Say... cheese?

I'll bet some of you remember this from your childhood, and like me, may be surprised it is still around.

Yes, good old Old English Spread cheese product from Kraft. Apparently it appears in the movie Silver Linings Playbook, which I have not seen, and even used by chef Paula Deen, but I remember this product well enough. As I recall, it had an Olde Tyme font for its design in the past, which, going by this aged jar that appeared on eBay, was the product labeling for a considerable period. 

"For Lovers of Rare Old Cheese"

Something I didn't know, and wouldn't have if not for the Internet, was that Old English did not just come in jars, but at one time was sold as a loaf, a companion to the still-loafed Velveeta. 

And like Velveeta, both are shelf-stable in the store; no refrigeration needed.

I succumbed to temptation and nostalgia and purchased the jar up top. And my first thought on tasting it was not "This is tasty" or "This is how I remembered it" but "This tastes like Velveeta."

And that's the rub -- when you get down to it, Kraft various cheese-like comestibles (Velveeta, Old English, Cheez Whiz) all have that Velveeta vibe. Nabisco's Easy Cheese (a.k.a. Aerosol Cheese) does too. I know that by USDA rules they have to have some relationship to cheese to call themselves cheese, but they're all so much a non-cheese that they could have been in the Monty Python cheese shop without affecting the sketch.

Of course, here in the Hudson Valley, a very cultured part of the nation, home of the Culinary Institute of America and some of the finest restaurants in the world, home of West Point, and home of the famous school of landscape artists, we would never have anything to do with something as low-rent as Velveeta...

Uhh....