Who Invented Monterey Jack Cheese?
An Original American Cheese with a Very Curious History
Here’s a story replete with intrigue, mystery, skullduggery, and a cast of international characters, and in the end, you’re still not sure whodunit! Sounds like a John le Carré spy novel. But it also describes the history of Monterey Jack, a cheese that has been called an “American original” but may not be American after all. Or is it?
The popular version of history goes like this: In the late 1700s, Franciscan padres at Mission San Carlos near Carmel on California’s Monterey Peninsula created a semi-firm cow’s milk cheese with a creamy, mild flavor and high moisture content that became a staple of the local farming community.
Scottish immigrant David Jacks arrived in Monterey during the early days of the Gold Rush. Through aggressive and questionable business practices, he amassed an empire of 60,000 acres that included dairies making cheese based on the padres’ recipe. After the railroad arrived in 1875, he began commercial marketing of “Monterey Cheese” in San Francisco and beyond. Widely known as “Jacks Monterey Cheese” at the time, it is familiar today as America’s most popular melting cheese — Monterey Jack.
My research into its origins yielded a more convoluted history. It’s still unclear if the “J” should be uppercase or lower. And in The Cheese Shop, a Mecca for world-class cheeses in tony Carmel-by-the-Sea, I also discovered that far from the greasy rubbery substance that drips from our quesadillas and grilled cheese sandwiches, true Monterey Jack can stand among the finest as a gourmand’s delight. Here is the tangled thread, as best I know it.
Father Junipero Serra, leader of the Catholic missionaries who colonized the Spanish province of Alta California in the late 1700s, was born on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. The recipe for the local cow’s milk cheese, renowned for its quality by kings on the mainland, is said to have been brought from Italy centuries earlier by invading Roman soldiers. It is known there today as Artesano Mahon.
When preparing for the journey to Monterey, Serra wrote in his diary, “I took along no more provisions for so long a journey than a loaf of bread and a piece of cheese.” [1] Milk also supplied an important source of nourishment at the missions that Serra established throughout California. A 1776 report notes that the “Mission Indian women make good cheese and very good butter.” [2] It is reasonable to assume that the indigenous cheese makers followed a recipe that Serra or one of his friars brought from their homeland.
Cheese-making continued as a means of preserving excess milk and generating income by settlers after the United States seized the territory from Mexico in 1846. Monterey traders’ records show cheese-related transactions, including shipments by sea, as early as the 1850s. And in 1875, the editors of the Monterey Handbook waxed enthusiastic over dairies in Carmel Valley. [3] Most were small family farms with as few as three cows that produced a cheese known simply as queso del pais (country cheese). A similar style of cheese continues to be made across rural Central America today.
Carmel Valley resident Joseph Hitchcock described the process: Milk was heated with a solution of rennet to curdle the milk. When the curds were ready, the whey was drawn off, and after many washings, they were salted and put into clean sacks. The sacks were rung until all liquid was squeezed out. A heavy string was tied around the loose ends of the sack, pressed down by hand, and placed on a wooden plank. Another plank weighted with sand and rocks placed on top of the cheese squeezed it to the proper thickness. [4]
Two different versions of the source of the name Jack begin in Carmel Valley. Jose Manuel Boronda, owner of Rancho Los Laureles, was unable to work after a bullfighting accident. To help feed their 15 children, his wife began selling her queso del pais, following a recipe from her father-in-law’s home in Aragon, Spain. After David Jacks purchased a quantity of her cheese, her family claimed that he stole her recipe, and the rest, as they say, is history.
An alternate version involves the acquisition of Rancho Los Laureles, including the Boronda Adobe, in 1882 by the Pacific Improvement Company to secure a water supply from the Carmel River for its Del Monte Hotel in Monterey. The PIC later enlarged its holdings by purchasing the nearby ranch and dairy of Swiss-Italian dairyman Domingo Pedrazzi.
According to S. F. B. Morse, founder of the Pebble Beach Company that purchased the hotel in 1915, in place of the weighted plank, Pedrazzi employed a device designed to support settling houses, called a house jack, to press the curds into wheels. Thus, jack cheese (with a lowercase “j.” Morse insisted in a 1948 letter that he “developed a fine cheese, and it became known as Pedrazzi’s jack cheese … none of the Jacks family had anything to do with it as far as I know.” [5]
Irish immigrant William Hatton managed the enlarged property. He modernized the diary, where he used Pedrazzi’s jack process to form cheese that was served at the Del Monte Hotel. Hatton’s barn and a ventilation tower built to cool the milk still stand in Carmel Valley Village.
In 1995, the Monterey Cheese Company, then of San Francisco, offered a more colorful version. A spokesman speculated that it was derived from the jackass burros that carried the cheese to market in Greenfield in the Salinas Valley. [6]
As success has many fathers (and, in this case, mothers), dozens more entrepreneurial cheese makers from Monterey County and beyond have laid claim to a slice of the Jack cheese legacy.
Portuguese whalers who operated out of Whaler’s Cove at Point Lobos beginning in the 1860s supplemented their income with milk and cheese production. Manuel Jose Rodrigues and his wife Maria, who learned to make cheese from her mother in the Azores islands, raised a few cows in Big Sur’s Palo Colorado Canyon in the 1880s. Her daughter Anne claimed that David Jacks acted as her mother’s agent to sell it as Monterey Jack in San Francisco.
Kurt Loesch, former curator of the Whalers Cabin museum at Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, recorded an oral history with Avelino and Walter Victotine in the 1990s about their family contribution to the story.
In this telling, the Vierra family owned a dairy on Vierra Knoll near Gibson Creek on the South Plateau area of the Reserve. Mrs Vierra made cheese from a recipe, also from the Azores. When they moved to Salinas, Mrs. Vierra sold her cheese recipe to a neighbor, Mrs. Victorine, for five dollars. Antonio Victorine hired two Spanish-American war veterans, Juan and Pancho, as cheese, makers in their dairy near San Jose Creek. Around the turn of the century, the two cheesemakers went to work for David Jacks’ dairies near Marina. [7] You know the rest of the story.
Another story takes us back to Italy, where our cheese journey began. Italian immigrant, Stefano Mori, arrived in San Francisco in 1888. He owned an inn that enjoyed a notorious reputation during the Prohibition era. In addition to popular libations, his restaurant was also noted for its cheese made according to a recipe from the homeland. The Pacifica Historical Society, which claims that a family friend stole Mori’s recipe and then went to work for David Jacks, raises funds by selling “Pacifica Jack, California’s original jack cheese.” [8]
At the beginning of the 20th century, hundreds of Monterey County dairies made cheese. With the development of refrigerated shipping for produce, land became more valuable for growing lettuce and strawberries: today, about seventy percent of the nation’s lettuce is grown in the Salinas Valley, but 99 percent of jack is made in giant factories far away. Only one dairy, the Schoch Family Farmstead of Salinas, produces cheese commercially.
Kent Torrey, president and CEO (Cheese Eating Oenophile), of The Cheese Shop in Carmel-by-the-Sea, delights in telling his preferred version of the origin (the hapless Doña Boronda) of Monterey Jack to visitors from around the world and introducing them to the artisan version. Few can believe that Schoch’s Farmstead Jack hails from the same roots as the familiar industrial product shipped by the truckload from places east.
Schoch’s is a rich, buttery, medium soft, pale-yellow cheese made from raw cow’s milk using animal rennet encased in a firm rind, hand-rubbed with salt brine and Porter beer and aged for seven-plus months to a partially dry consistency. And like the origin story of jack cheese, Schoch’s is far from bland.
The first version of this story was published on The Cheese Professor website in June 2023. This longer version appeared in Point Lobos Magazine Fall/Winter 2023.
Post Script
After the manuscript was submitted to the Point Lobos Magazine, the Carmel Pine Cone newspaper published articles in August and September 2023 citing many of these same stories. Written by local historian Neal Hotelling, and using quotations from letters written by S.F.B. Morse in 1950 debunking the David Jacks connection, he concludes, “We may never agree on who invented Monterey Jack cheese … As for me, I’ll stand by the Pedrazzi version.”
Sources
[1] “The Legend of Monterey Jack Cheese,” UC Davis Dairy Research and Information Center. Retrieved from https://drinc.ucdavis.edu/dairy-foods/legend-monterey-jack-cheese on June 19, 2017.
[2] Robert L. Santos, “Dairying in California through 1910,” Southern California Quarterly 76 (Summer 1994)
[3] Mayo Hayes O’Donnell, “More About Monterey Jack Cheese,” Monterey Peninsula Herald (January 2, 1951)
[4] Mayo Hayes O’Donnell, “Our Own Monterey Jack Cheese,” Monterey Peninsula Herald (November 8, 1950)
[5] Elizabeth Barratt, “Monterey Jack Cheese,” Monterey County Herald Weekend Magazine, (September 17, 1989) p. 12.
[6] Bonnie Gartshore, “When ‘jack’ became official,” Monterey County Herald, Alta Vista Magazine (November 5, 1955, pg. 3)
[7] Elizabeth Barratt, “Joe Hitchcock’s Maternal Grandparents,” The Carmel Valley Historian, Vol. 37, №1 (March 2023) p. 7.
[8] Vanitha Sankaran, “Don’t Know Jack?” Pacifica Magazine (June 2017) p. 16.
Rev: 12.2.23
