Why President Andrew Jackson Once Held A Party With A 1,400-Lb Wheel Of Cheese

American presidents might not be the most relatable people in the world, but one thing that connects the highest person in the land to the most common is cheese. Presidential food proclivities have run from the basic, like Jimmy Carter's love of grits, to the old-fashioned, like William Henry Harrison's taste for squirrel, but if you look through the favorite food of every U.S. President, you'll find a lot of cheese. Thomas Jefferson famously helped make mac and cheese an American staple, but FDR adored a grilled cheese, Bill Clinton couldn't resist a cheeseburger, and George W. Bush liked the less common but hard-to-deny cheeseburger pizza. But the most famous story of cheese eating in the White House actually comes from someone who didn't even ask for it: Andrew Jackson and his 1,400 pound wheel of cheese.

As much as this might sound like a tall tale, it actually happened. In 1837 President Jackson hosted a party for the anniversary of George Washington's birthday, and on the menu was almost a full ton of cheddar cheese. But this wasn't planned. Jackson had been gifted the cheese by a group of dairy-farming supporters from upstate New York. The problem was that no matter how much he ate or tried to give away to friends, he couldn't put a dent in it. So the party favor was actually a trick to get rid of the unwanted cheese, and it worked better than he could have imagined.

The man behind the giant cheese was Thomas Meacham and, it turns out, his massive wheel of cheddar was actually inspired by a similar gift to an earlier cheese-loving President. Thomas Jefferson was given a 1,200 pound cheese by a Massachusetts church in 1802, which was so big that it actually started the trend of calling huge objects "Mammoth," after the recently discovered prehistoric bones. Jackson and his supporters saw themselves as Jefferson's heirs and thought that he should be honored in the same way. Jackson's cheese became a spectacle, touring through New York and Philadelphia on its way to the President, where it was presented with a chain of all 24 states at the time linked together.

Besides the cheese's size, there was one other problem: it stunk. The mammoth cheese sat in the White House for two years and could reportedly be smelled from blocks away. Still, when Jackson opened his doors, the people of Washington went wild, overrunning the residence and even climbing in through windows. The party was such a success that the still huge block of cheese was gone within two hours. Yet even after that, the smell of cheese remained, to the point that it took days of cleaning, including airing out the carpet and whitewashing the room to get rid of the stench. Turns out, even 10,000 people can't fully defeat a 1,400-pound aged cheddar cheese.