Limburger

The Duchy of Limburg was a medieval territory whose name outlasted its political existence by several centuries. At its height it occupied a patch of low hills east of Liège, and by the 19th century its former lands had been divided among Belgium, the Netherlands, and the German Rhine Province. Monks and farm dairies in this overlapping border region made a washed-rind soft cheese that was being sold in the markets of Liège and Aachen by the 1820s. When German merchants began exporting the cheese across the Rhine into the broader German market, they gave it a simple label: Limburger, the thing from Limburg.

The smell is the cheese's defining characteristic, and it comes from Brevibacterium linens, the same bacteria that colonize human skin and contribute to foot odor. During the weeks of washing and aging, the rind develops a sticky orange surface and releases a sulfur compound called methanethiol. This is not spoilage but ripening: the interior beneath that aggressive rind is mild, creamy, and rich with lactic acid tang. German consumers embraced the contrast, and by the mid-19th century Limburger had become a working-class staple, eaten on dark bread with raw onion and washed down with beer in Rhine and Ruhr taverns.

German immigrants carried Limburger to the United States after 1848, and Monroe, Wisconsin became the American capital of its production by the 1870s. Swiss-German cheesemakers set up operations there, finding the soil and the milk similar enough to work with. Monroe's Chalet Cheese Cooperative, established in 1885, is today the last commercial producer of Limburger in the United States. For most of the 20th century Limburger was a reliable American punchline, the subject of jokes in vaudeville routines and early film comedies, always positioned as the cheese whose smell precedes its arrival.

In Germany and Belgium, Limburger never needed the comedy framing: it was simply cheese, common and unfussy. The European Union registered Limburger as a protected geographical indication under German law in 1996, limiting the name to cheese made in specific German regions. This effectively closed out Belgian and Dutch producers from using the original place name on their own ancestral product. The Hervé cheese of the Belgian Limburg area, which may be the original, now carries its own protected designation separately. Two countries, one smell, and a medieval duchy that will not stay buried.