A Man and His Cheese

Sometimes you just have to do something for yourself, for no other reason than it needs to be done.

One of the ongoing minor annoyances in my life is the fact that I have never found Cooper Sharp cheese anywhere more than about 75 miles from the Liberty Bell.

Cooper Sharp, for those of you who have not had the pleasure, is a mild sandwich cheese that comes in a 5lb brick about two inches wide by six inches across. You slice it moderately thick and put it on food. It will never win any awards, but it’s great stuff. It’s basically what American cheese wanted to be – something with actual flavor that you could put on a sandwich to make it taste better.

I grew up with the stuff back in Philadelphia. It was a household staple. My dad was a big sandwich person and we always had it in the fridge to put on whatever lunchmeat he’d picked up that week. But I’ve never seen it anywhere else.

And despite the fact that it is made in Green Bay, Wisconsin, you cannot get it in this state.

This is just one of the things that I hold against my current state, along with the utter inability of Wisconsinites to use high beam headlights responsibly and the fact that the state GOP has turned it into a one-party mockery of American democracy.

I can’t solve those other two problems by myself, but every time a new food store opens in Our Little Town I visit the deli section to see if I can get them to stock Cooper Sharp. And every time I am met with blank stares and confusion. They check with their distributors and find nothing, and I’m back where I started.

We have a new supermarket here that opened a couple of months ago. It is an astonishing and frankly somewhat unnerving conglomeration of things all piled together under one roof. There’s the supermarket part, of course. But there’s also a food court that stretches across one entire side of the building and has maybe half a dozen different restaurants – burgers, pizza, sushi, Mexican, and so on. It has a liquor store. It has a cosmetics shop roughly the size of the one at the mall. You can buy clothing there. There’s a Starbucks, and – how you know you’re in Wisconsin – an actual full bar.

Make it a date night, folks!

It’s also got a cheese counter that is surprisingly impressive, and a full deli section. So I spoke to the people who work there and, as usual, came up empty.

But you know. Folks. This is the 21st century. You can get everything online. Including, I discovered, Cooper Sharp cheese. It turns out that for a reasonable sum someone will ship you a 5lb brick of the stuff. I don’t know why it goes from Wisconsin to a store in New York and then back to Wisconsin, but there it is.

My brick arrived Thursday.

This is the face of a happy expat Philadelphian.

I went back to the new supermarket and found the deli manager I’d been talking with and asked how much she would charge to slice it for me and she named a reasonable price so now I have it all sliced into five one-pound packages for my future consumption and distribution to worthy recipients. I also gave her the contact sheet for the place in Green Bay that makes it and a sample of the cheese (which she enjoyed) so perhaps sometime soon I will just be able to walk in and buy some rather than ordering it by mail.

In the meantime, I have my cheese.

This is, of course, a ridiculous sort of thing to do, but sometimes in this darkening world that is exactly what needs to be done.