I made a tomato sauce the other day at my dad's place. Fresh roma tomatoes, a bit of garlic, a few grinds of pepper and a load of olive oil, cooked down into one of the finest tastes of summer.
But my dad, an older guy who lives alone -- the kind of guy who buys Mr. Noodles by the case -- didn't have any proper Parmigiano Reggiano. He had a three-year-old shaker can of Kraft Parmesan. I shook the can to break up the lumps, then poured the crumbs over my pasta. It felt like bumping into an old, forgotten friend.
It's fair to say we all grew up on the stuff. It was difficult to find the real thing until the 1990s, right around when North Americans began buying pricy balsamic vinegar and sun-dried tomatoes by the pound. Almost overnight, canned cheese became an embarrassing reminder of a sullied past; it was cooking's equivalent of Peter Cetera's solo years.
It's time for a rehabilitation. If iceberg lettuce is good enough once again for upmarket chefs, and meatloaf can claw its way back onto otherwise credible menus, then why not shaker parmesan?
Kraft first introduced it in 1945, as North America's soldiers were returning home from Europe. The Northfield, Ill., food giant added Romano to its line in 1959, then in 1983 -- just about the time I was old enough to demand it on my mother's spaghetti and meatballs -- they launched a Parmesan/Romano blend.
Some of the newer additions to Kraft's cheese family aren't quite as great. Kraft Reduced Fat Grated Topping (1994) sounds creepy. And lord only knows who's buying the Zesty Red Pepper and Garlic Herb Parm Plus! varieties (1997). But canned cheese is no worse than the "Parmesan" most North American food snobs dump on their pasta. Most "real" Parmesan cheese isn't real. It's made on some guy's dairy farm near Bloomfield, Ont. It tastes like salted rubber tires.
Here's what cucina Italiana authority Marcella Hazan -- she whose recipes read like edicts, full of "musts" and "must nots" and "don't even dare tos" -- says about Parmigiano Reggiano, the real, real parmesan: "The only cheese that may bear [the name] is produced -- by a process unchanged in seven centuries -- from the partly skimmed milk of cows raised in a precisely circumscribed territory mainly within the provinces of Parma and Reggio Emilia in the region of Emilia-Romagna."
Hazan continues: "The long aging of 18 months; the flora and the microorganisms that are specific to the pastureland of the production zone, all are contributors to the taste of Parmigiano Reggiano and to the way it performs in cooking, qualities no other cheese can claim in the same measure."
At least the canned stuff doesn't pretend to be something it knows it is not. Kraft Parmesan (as well as many of its imitators' versions) is sharp and salty, a perfect down-home addition to ziti or meatballs or even Bolognese. Back at my dad's place, sprinkled on my alla carrettiera sauce, it tasted good, great even -- just like growing up.
So go ahead, take a look. You'll probably find it in the fridge, standing stoic, ever faithful, behind a bag of sun-dried tomatoes (may they never see their resurrection).
Give it a shake. Don't worry. It's still good.