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Who Invented the Cheese Curd? A Squeaky Piece of Wisconsin History

5 minute read

  • Wisconsin history
  • Cheese
  • Supper club traditions

Ask who invented the telephone and you’ll get a name. Ask who invented the cheese curd and you’ll get something better: a shrug, a smile, and a squeak.

Here’s the honest answer, the one we love telling at Emmi’s: nobody invented the cheese curd. Curds aren’t an invention at all. They’re a moment, a stage that every batch of cheddar passes through on its way to becoming cheese. Somewhere along the line, Wisconsin decided that moment was too good to let pass, and a state icon was born.

A snack that was hiding inside the cheese all along

Every wheel of cheddar starts the same way: milk is cultured and set, the solids separate from the whey, and the fresh solids (the curds) are cut, cooked, salted, and pressed. Most curds go on to be aged into the cheese you know. But scoop a handful out before the pressing, and you’re holding cheddar in its youngest, springiest form. As the food history site What’s Cooking America puts it, curds are “formed as a by-product of the cheese-making process”, most often from cheddar, and best eaten within hours of being made.

That last part matters. Fresh curds don’t travel and they don’t wait. For most of history, the only people who ever tasted them were the ones standing near a cheese vat. Which explains a great deal about why the cheese curd belongs to Wisconsin: for more than a century, almost everybody here stood near a cheese vat.

How Wisconsin became curd country

It didn’t start with cows. In the mid-1800s, Wisconsin was wheat country. By 1860 it was the second-largest wheat-growing state in the nation, as PBS Wisconsin recounts. Then the wheat failed. By 1870 the crop was collapsing, and farmers went looking for something steadier. A University of Wisconsin public-history project points to exhausted soil and crop pests among the culprits, and tells the story of Swiss settlers in Green County, 108 of whom founded the town of New Glarus. They helped show the way forward: milk, and the cheese you could make from it. By 1910, Green County alone had 222 cheese factories.

The rest of the state followed. Records collected in the history of Wisconsin cheesemaking trace the arc: A. Pickett ran the state’s first documented cheese cooperative near Lake Mills in 1841, Chester Hazen opened the first large-scale factory in Ladoga in 1864, and by 1922 Wisconsin counted a staggering 2,807 cheese factories. In 1919, this one state produced more than 63 percent of all the cheese made in America. Wisconsin took the craft seriously enough to become the first state to require licensed cheesemakers, in 1915. The state still requires that license today.

With a cheese factory in nearly every crossroads town, the cheesemaker’s-doorstep snack stopped being a cheesemaker’s secret. Fresh curds became the taste of payday, of Saturday errands, of a paper bag on the truck seat. No one invented that. It just happened, batch by batch, town by town.

Why the squeak?

The squeak is the curd’s birth certificate: proof of freshness you can hear.

The science is real, and it’s lovely. In a fresh curd, the milk proteins still form a tight, elastic network with plenty of calcium holding it together. The Cheese Science Toolkit explains that squeaking depends on an “intact protein structure and bound calcium.” Bite down, and the friction of your teeth against that springy protein network literally makes noise.

It doesn’t last. The cultures in the cheese keep working, turning lactose into lactic acid, and the acid slowly dissolves the structure that squeaks. Arthur Kneeland, a senior lecturer in biology at UW-Stout, told Eau Claire’s Volume One that curds really only keep their full squeak for about a day. After that, the long elastic protein molecules get snipped into shorter pieces and go quiet. (A few seconds in the microwave can briefly wake the squeak back up. Cheese scientists admit they’re not entirely sure why. We find that charming.)

So when a curd squeaks, it’s telling you where you are: close to the source. In Wisconsin, that’s practically a compliment.

Then somebody dropped one in the fryer

If the fresh curd has no inventor, the fried curd has too many. Food writers at The Takeout point all the way back to ancient Rome, where cooks made globuli, cheese curds fried in olive oil and finished with honey. We’d gently note that story rests on food-media retellings rather than a footnoted scroll. The most common account of the modern fried curd’s debut puts it at the Minnesota State Fair in 1975. (Yes, Minnesota. We’ve made our peace with it. Mostly.)

Wisconsin, as usual, answered with volume and pride. In little Ellsworth, the local cooperative creamery had been making cheddar curds since 1968. “The popularity of the new squeaky cheese was instantaneous,” the creamery’s own history recalls, and in 1983 the governor proclaimed Ellsworth the Cheese Curd Capital of Wisconsin. Today the fried curd is standard equipment at every fair, tavern, and supper club worth its relish tray.

The way we do it at Emmi’s

Emmi grew up on the backroads version of all this history, in the diners, drive-ins, and supper clubs where a basket of golden curds landed on the table before anyone had even looked at a menu. So we treat ours the way tradition demands: Wisconsin white cheddar curds, hand-battered and fried golden, served with our house buttermilk ranch. They’re on the starters list where they belong, with a supporting role griddled over our Greek salad and piled onto our poutine with homemade chicken gravy.

No gimmicks, no reinventions. Just a piece of Wisconsin history that happens to squeak, served overlooking Lake Geneva, the way a happy accident deserves.

Sources & Further Reading