Blue Cheese is probably not a condiment, but it is a delicacy that keep around the Veber house from time to time. And there aren't too many blue cheeses available on the market that are better than Maytag Blue Cheese.
Maytag Blue Cheese (notice it's the Anglo version of the French "bleu cheese") is made just outside of Newton, Iowa. E.H. Maytag, whose father, Fred, founded 
the Maytag Company, built the Maytag Dairy Farm in 1919 and raised Holstein cows not only for their milk, but to show at nationwide expositions. In the 1930's, Maytag's Holstein's were recognized as some of the best cattle of their kind any where in the world.
In 1941, E.H.'s son, Fred II, heard about a process for making blue cheese from dairy scientists at Iowa State University. The process was time consuming, but through time, the Maytag Dairy Farm began to produce some of the best blue cheese in the world. It wasn't long before the finest restaurants throughout America were using Maytag Blue Cheese as their exclusive blue cheese.
As a kid growing up and going to school in the Newton Community School District, you're sentenced to tour the Maytag Dairy Farm when you're in the fifth grade. I think that's wrong - as a 10 or 11 year old, your "give-a-shit" factor about cheese is pretty low. Other than the fact that you do get out of school for half a day, it was sort of pointless to send a bunch of kids through the place.
Then on top of it, you have to go through the room where they curd the cheese in these big vats. The smell is not of this earth. It's actually rather nauseating and disgusting. At the end of the tour, they give the school kids a cracker with a dollop of blue cheese on top. I knocked my blue cheese off in the garbage and ate the cracker, as did about 98% of the thousands of school children who have toured the place over the years.
The smell was bad enough to make me swear off eating blue cheese for years and years.
One time, however, my old boss, Mike Cannady, ordered a salad at a great Italian restaurant, Villa Francesca, that we were eating at in Boston and he asked if they had blue cheese, explicitly, Maytag Blue Cheese. Well, the restaurant did have Maytag Blue Cheese, and he ordered his salad with oil and vinegar with a bunch of crumbled Maytag Blue on top. It looked good and it actually smelled pretty good. So the next time I went to a restaurant and found that they had Maytag Blue, I ordered a salad the same way. I've never looked back.
I especially like a grilled beef tenderloin filet topped with melted Maytag Blue Cheese. I first had that combination at the Twin City Grill at the Mall of America in Minneapolis at the suggestion of my friend, George Miller. It's a great taste combination. There are also some places out there that make a good blue cheese burger, but more than likely they're not using Maytag Blue.
Maytag Blue Cheese is still reknown worldwide. People still order Maytag Blue, as well as their White Cheddar, their Edam, Swiss and cheddar spreads from all over the world. I send a bunch to my boss and his wife in Quebec every Christmas - not because I'm looking for favors or buttering up the boss, but because I know they truly enjoy the stuff with a nice bottle of wine.
Blue cheese is an acquired taste, for sure. But once you have Maytag Blue Cheese, you'll want no other type of blue cheese.
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