When I-90 Became the Cheddar Parkway

On July 8 of this year, a crash involving a semi-trailer rig dumped more than eight tons of cheese onto Interstate 90 in South Dakota. The Utah man who was driving that vehicle was supposed to appear in court this week, but he was a no-show.

Thomas Jefferson Ponders Parmesan

Stopping by the Italian village of Rozzano in the spring of 1787, Thomas Jefferson happened upon a farmhouse where parmesan cheese was produced. America's future president was captivated by the process and described it in painstaking detail in his journal.

Jefferson wrote that the milk used to make parmesan was "scummed" and then placed in a large copper kettle. After four hours in the kettle, he wrote, "the whey begins to separate" and a small portion of saffron is used to "give colour" to the cheese. Then it is heated "by a quick fire," wrote Jefferson, until the curd hardens and separates.

Jefferson used nearly 500 words to record just about every detail of parmesan making -- from the amount of salt that was added to the precise number of days it took the cheese to "ripen."

(Note: Jefferson's culinary observations during his travels to Europe during the 1780s are contained in this book, edited by Anthony Brandt.)

Nachos: The Super Bowl Snack

The N.Y. Times recommends adding pork rinds to the menu for your Super Bowl party. But I have a feeling that nachos will remain the prevailing choice for snack food for most Super Bowl watchers.

This blog post by Bon Appetit's Andrew Knowlton offers these "10 rules for making nachos." From what I can see, they seem like sensible rules worth heeding. Here is one of them:

Don't buy pre-grated cheese (ever). Grate it yourself so that the cheese will be fresh and finer in texture, which leads to uniform melting.

I prefer guacamole or salsa to nachos-and-cheese dip, but I realize I'm swimming upstream on this one. I was lucky enough to be at last year's Super Bowl. I hope this year's game is even half as suspenseful as last year's 4th quarter was.