hoop

noun, a circular wooden frame in which cheese is moulded (“hoop, n.1.” OED)

“In twenty minutes or so, you cut the curd, you know, with wired knives, and turn the steam on and cook it a bit, drain some of the whey off and keep working ’til the whey was gone, and cheddar up the sides of the vat, sheepskin it, put the curd mill on and mill the curd into the vat and salt, put it in the hoops. And three 33-pound piles of curd made a 90-pound cheese.”

“Then they’d put it through a mill, and it’d come out like french fries and about that size, and then they salted that and put it in hoops that had cheesecloth already in it, and laid them down on their sides and squished them all together. And that’s what made a cheese.”

“The cheese were 90 pounds, about yay-big around, stood maybe that high. It was all you could do was to lift one. But every day in the curing room, they were taken out of these hoops and taken in the curing room, which was another room, and it was cool. And then every day you had to turn them, like flip them end-for-end.”

“We were bailing it out of the vat as curd. Then it went into a hoop, and it would be a metal hoop about that big around and about that high, and it would slide, and that’s what was put in the press, and when they tightened the press then it would slide together and squeeze the juice or whey out and make it a solid.”

“It’s the cheesecloth that was in this hoop when you put the curd in. So that’s how the cloth got so tight around the cheese, ’cause it was already there when the curd was put in. But when it was taken out of the hoops to go in the curing room this cheesecloth was taken off. It was just a cheese then.”