Basket Cheese Is An 85-Year-Old Tradition For Lamagna Cheese Co.

Easter often is associated with the candy aisle, and its tempting display of rainbow-hued jelly beans, foil-wrapped chocolate eggs and bright-yellow marshmallow Peeps.

For an 85-year-old cheese company in Verona, the 40-day Lenten season is punctuated not by sweets but by an unusual cheese product that for two days each week leading up to Easter puts its small staff into curd-making overdrive. And no, it's not the ricotta on which the family has built its name over three generations.

It's called basket cheese, and it's been an Easter tradition at Lamagna Cheese Co. for as long as anyone can remember — probably since the company first set up shop in the Strip District in 1928, guesses vice president Chris Lamagna, one of four brothers who now run the company.

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