Why Don't You Dance with Limburger Cheese?

The plaintive whine of one of the bouffanted singers of the B-52s still rings true today. Why not dance with someone if they aren't a limburger? On the other hand, who in their right mind would dance with anyone who reeked of this most infamous of all stinky cheeses? Limburger cheese sounds German and for all intensive purposes today it is officially considered a German cheese, but it actually traces its roots-as it were-back to Belgium. Most limburger cheese eaten in America today, however, is made in Wisconsin. It is perhaps of a sign of the hard times of limburger cheese that at one time its popularity reigned so greatly that at one time it was produced throughout the Germanic enclaves of the Midwestern and northeastern United States.

Even so, there remains a rabid obsession for limburger among a certain ilk of cheese aficionados. The American version of limburger varies almost not at all from its Germanic cousin; both are made from unpasteurized lactation of bovines and arrives at the cheese store in the form of half-pound rectangles. Since many other cheese are made courtesy of unpasteurized cow milk, what accounts for the singularly distinctive aroma that has made limburger so infamous?

Brine, my curious friend, brine. If you have spent any time at all watching Alton Brown's Good Eats, you will have come to recognize that brine is an integral ingredient of a good many things you eat. The limburger rinds undergo multiple washings in a brine and it is the bacteria used in the fermenting brine that that results in what can only be described as a sincerely righteous stench. Despite that, however, those who choose to dance with limburger would have it no other way. The popularity of limburger cheese in America is still mostly relegated to those areas rich in Germanic tradition, such as Pennsylvania, upper New York and the states around the Great Lakes.

So how is that such a little-appreciated stinky cheese is so well known? Well, limburger has had the good-or is it bad-fortune to ferment into pop culture. This aromatically-challenged cheese has been the butt of jokes going all the way back at least to Charlie Chaplin movies. Anyone familiar with the comedy of Abbott & Costello is well acquainted with the comedic possibilities inherent in a cheese that has been described as smelling not terribly unlike someone afflicted with athlete's foot. Watching Lou Costello's face as he huffs and puffs from the overwhelming stench is fodder for some mightily fine comedy, let me tell you.

And then, of course, there's Mighty Mouse. Although the diminutive flying superhero has unfortunately fallen upon hard times lately in the form of being unfairly forgotten, for a time Mighty Mouse was as popular as Superman. And just as Superman had kryptonite to deal with, so did Mighty Mouse have to deal with the effects of Limburgerite.

So, the next time you're at a club and aren't getting hit on, I strongly advise you to stand up on your bar stool and cry out: Why don't you dance with me? I'm not no limburger!