Cheese

Tusser says that a cheese, to be perfect, should not be like (1) Gehazi, i.e. dead white, like a leper; (2) not like Lot’s wife, all salt; (3) not like Argus, full of eyes; (4) not like Tom Piper, “hoven and puffed,” like the cheeks of a piper; (5) not like Crispin, leathery; (6) not like Lazarus, poor; (7) not like Esau, hairy; (8) not like Mary Magdalene, full of whey or maudlin; (9) not like the Gentiles, full of maggots or gentils; and (10) not like a bishop, made of burnt milk. (Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry.)

⁂ A cheese which has no resemblance to these ten defects is “quite the cheese.”

Bread and cheese. Food generally, but of a frugal nature. “Come and take your bread and cheese with me this evening.”

A green cheese: An unripe cheese.

The moon made of green cheese. A slight resemblance, but not in the least likely. “You will persuade him to believe that the moon is made of green cheese.” (See above.)

ʹTis an old rat that wonʹt eat cheese. It must be a wondrously toothless man that is inaccessible to flattery; he must be very old indeed who can abandon his favourite indulgence; only a very cunning rat knows that cheese is a mere bait.

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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.