Stilton cheese is available, as an expensive import, but the traditional starters and mold spores are tightly controlled by the handful of authorized producers in England, so it's one of the few cheeses not made here.
Which brings up a sore point with me; how in the name of all that is holy, in a country that can and does match any cheese but a handful of the most tightly controlled, did this bland processed artificial imitation muck come to be called "American"? Longhorn is an American cheese. Monteray Jack is an American cheese. "American cheese" isn't even cheese, dammit!
An important point, brought about in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cheese"Today’s American cheese is generally no longer made from blended cheeses, but instead is manufactured from a set of ingredients[1] such as milk, whey, milkfat, milk protein concentrate, whey protein concentrate, and salt. In the United States it may not be legally sold as "cheese", and must be labeled as "processed cheese", "cheese product", or similar--e.g., "cheese food".
So in essence not even the US Govt. will recognize it as cheese. You may not label it cheese either! "processed cheese" or "cheese product" may still be used. But not cheese.
According to this same article, originally it was a blend of cheeses, most notably Cheddar-style cheese made in America - yet it sold outside of America, because of its low price
British colonists made cheddar as soon as they arrived in America. By 1790, American cheddars were being exported back to England. The British referred to American cheddar as "American cheese", or "Yankee cheese", and post-Revolution Americans promoted this usage to distinguish their product from European cheese.[6] For example, an 1878 newspaper article in The New York Times lists the total export of American cheese at 355 million pounds per year, with an expected growth to 1,420 million pounds.[7]
Originally, the English considered American cheese inferior in quality; still, it was cheap, so it sold. This connotation of the term American cheese became entrenched in Europe. "American cheese" continued to refer to American cheddar until the advent of processed cheese. Americans referred to their cheddar as "yellow cheese" or "store cheese", because of its popularity and availability.[6] By the 1890s, once cheese factories had sprung up across the nation, American cheddar was also referred to as "factory cheese". And in the 1920s another slang term arose for the still popular cheese: "rattrap cheese", or "rat cheese"
The name "American Cheese" was acquired, oddly enough, outside of America where imported yellow cheese would be called "American" (!) So we didn't even get to name the name this atrocity! What American merchants did was in fact promote the name as a marketing tool.
I think the association of the name "American Cheese" with this processed product actually exacerbated the perceptions of American cheeses as low quality cheeses around the world.
