Holte

The cheese is named after a farm outside Copenhagen where a woman reverse-engineered European cheesemaking.

Hanne Nielsen toured dairies across Europe in the mid nineteenth century and brought the techniques back to Havartigaarden, her farm near Holte north of Copenhagen. The cheese was only given the name Havarti in 1952, long after her death. The English phrase is a half translation of Danish flodehavarti, flode meaning cream.

The cheese is named for a farm, seventy years after the woman who developed it worked there.

Hanne Nielsen ran the Havartigården farm near Holte, north of Copenhagen, in the second half of the nineteenth century and traveled through Europe learning other countries' cheesemaking. What she developed was sold for decades under borrowed foreign names. It was given the name Havarti only in 1952, when Danish cheeses were assigned names of their own.