"Some folk diplomatically state that mammoth cheese is an acquired taste. Others argue that its smell is not only pervasive but even aggressive — to the point that you don't need to eat it to taste it."
— Item description for Mammoth Cheese, The Elder Scrolls Online
Cheese is a dairy product made by coagulating and aging milk, most commonly from cows or goats, but other domesticated mammals (sheep, camels, horses, llamas, etc.) are not unheard of. It is one of the most widespread foodstuffs, with at least one (and usually many) of its over 1,000 recognized varieties popular in just about every region of the world. It is also one of the oldest prepared foods on record, with evidence of cheesemaking going so far back (~8,000 years) that it actually predates the human genetic mutation that allows us to digest the lactose within (~5,000 years).
Given its immense popularity, it's only natural that creators flavor their fictional worlds with their own cheeses, often fantastic in origin. The cheese can come from the same animals as in real life but with fantastic ingredients/methods involved, it can come from some sort of Fantastic Livestock, or it can even be downright supernatural in nature. If the source of the cheese is unknown but it has otherwise fantastic qualities (talks, glows, moves on its own, etc.), that also qualifies. Tropes Are Flexible, so other fantastic "prepared" dairy options (yogurt, ice cream, etc.) also qualify.
I Ate WHAT?! is a common reaction from outsiders sampling these cheeses. May take the appearance of Cartoon Cheese in some works. Cheese taken from a literal Cheesy Moon would likely qualify. Likely to appear in a Weird World, Weird Food setting. See also Gargle Blaster and Klatchian Coffee for other exaggerated depictions of food, Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables for the produce equivalent, and Marvelous Milk for the natural dairy equivalent. Not to be confused with Ham and Cheese, Suck E. Cheese's, Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys, Cheese Strategy, Swiss-Cheese Security, Richard Cheese, or the plethora of work titles with "cheese" in the name.
No Real Life Examples, Please! There may be Values Dissonance and, if it exists in real life, it's not really "fantastic" either.
Examples:
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Card Games
- Magic: The Gathering: The Cheese Stands Alone
, from the non-tournament legal "Unglued" set, is a superheroic piece of cheese that, if you control no other cards in play and have no cards in hand while it is in play, you automatically win the game.
Fan Works
- Confessions: Sasha idly wonders where cheese comes from in Amphibia since it's a world without mammals, but when Marcy is about to explain Sasha says she "doesn't want to know" while eating it.
Films — Animated
- The Boxtrolls: The White Hat society is obsessive about their cheese-tastings, with rare cheeses such as one produced from the milk of a lactating male fruit bat.
- Hotel Transylvania: One of the bizarre foods the titular hotel serves is "scream cheese", which occasionally pops up with two beady eye holes and a screaming mouth.
Literature
- Across the Green Grass Fields: Unicorns are a common livestock animal in the Magical Land, though one of the local centaurs admits that the cheese isn't as good as the meat.
- Agatha H. and the Clockwork Princess: The Geisterdamen, mysterious pale women from (possibly) Another Dimension who ride Giant Spiders, find the food in Europa disgusting. They apparently live mostly on cheese they make from some sort of juice they milk from their spiders. Their then-ally, Tarvek, has eaten (and enjoyed) a lot of their cheese, and he's less than thrilled when he learns what it's made of.
- Discworld:
- There's a Running Gag in the books about Lancre Blue, a cheese so strong that it's been known to attack other cheeses. In Wintersmith Tiffany Aching (a witch in training with some experience in cheese-making) tries her hand at making Lancre Blue, and the result becomes pretty much sapient to the point it answers to the name "Horace".
- Maskerade: Overlapping with The Secret of Long Pork Pies, Seldom Bucket's dairy produced its best batch of Farmhouse Nutty when a workman fell into the curdling vat. The cheese was potent enough to leave no evidence but the trouser buttons.
- A Face Like Glass: Certain types of cheese like the ones produced by Cheesemaster Grandible can allow you to have visions of the future once you consume them.
- Harry Potter: The book Charm Your Own Cheese by Gerda Curd includes a chapter on dragon milk cheeses.
- Looming Gaia: Owing to restrictions on hunting and eating animals, much of the Mogdir Kingdom's cuisine is insect-based. In particular, the silk of the "pitter" caterpillar is edible and used as a dairy substitute.
- Out of the Silent Planet: While Ransom is a guest at a Martian sorn's house, he asks about a particular foodstuff which starts a painfully detailed lecture on cheese-production, which he cuts short.
- Redwall: The Funny Animals of Redwall Abbey make their dairy products out of "greensap milk" that they produce from a mixture of grasses and tubers.
- The Stormlight Archive: Most of the planet Roshar's landmass is too rocky to support grazing animals, so dairy products are commonly produced from sow's milk instead.
- Summer in Orcus: The Wheystation sells "every kind of cheese you can imagine", including green moon cheese and cheese made from the milk of harpy, manticore, and unicorn, in addition to the more mundane varieties. Some of the exotic cheeses also have exotic effects; for instance the manticore cheese that was ripened on grass where heroes have slept bolsters the courage of whoever eats it, and the harpy cheese that was aged in moonlight and washed in the pool of the Oracle can tell the future.
- Thursday Next: Due to an exorbitant tax to pay for the Crimean War, cheese in England has become expensive enough that a thriving black market has sprung up around it. The entirely unregulated fromagerie also resulted in... questionable products ending up for sale. When Thursday visits an underground meet-up to buy some cheese, these range from merely very smelly cheeses to one so outright toxic that it's described as not so much a cheese eating as one for locking in a lead box and dumping into the sea somewhere far away from civilization.
- Vorkosigan Saga: bug butter. This nutritious, cheap, high-protein product (named more for alliteration than descriptiveness) can be similar to soft cheese or yoghurt, and Miles first encounters it prepared as a firm, bland white cube that resembles feta or cottage cheese. It's secreted by genetically modified vegetation-munching insects, the butterbugs. They're not picky, and unlike many Earth-descended animals, will eat Barrayaran plants. Finding a way to market the butter that downplays the potential ickiness of its insect origin—and the prejudice against genetic modification on Barrayar—requires lateral thinking, but eventually succeeds. It's really not that different in concept from mammalian milk, but people are more used to that.
Live-Action TV
- Monty Python's Flying Circus. One of the cheeses mentioned in the "cheese shop" sketch is Venezuelan Beaver cheese, presumably made from beaver milk.
- Star Trek: Voyager: In "Learning Curve", Neelix creates Brill cheese, which is a blueish-green cheese made from grakel milk. The bacteria from the cheese would infamously infect the Voyager's bio-neural gel packs, causing the ship to malfunction. When the ship was visited by the crew of the Cerritos, Rutherford ends up remaking the cheese to save the ship from being taken over by holograms.
Podcasts
- The Hidden Almanac: A sponsor announcement for Heywood's Cheese-Easy states that "November is Exotic Cheese Month, and will feature such specials as manticore gouda, nightmare swiss, and platypus stilton."
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Luiren spring cheese, or cheeeese (with four Es in the middle), is a type of cheese found in the Forgotten Realms setting that is completely unpalatable for any species other than halflings, for which it serves as a highly-addictive, hallucinogenic drug.
- Another cheese found in Forgotten Realms is Death Cheese, so named because it’s made from the milk of a catoblepas (a Monstrosity that has similar features to dinosaurs, warthogs, buffalo, and hippopotamuses), the harvesting of which is no easy feat.
Video Games
- Borderlands 3: One sidequest involves the player retrieving the "Nibblenomicon" so that a certain friendly bartender may use its cursed recipes, including Eggplant Harmesan, fettucine and Demogorgonzola, and the feared Xylourgos queso... which features cilantro as its most evil ingredient.
- Dwarf Fortress features the rare "dwarven cheese", which is crafted from milk produced by purring maggots, bugs that live deep underground. It is twice as valuable as any other type of cheese on the market.
- Dragon Quest VIII features several kinds of cheese items that the Hero can feed to his pet mouse Munchie in exchange for magical effects. Special mentions go to the various cold cheeses, which go from "ice-themed frosting on top of a slice of normal cheese" to "crudely cheese-shaped block of ice"; and to the Angel Cheese, which requires a literal angel's blessing and can raise the dead.
- The Elder Scrolls:
- The Daedric Prince Sheogorath, the Mad God, is also associated with (and a huge fan of) cheese. Fellow Daedric Prince Sanguine, The Hedonist, outright refers to Sheogorath as the "Cheese Prince". Given the strongly supported implication that the series' deities are Anthropomorphic Personifications over the "spheres" they govern, this means that Sheogorath is cheese... and cheese is Sheogorath. One of his favorite foods is himself.
- Series background lore states that the denizens of the Wrothgarian Mountains (Bretons and Orcs) tame the giant bats the live there and milk them to make a surprisingly delicious cheese.
- The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind: Vvardenfell's unusual flora and fauna means that native Dunmer (Dark Elf) diet qualifies as a Weird World, Weird Food to most outsiders with lots of insects, Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables, and more. One such item said to be "greasy and cheese-like" is "Scuttle", made from the flesh of local giant beetles.
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Olroy is a type of cheese made in Southern Cyrodiil, which has such a strong smell it must be kept in a locked container to conceal its aroma, and trying to cook it outdoors will draw every rat from miles around.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
- Eidar cheese is pretty standard to begin with, but becomes freaky during aging as it is stored underground and inoculated with fungus spores. Barrowost is a specific type of Eidar, aged in Nordic barrows rather than underground which gives it "an intense sweetness". The Nords themselves aren't sure exactly how it works, with the more practical-minded saying that it must be the stagnant air while the more fanciful believe it is magic within the barrow.
- Mammoth Cheese is created by the native giants from the mammoths they herd. It is aged in fur sacks, has a curd-like appearance, and is said to smell so strongly that you "don't need to eat it to taste it".
- The Elder Scrolls Online:
- The Orcs of Wrothgar make cheese from Echatere, beasts of burden that share traits of boars (body shape, tusks) and deer (fur, antlers, adolescents called "fawns" which have spots). It is said to be an aphrodisiac.
- According to the item description for the "Otter-Skin Cheese Strainer", it is used "in the making of rodent cheeses".
- Mammoth Cheese returns from Skyrim and now comes in several varieties, including "pungent".
- The "Shivering Cheese" (named for Sheogorath's Daedric realm, the Shivering Isles) is a legendary cheese wheel that can be switched between two states — "cheesy", which glows, and "cheesiest", which has glowing embers floating on top. The item description reads:
"When you're not looking at it, this wheel of cheese quivers and trembles—but as soon as you look, it's stopped. It's not doing it now, oh, no, it's too clever for that. But just turn your head for a moment, and … ah ha!"
- The Elder Scrolls: Legends: Cheesemancer is a "Festival of Madness" card which, fitting for a servant of the Mad God "Prince of Cheese" Sheogorath, grants one of five abilities at random. The card art shows the Cheesemancer using magic to either create a wheel of cheese or drawing power from the wheel of cheese.
- Fallen London: With tremendous expense, time, and luck, a character may produce Ripened Hellworm Cheese — Hellworms being massive eldritch devil-bred grubs that secrete a bewildering variety of improbable substances at random, only one of which is hellworm milk. The cheese is "pungent" and quite horribly lethal in large quantities, yet a club of gourmands find it a once-in-a-lifetime dining experience.
- Fallout Shelter: The quest "Cheese, Please!" asks that you visit an old cheese factory to return with "processed cheese", called "gray gold" by the quest giver, which is "scraped from the machinery". 200+-year-old 'cheese product' from a factory infested with mole rats and ghouls qualifies as "fantastic".
- Final Fantasy XIV: The Goblins that live in Eorzea absolutely love cheese, to the point where groups of goblins fight for possession of recipes and if they should be shared. Early in the game, you're tasked with rescuing one Goblin, Brayflox Alltalks, who rewards you with gobbie gouda. The item description reads as such:
The pungent odor of this hard yellow cheese veined with blue-green mold is most comparable to the warm, damp boot of a zombie after stepping in ripe chocobo dung. Goblins claim it is a delicacy, but then again, they have their masks to filter out the aroma.
- Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, the 3DS remake of Fire Emblem Gaiden, features the Provisions system that allows you to feed your units in order to reduce their fatigue. One of the available food options is Pegasus Cheese, made from pegasus milk and described as being extremely rare. It's also one of a handful of items that, when consumed, restores a much higher level of fatigue points(40, compared to the usual 10 that most other food items restore) and permanently boosts one of the unit's stats(in this case, Speed) by two points.
- Pokémon: Moomoo cheese is an ingredient made from Moomoo milk, which is produced by the cow-like Pokémon Miltank and eagerly consumed by humans and other Pokémon alike.
- Przygody Reksia: Statue of God Curd is stated to be from cheese made of coconut milk.
- Starfield: The game takes place a few hundred years into the future after Earth is rendered uninhabitable and abandoned. The game is explicit that nearly all Earth animal life other than humans has been lost. However, "cheese" is a consumable item that can be purchased while the Chunks fast food franchise (which specializes in cube-shaped food items) has both cheesesteak and cheesecake menu options. Other than being implied to be artificial, it is never stated where this food comes from and the Chunks clerks are rather cagey if asked what the food actually contains...
- The Berger from U.B. Funkeys are cow-people who are well known throughout Daydream Oasis for being masters of cheese-making, with thousands of varieties to their name, with some named examples including Banana Split Cheddar and Triple-Dipple Funkberry Gouda.
- Warframe: The Ostrons in Cetus apparently have an unseen creature known as a 'Vobi' that they use for their dairy products. They've never been seen in-game, but considering the extensive genetic engineering that the Orokin did throughout the Origin System, it's safe to assume that they're as far removed from a cow or a goat as one can get.
- The Witcher 3: The sidequest "Of Dairy and Darkness" sees Geralt explore the mansion of Aeremas, a Tyromancer (a type of wizard who makes magical divinations based on the maturing of cheeses), who teleported to an elven ruin where he aged his cheeses and experimented on humans, leading to his execution by witch hunters. Whatever process he used, the spores given off by his aging cheeses are outright toxic, resulting in intense visions. Getting through it rewards Geralt with "The Emmentaler", a sword that deals fire damage and randomly produces cheese.
Webcomics
- Unsounded: A "monny" is a type of Unicorn that's common as livestock in the world of Kasslyne, absent cows. A popular breakfast item is a colorful savory cereal made up of crunchy bits that taste like shrimp and salty biscuits served in warm monny milk topped with monny cheese.
Websites
- Neopets: A majority of the cheese items on the site don't address where the cheese actually came from, given that normal animals don't exist in Neopia, but the item "Stinky Zebie Cheese" confirms that it's made from "Zebie milk", the "Zebie" being a goat-like petpet.
- SCP Foundation: SCP-1600 is called the Philosopher's Cheese; it's essentially a substance that turns almost anything it touches (it's noted that brass isn't affected) into "an edible product highly similar to cheese". While the Foundation for once doesn't test it on humans, it works on everything from pork to oak wood to elemental mercury, which produces a 'cheese' that is black and soft, and is supposedly tasteless, but the subject displayed no effects of mercury poisoning.
Western Animation
- Amphibia: In "Hop Luck", during the scenes where Anne, Sprig, and Hop Pop gather pizza ingredients, the farmer who gives Anne the cheese wheel is about to explain that the cheese is made from the milk of the giant worm-like creatures on her pasture, but Anne interrupts with a disturbed, "Don't tell me where it comes from."
- Camp Lazlo: In "The Big Cheese", Raj’s parents send him a cheese wheel made of cheese from the Kafizzle River. Raj claims a cheese wheel made from such cheese is the best toy in India, and it can be used as a bouncy ball, a whoopee cushion, etc. Scoutmaster Lumpus steals the cheese wheel and eats some of it. However, a horrified Raj tells Lumpus that people aren’t supposed to actually eat Kafizzle River cheese, because the Kafizzle River is acidic, so anyone who eats Kafizzle River cheese will disintegrate in 13 minutes. Luckily for Lumpus, it wasn’t really Kafizzle River cheese, it was made in China.
- Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: The Chèvre Sisters, a trio of mutant goat oracles, make vast quantities of cheese to channel their divinations. Dave notes that they never mentioned where the milk for all the cheese comes from; given the type of livestock they are, it implies the sisters themselves provide it...
