The Cheeseball

A fictional feud, a legacy, a history

***This voiceover excerpt is intended to illustrate better the chowacolate cheesbwall section below *** Wait, if you can, to press play. This is an experiment. Thank you.

I have been thinking of creating a fictional town that is really this town and writing you all in as characters.

William Faulkner’s famous Yoknapatawpha county was a dark and fraught place. I used to give my English students extra credit for being able to spell Yoknapatawpha on their tests. Wendell Berry’s magic trick in his fictional town of Port William is to transport and transfix you just by describing decent folks in Kentucky who tolerate each other, oftentimes without saying much of anything. He’s the writer we should be teaching in schools, for his connections to American thought and small-town, individual morals that we all claim as our own. Mark Twain turned his own love of steamboats and the small town of Hanibal MO into a dreamscape for Tom Sawyer that is recreated in Disney World as a nostalgic place of childlike shenanigans that never seem to result in real-world consequences.

I struggle to do this. I don’t know how to fictionalize all of the characters I’ve met despite there being so many. When I studied improv, the biggest laughs I ever got were in naming real places like Turkeyfoot Rd. or Dixie Highway or the water tower that says Florence Y’all. Perhaps I could spin out an entire tale based on a family feud that wasn’t a family feud at all but it could have been. I ran into a cousin this weekend and complimented her on her cheeseball. She responded with hilarious voracity that it was her sister-in-law who made the cheese ball, having stolen her recipe last year!

Ok, so I’m really bad at coming up with fictionalized names so let’s say it was cousin “Betty” who asked cousin “Mary” for her mother’s cheeseball recipe which Mary was known to bring to many a baby shower, holiday party, etc. Now, cousin Betty has been showing up with this cheeseball to all of the gatherings, never uttering the story of its origins or giving credit where credit is clearly due. Family feuds really do start for less. So many families have people who don’t see each other at all because so-and-so got grandma’s figurines in their will or whatever. More likely, at least around here, they continue to do everything their families dictate, and sit side by side, seething with resentment and unsettled scores.

Cheeseballs are no laughing matter. They’ve been handed down complete with secret (Worcestershire) ingredients! It’s hard to come up with a signature dish! It’s hard to squeeze into your life things that are a no-brainer, and a cheeseball is one of these things. The best is when the old people start to finally let these things out, usually out of the corner of their mouths, with snide little asides or malicious giggles that hint at past grievances lurking just below this surface.

Not that this has ever happened to me. I’ve never been given a weight-loss book by a family a member for my birthday or a book called “Why doesn’t Mommy Spend More Time With Me?” for Christmas. If I did, I wouldn’t resent it for years. Food is so contentious, though! And I certainly never got bent out of shape about buying a HoneyBaked Ham for Christmas and making sides for it, only to have family arrive with unannounced crockpots of jambalaya or 13x9s of spicy bratwurst, and tacos leaving me with heartburn and $85 worth of ham to eat for a month. No one’s ever resented me for my own family not eating the mac and cheese they were sure my kids should love. No, that never happened to me. And if it did, I certainly wouldn’t stew or worry about it before Christmas, or let the expectations and disappointments of said holiday send me into existential quagmires out of which no nog, no punch, no hanky panky (slices of rye bread with sausage and cheese on top) can save me. I’m working on it!

In the first few chapters of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, a girl has saved up eggs to make a cake for a wealthier townsperson who then cancels on her. She is left with a cake she didn’t want and wouldn’t have squandered eggs on. In her monologue, she returns to this injustice regularly and serves as a conduit for all our own petty grievances - but oh how they can stick with you.

In my story, the cheeseball would be the straw that broke the camel’s back -the last straw. Are there two sayings about straw that mean the same thing? Anyway, the cheeseball would come in as an underlying grievance after a lifetime of perceived mistreatment. It turns out cousin Mary has been harboring such resentments as the fact that when they were 9, cousin Betty wore an extravagant dress to their aunt’s wedding and was given far more attention than she deserved. Even in life’s circumstances, Mary’s need for attention also fell below the radar while Betty always had some drama that needed tending to. Of course, Mary didn’t want the actual drama and she knew she was silly for wishing for trouble, but she could see how tightly knit it made everyone who engaged in it. And all she really had was showing up to the parties and trying to make a contribution. And the one thing she had been sure of was that dang cheeseball! And now Betty’s taken the cheeseball!

Not sure if that will really work. If the cheeseball could really be the straw. I don’t know. But I hesitate to underestimate the cheeseball. Perhaps it has lost its social standing, perhaps it’s not featured in the Ladies day magazines as much as it used to be. But let’s face it, the midwest hangs on to what works and my predilection for 50s housewifery makes me think the cheeseball could be used with all due respect as either the hero or villain of a family’s quarrel.

Sometimes neglected or passed over, sometimes cursed as the ruiner of diets, one could argue that the cheeseball should take its place in some sort of hall of fame. It could be a work of art in a homemaker’s museum or the subject of an anthropological study in hospitality. Or there could be a retrospective fashion show of cheeseballs over the decades. One from the 60s, sat next to or surrounded by Jello molds, followed by the hideous red background of the 70s and 80s pictured above, followed by updated versions next to Triscuits and then avocado toast and well-designed charcuterie boards. My deep google-dive into cheeseballs has resulted in the fun fact that the first cheeseball was presented to President Thomas Jefferson and weighed over 1,000 pounds. So, the old girl has really slimmed down since, with Betty’s chopped beef cheeseball weighing in at a mere 1.5 lbs.

*** start voiceover here for my version of a new york accent for the following paragraph.

Oh, and we haven’t even discussed the sweet cheeseball of 2010!

This cheeseball, in particu[lah], became the focal point of a family party when my husband’s aunt came in from LawnGisland to visit, her accent so thick she needed a carry-on to bring it with her. (ba dum ch) My midwestern aunt had made this dessert cheeseball, which was basically a cheesecake that you spread on graham crackers. Aunt Kitty, whose name cannot be fictionalized, and whose character should have its own sitcom, was taken with this “cheesebwall.” That’s ball with almost with two syllables, over and over again like a bwall on a roll. And to this she began adding, with incredulous excitement, the word chocolate, pronounced “chuawcolate.” Now my sweet aunt who had made the chocolate cheeseball is a quiet soul with a dry sense of humor. With tears in her eyes, she said, “Jodie, if she says cheese ball one more time, I’m afraid I’ll die"!” and as if on cue, my mother-in-law entered the room and Kitty cried, “Maaa-ry, have you tried the chuawcolate cheesebwall? It’s to die fowa (for)!”

My lovely aunt was flattered of course but had to quietly excuse herself from the room, tears of laughtah rolling down her cheeks. Eat your heart out Linda Richmond!

I don’t know. I shall continue to ponder this staple and metaphor of Midwestern values. I couldn’t help but write about it once the idea came up. Sometimes the universe just guides you. I stopped in at my sister’s house where the kids were watching an old episode of The Muppets Show and Dr. Teeth was singing a silly song about cheesecake. I was going to post that here and tell you to substitute “ball” or “bawl” for “cake” to understand the obsessive nature of my thematic musings. But in looking for the Dr. Teeth clip, I found Louis Armstrong, here introduced as the “Ambassador of American music to all countries” singing Cheesecake. The cheeseball might be the ambassador of midwestern snacking. Who knows? And also what should the name of my fictional town be? Suggestions welcome.

Meanwhile, I’ll be munching on a cheeseball, chomping on a cheeseball, gobble, gobble cheeseball. Enjoy the video.