The local story behind the country’s proudest cheese is hard to slice.

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Dennis Boronda, a descendant of the original cheese maker, remembers listening to the story growing up. His great-great aunt is Doña Boronda. “The Borondas came from a northeastern region of Spain called Aragon, and they did have a recipe that was supposedly brought over,” he says.

“The original Boronda, Manuel Boronda, came to California in 1769 with the Fr. Junipero Serra and Gaspar de Portola,” he adds. A corporal in the Spanish army, Manuel Boronda was appointed by the governor to be the first schoolteacher in San Francisco, and then in Monterey. He moved onto a 14-acre parcel of land behind the Royal Presidio Chapel and built the Boronda Adobe of Monterey.

In 1840, the governor gave a generous wedding gift to José Manuel Boronda, the son of Manuel Boronda and his new wife Juana Cota of Santa Barbara: some 6,625 acres of Los Laureles property in Carmel Valley, where one of the county’s three Boronda adobes still stands.

Later, the family fell upon hard times.

“José Manuel Boronda was injured in a bull fight,” Dennis Boronda says. “I heard he lost his leg. He couldn’t run a ranch anymore. The family had all of those kids – 15. She had to make money to support the family so she started making that cheese. She used a jack to press the cheese.”

And from this jack – according to some – Monterey Jack was born.

Old newspaper clippings tells stories of Doña Boronda selling cheese to her neighbors, door to door. She “made a name for herself and her cheese,” writes Blair Merbs, in a 1983 Herald Weekend Magazine story. Apparently no one could resist the delicious queso del pais, David Jacks included.

A shrewd businessman and a wealthy landowner, Jacks, who owned 60,000 acres of land and 14 dairy ranches, realized the cheese’s potential and had the resources to exploit it. Some say he stamped his name across the crates used to ship the cheese.

Real California Cheese tells it this way on its website: “As the story goes, sometime in 1882 David Jacks began shipping from his dairies a cheese branded with his last name and the city of origin, Monterey, to San Francisco and other western markets. Eventually the ‘s’ was dropped and people began asking for ‘Monterey Jack.’ ”

“At the time,” says Boronda, “Jacks was helping Doña Boronda out, selling the cheese. But it seemed that at some point he realized, ‘Hey, this is really a good deal here.’ He was a businessman and he knew how to market it. The family probably got mad at him – I would think they would – but they probably weren’t going to do anything about it. They weren’t trying to get rich. They just wanted to keep the family going.”