin hasn’t changed over the decades. It
absolutely has, and it’s become its own thing: Wisconsin Parmesan.

“We found that our customers tended to prefer our cheese because of
its own attributes—that it was sweeter and fruitier and less salty
than Reggiano,” he told me.

Matucheski explained that Sartori’s black rind was meant to appeal
to customers too. It turns out it’s not a rind at all. It’s a
decorative wax that is put on late in the process, and it’s meant to
evoke the Parmesan from Count Bolognesi’s day. That is, it’s meant
to look traditional—in the Italian–American Wisconsin way.

Matucheski, as an American cheesemaker, can also appreciate a
traditionally made Italian cheese. During our interview, he started
reminiscing about a 9-year-old Parmigiano-Reggiano he’d eaten on a
trip to Italy. “It was just amazing. Absolutely amazing. One of the
best cheeses that I’ve ever had in my life,” he said. “You would
never see that cheese in the United States. Absolutely never.”

You would never see that 9-year-old cheese in America because it
wouldn’t pay. There isn’t really a market for high-end American
Parmesan. Italy’s got that cornered. Simply put, Parmigiano-Reggiano
is a gourmet product that commands gourmet prices. American Parmesan
is an industrial product. It’s made faster, and in much larger
quantities. That means it’s more affordable and it reaches a lot
more people. They’re both very successful products. But they are
also very different cheeses.

I had one more thing to do: reach back out to Alberto Grandi. I needed
to tell him that I had, unintentionally, out-contrarianed a
contrarian. He was wrong: Wisconsin Parmesan is not the same cheese it
was 100 years ago. And although its Italian cousin,
Parmigiano-Reggiano, was different too, it’s … less different.

When we did speak, Grandi continued to insist that Wisconsin Parmesan
looks more like its cheese ancestor than Italian Parmigiano does,
thanks to that black wax. But he was otherwise a very good sport. He
basically agreed with Wisconsinite Matucheski that it’s all about
different people in different places having different tastes, and how
all of those factors merge to create something authentic to them.

What Grandi had wanted to underline, he said, “is this absurd
pretense that Italians have to plant an Italian flag on Parmesan and
say, ‘You shouldn’t even call it Parmesan,’ because they are
clearly different cheeses with clearly different markets and different
prices and different taste.”

There’s a real irony to what Grandi had to say about Wisconsin
Parmesan: that it hadn’t changed. Because what’s driving his
provocative debunkings of Italian food myths—the bogus origin
stories of carbonara, tiramisu, and olive oil—is his conviction that
Italians need to understand that foods are constantly changing, just
like Italians. His whole mission, he explained, “is to tell people
that you cannot freeze identity, because if you freeze identity and
tradition, at one point you end up killing it.”

Sometimes we invent traditions to preserve a connection to our past.
To make the things we love feel permanent and unchanging, whether
that’s a cheese or something less tangible, like where we’re from.
But traditions are only as unchanging as we are—which isn’t very.

The traditions that endure are the ones that keep up with
us—Parmesan included. It started as an Italian tradition, but when
you make something this good, people are going to spread it, adopt it,
change it, and make it into a tradition of their very own.

Special thanks to Derek John and Giacomo Stefanini for translating.
Thank you also to Patrick Fort, Fabio Parasecoli, Ken Kane, Thomas
Mcnamee, Dan Weber, Irene Graziosi, James Norton, and Ian MacAllen,
whose knowledge and book Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American
were very helpful.

Correction, Sept. 2, 2025: Due to an editing error, this piece
originally misstated the typical cost of an 80-plus-pound Parmesan
wheel in the United States.

* Cullinary history
[[link removed]]
* cheese
[[link removed]]
* food science; cheese makers; FDA
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]