GLOBAL HISTORY OF CHEESE
History
So the first history of cheese is the history of individual cheeses. Fifty or a hundred could have been chosen, and each new name would add another detail. Some we could show to be ancient, some we would know or suspect to be modern. Some would have a solid recorded history, some might scarcely have impinged on the written record. A few, like Parmesan, would have remained for hundreds of years practically unchanged; others, like Stilton and Camembert, would have evolved into new and perhaps finer forms.A second history of cheese is that of the gradual spread of the cheese idea from the distant and unrecoverable moment of its invention. Accordingly this chapter begins by focusing on the distant moment, thereafter following the cheese idea in an approximate spiral from its Near Eastern origins to its triumphant implanting in the New World.
The Idea of Cheese
The story necessarily begins with milk, a good and nourishing food for humans.We learn this fact instinctively, as infants, by feeding on mother’s milk; if we keep domestic animals we may learn it over again by observing how their young are fed and, more adventurously, by tasting the milk ourselves. That is certainly how our ancestors in the western half of the Old World learned to use the milk of domestic animals.
The earliest domestication of a milk-producing animal probably took place about nine thousand years ago. If we allow ourselves to build history from known archaeological sites, it may have been in the Zagros mountains of northwestern Iran that goats, which were already being herded seasonally in many temperate regions of the Old World, first began to live and reproduce under continuous human control. At roughly the same date, somewhere in the Middle East, sheep were also domesticated. Perhaps slightly later, cattle were domesticated too; this may have first occurred either in the Middle East or in the Sahara, which was at that time far less arid than it later became. The water buffalo was domesticated in China and eastern Asia, probably in the fifth millennium BC (it didn’t arrive in the Mediterranean region until the sixth century BC). The domestication of the camel in southern Arabia possibly dates from about 2200 BC.
So when did the milk of these animals begin to be used? Archaeologists hesitate. Nearly thirty years ago Andrew Sherratt bounced them towards an answer with his hypothesis of a ‘secondary products revolution’ around 3500 BC in the Near East. Before that date, he argued, humans in Eurasia kept domesticated animals only for the meat, bones and hide available when they were slaughtered. After that date the idea of additional, ‘renewable’ uses of animals, for the milk, wool and labour that they offered without killing them, was adopted rapidly in western Asia, in Europe and as far east as India.
The theory was based largely on negative evidence, because secondary uses of animal products in pre-industrial societies left little trace for an archaeologist of the early 1980s to find. But Sherratt succeeded in his aim. In the last 25 years researchers’ attention has increasingly focused on the question, and routes to a more reliable answer have been explored. One answer will come by way of kill-off patterns;in other words, the age at slaughter of domestic animals, as evident from surviving bones. If correctly interpreted, these results should show whether herds and flocks were keptmostly for meat or whether wool and milk production were main activities. Another answer will come from analysis of lipid and protein residues in pots, which can be made to reveal whether they once contained meat fats or milk fats.But the data so far known is hardly conclusive.
Kill-off patterns have been thought to change in the direction of dairy farming by 4000 BC in central and southeastern Europe.From lipid analysis it is clear that the collecting of milk was taking place by about the same date even in southern Britain, a long way from the likely centres of innovation.
Milk is a very unstable food.Without refrigeration it spoils within days, even within hours in hot weather; without modern means of packing and transport it will not travel.In addition the supply is irregular: in nature there are long seasons when cows, goats and sheep produce no milk, although farmers have learned to extend the period of lactation.
Milk becomes a fully reliable resource when it can be converted into a product that will keep; until that was possible farmers needed to rely extensively on slaughtering to maintain a supply of protein (as we would say) through the year. So the discovery of cheese may well have been central to the putative secondary products revolution. First, at whatever date,herders began to milk their animals for human nutrition. At some later time they learned to make the milk into cheese, a stable and regular food source. This in itself could have catalysed the real revolution, the beginning of heavy reliance on dairy farming.
To return to the discovery itself, it was surely no momentous event. Milk, left to stand, will quickly sour from the action of lactic acid bacteria and may begin to curdle. If one carries or stores it in a bag made from an animal’s stomach, it will encounter rennet – the enzyme which, in the stomach, curdles milk as a step in the process of digestion – and this will start, or will magically hasten, the curdling process.
Some alternative substances will be found, by accident or experiment, to have a similar effect. The resulting curds will become easier to deal with as whey drains out of them; they will be more useful still if they are pressed to encourage further draining. Salt, perhaps already known to be useful in preparing meat for storage, can be used in much the same way and will turn out to be similarly useful as an additive to young cheese.
There is a remaining problem. Mammals, including humans, once they have been weaned, lose the ability to digest lactose, because their digestive systems cease to produce the necessary enzyme lactase. Themajority of adult humans worldwide today cannot digest fresh milk, though the ability to do so, a new development at some unidentified prehistoric moment, is shared by most people in northeast and north Africa, Europe, northern and western Asia, and by some people in southern Asia and the Americas.
Now it is true that really well-aged cheese, being almost lactose-free, poses no problem to those who are lactose intolerant;but the practice of maturing cheese for a year or more depends on complex procedures and specialized labour; there must have been a gap of hundreds if not thousands of years between the first young cheese and the first extra vieux cheese.
It is also true that pulled-curd or pasta filata cheese, such as traditional mozzarella and provolone, contains practically no lactose even though fresh. But this, too, is not a simple method: the curd, after draining, is typically steeped in very hot whey for several hours; then, as it rises to the surface, it is drained again and repeatedly kneaded and pulled to an elastic texture and finally cut into cheeses (some kinds are eaten fresh, some matured). However pleasing its texture, however useful its digestibility, the idea of pasta filata surely did not arise overnight.The conclusion asserts itself. The novel ability to digest milk must, in its historical origin, somehow coincide with the origin of dairy farming, because, without that ability, milk and most of the products made from it would have been useless. Frederick Simoons drew attention to this conjuncture thirty years ago, but bio-cultural history has not yet contributed all that it one day will to the development of a full prehistory of cheese.
The Spread of Cheese
The direct evidence for cheese begins with the third millennium BC. In saying this I discount the so-called cheese strainers, the pierced earthenware containers sometimes found by archaeologists. The earliest example, from central Europe, is dated to about 5500 BC; there are several others from southeastern Europe and Crete dated to about 3000 BC and later, but it is far from certain that cheese strainers is what they are.
Analysis of lipid residues may very soon prove or disprove it.Meanwhile the earliest direct evidence for cheese comes from Egypt, thanks to the remarkable climate which preserves organic substances that would long since have disappeared almost everywhere else. So it is that a strange substance found in two jars from a tomb of the Egyptian First Dynasty (c.3100 to 2900 BC), with inscriptions that were read as ‘rwt of the north’ and ‘rwt of the south’, was examined (but not, apparently, tasted) by a succession of puzzled archaeologists and was eventually pronounced to be cheese.
The identification was not helped by the fact that ‘rwt’ was a doubtful reading; in any case it is an unknown word, the ancient Egyptian term for cheese being otherwise unrecorded. There is, however, no doubt that the monarchs of the first dynasty were credited with having united Egypt (the ‘two lands’, as the country was called for some time afterwards); there is also no doubt that Egyptians by this time were practised cattle-herders. Presenting cheese from both north and south to a deceased First Dynasty dignitary would make perfect political sense. If these conclusions are correct, they offer a hint that there were at least two kinds of cheese, worth distinguishing by their geographical origin, in Egypt of 3000 BC. We have not only the earliest surviving cheese, but the earliest recorded appellations. At the same date the Sumerian civilization was flourishing in southern Iraq. Sumerian literature, written in a language unrelated to any modern tongue, was gradually deciphered during the last century with the help of bilingual texts and glossaries in Akkadian. The Sumerian word for cheese, ga-har, is found in literature from the late third millennium BC.
Cheese from cow’s, goat’s and sheep’s milk was known; a distinction, significant to shepherds ever since, was already made between small cheeses, likely to be used when fresh, and large cheeses made for longer maturing.There is more: the Sumerian-Akkadian glossaries include lists of food, and among these lists are ‘white cheese’, ‘fresh cheese’, ‘rich cheese’, ‘sharp cheese’ and various flavours making up a total of twenty distinct cheeses, distinct at least in the minds of the Akkadian teachers of Sumerian. Most of them surely had a distinct identity in the Sumerian texts themselves, and therefore, we may reasonably deduce, in the markets of Sumerian cities in the late third millennium.
In Akkadian the basic word for cheese was eqıdum, and there were several more names for cheeses in addition to the eighteen or twenty identified from the Sumerian glossary;some of the names were borrowed from neighbouring languages both west and east.Nagahu wasmaybe the name for a smelly cheese, because the word was also used as an insult; kabu, literally ‘dung’, when used as a cheese name might (like French crottin) allude to the shape rather than the smell.
It appears from glossaries that there were cheeses flavoured with wine, dates and various herbs, but how the flavour was added is not known. A few cookery recipes survive in Akkadian, and they tell us that cheese was used as an ingredient. In Hittite writings, from central Anatolia in the mid second millennium BC, we find that a cheese could be large or small; it could be huelpi: ‘fresh’, damaššanzi: ‘pressed’, paršan: ‘broken, crumbled’, iškallan: ‘torn’, hašhaššan: perhaps ‘scraped’. It could be ‘dry’ and ‘old’; it could be ‘incised’ (perhaps marked to show its origin); there was even ‘aged soldier cheese’, which might or might not have been better than it sounds. Such adjectives are interesting less for what they say than for the oppositions they imply: cheese was, by this time, evaluated on several scales. It was doled out in purpurruš: ‘balls’ or in ‘loaves’ (presumably a difference between small and large whole cheeses) which might be broken into paršulli: ‘chunks’, like those from a Parmesan. In the ancient Near East, probably the part of the world where cheese was firstmade, early literature offers us just these few tantalizing glimpses of cheese gastronomy: thismuch and no more. Later, cheese was an occasional cooking ingredient in medieval Arabic cuisine; it is still a significant food in these countries today, though far less varied, and gastronomically less compelling, than in western Europe. We now move westwards. In an excavation on the small Greek island of Therasia, at a settlement buried by the Santorini eruption at or near 1627 BC, a grey substance was found which nineteenth-century archaeologists belived to be cheese. Cheese is mentioned in Linear B tablets, written in southern Greece and Crete during the thirteenth century BC. In these laconic accounts cheese is measured in units – whole cheeses – and the standard Mycenaean cheese was not so very small if we reflect that on one such tablet, a list of requisites for feasting from ‘Nestor’s palace’ at Pylos, ten cheeses are listed alongside an amount calculated at 86.4 litres of wine.
Oddly enough we can compare this with a calculation from the same part of Greece about a thousand years later: The man who was appointed victualler at Phigaleia would bring each day three choai [8 litres] of wine, one medimnos [50 litres] of barley meal, five mnai [2½ kg] of cheese, and whatever was needed to season the sacrificial meat. The city provided . . . three sheep, a cook, a rack for waterjars, tables, benches and all such furniture . . . The meal began with cheese and barley mash served on bronze platters . . . Alongside the barley and cheese came charcuterie and salt as relish. When they had blessed this food, each man might drink a little from an earthenware vessel, and the server would say: ‘Eudeipnias, Dine well!’
Much of Greece is poor cattle-raising country; in early times most of its cheese was from sheep’s and goat’s milk, but scientists such as Aristotle (who wrote in the fourth century BC) had made observations well beyond the local context. Milk contains a serum called orros ‘whey’ and a solid called tyros ‘cheese’; the thicker the milk, the more cheese. The milk of animals without upper incisors coagulates and, under domestication, ismade into cheese . . . Camel’s milk is lightest, mare’s second, ass’s third; cow’s milk is thickest . . .
Some animals produce enough milk for their young and an additional quantity that can be set aside and turned into cheese. This is true particularly of sheep and goats, and to a smaller extent cows; mare’s milk and ass’s milk are incorporated in Phrygian cheese. There is more cheese in cow’s milk than goat’s milk: herders say that they get nineteen trophalides worth one obol a piece from one amphora [26 litres] of goat’s milk, whereas from that quantity of cow’s milk they get thirty.
Aristotle does not discuss the maturing of cheese. From reading him one might assume that the small trophalides, fresh cheeses selling for a tiny silver coin, were typical; also that science can explain everything. Even the very oldest texts – the Homeric epics – show that this is not the whole story. In the Iliad Nestor, after a busy day at the siege of Troy, is revived by a posset consisting of grated cheese mixed into wine, and the poet tells us exactly how it was done: ‘First she moved a table up to them, a fine polished table with a dark gleaming stand, and on it she placed a bronze dish with an onion in it as relish to the drink, and also yellow honey; and next came the heap of holy barley meal; and then a splendid goblet . . . in which she made a kykeon “posset” for them with Pramnian wine, and grated goat’s cheese into it with a bronze grater, and sprinkled barley meal on it, and invited them to drink.’
We notice the bronze grater – they are occasionally found at Greek archaeological sites of this period – and the cheese that was not just mature but hard enough to grate. Some of the epic detail seems incongruous; even more so when it is echoed in the Odyssey as Odysseus and his men are welcomed to Circe’s magic island: ‘She led them in and sat them on chairs and stools, and stirred for them cheese and barley meal and yellow honey into Pramnian wine, and mixed harmful drugs with the food’, with the result that Odysseus’s men were turned into pigs; but the kykeon, a mixture made by stirring in just the way that milk is stirred while it curdles, had deep religious overtones.
The gods were not far off when butter or cheese was made in the mountain pastures. ‘Often on the mountain tops, when the torchlit feast delights the gods, you have brought along your golden bowl – a big pail such as shepherds have – and filled it with lioness’s milk and made a big firm cheese for Apollo, Killer of Argos’, sang Alkman, the poet of early Sparta, picturing a ritual that combines the real and the supernatural.
Greece in Roman and medieval times continued to produce cheese. It came particularly from the northern mountains and the big island of Crete, where European travellers often saw it for sale. ‘They make a great many cheeses’, wrote the pilgrim Pietro Casola of his landfall at Chania in 1497. ‘It is a pity they are so salty. I saw great warehouses full of them, some in which the brine, or salmoria as we would say, was two feet deep, and the large cheeses were floating in it. Those in charge told me that the cheeses could not be preserved in any other way, being so rich . . . they sell a great quantity to the ships that call there: it was astonishing to see the number of cheeses taken on board our own galley.’ In modern Greece, although cheeses matured brine are still among the best known, there is an unexpected variety of local cheeses, still mostly from goat’s and sheep’s milk.
Sicily, which had been partly colonized by Greeks, was the one significant exporter of cheese to early Greece: goat’s milk gave Sicilian cheese its quality, or so Aristotle assumed, while sheep’s milk added bulk. Thus we move westwards again, to Italy, where it is evident from Latin literature that under the Roman Empire caseus (‘cheese’) was both a favourite food and a luxury. If a meal or hospitality is described, cheese will figure, as in the rustic tavern somewhere in Italy that is sketched in Copa (‘The Bar-Girl’), a poem sometimes ascribed to Virgil: ‘There is vin ordinaire just poured from a pitchy jar, and a watercourse running by with an insistentmurmur . . . there are caseoli “little cheeses” dried in rush baskets, waxy autumn-ripe plums, blood-coloured mulberries . . .’.
The Roman Empire, with its army, its administration and its roads, fostered trade in high quality commodities throughout the Mediterranean; this was the only period in history when the whole Mediterranean coastline was open to travel under a single government. Italy itself, Spain, Gaul (France), the Alpine provinces, Greece and Anatolia (Turkey) are all named in literature and documents as producers of cheese. For example, the fantasy plot of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) has a well-constructed naturalistic opening in which the hero shares a journey in the hills of central Greece with a commercial traveller: ‘I’ll tell you my trade: I hunt about through Thessaly, Aetolia, Boeotia, for honey and cheese and all that line of grocery.’ For the Romans, as for the Hittites before them, cheese was a typical army food, alongside bacon and vinegary wine.
Cheese was made throughout western and central Europe long before the Roman Empire; but we can know little about it. In this sense alone, the history of cheese in Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and Italy may reasonably be said to begin with the Romans. All these countries continued to produce cheese through medieval times, and the general names for cheese in the Romance languages are inherited from Latin caseus (queijo, queso, cacio, cas) or from a late Latin forma as the term for a cheese-mould and hence for a cheese shaped in a mould (fourme, fromage, formaggio).
As available information increases, around the year 1500, we find Italy, France and Switzerland very prominent as producers and exporters, a position that all three countries have retained. Spain and Austria, though less is known of their cheeses in the intervening period, are important producers nowadays; Portugal and Belgium are not without good local cheese.
North of this large region are more countries sufficiently influenced by the Empire and its culture to have borrowed their name for cheese from Latin caseus (Irish caise, Welsh caws, English cheese, Dutch kaas,German Käse). These countries produced cheese before and during Roman times – Roman sources confirm it – but their recorded cheese history begins with the Middle Ages. Among them, Holland gained special fame in the seventeenth century for its good, big, round, bright-coloured cheeses known abroad under such names as Dutch cheese and Tête de mort. All these countries have remained important producers, except Ireland, whose cheese tradition was largely wiped out under British rule.
In Britain itself the restrictions of Word War inflicted lasting damage on cheese traditions, damage that has taken many decades to repair.
Beyond this again are countries that lay wholly beyond the reach of the Empire’s trade. In general, until relatively modern times, few or no details are known of their cheeses; if there appears now to be less diversity in their cheese traditions, a smaller time depthmight explain the fact. This applies to Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Baltic republics, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and the former Yugoslav countries, Bulgaria, Romania,Moldavia, Ukraine and Russia. The general Balto-Slavic word for cheese (Russian sir ) is cognate, via proto-Indo-European, with English sour ; a second term (Russian tvarog), used for ‘cottage cheese, fresh cheese’, is borrowed into modern German as Quark with the same meaning. Meanwhile the original Germanic term, source of the modern Scandinavian ost, was borrowed long ago into Finnish, as juusto: ‘cheese’.
The borrowings that resulted in German Käse, English cheese and Finnish juusto are not evidence that these peoples had no earlier knowledge of cheese, but they do suggest that improvements in cheese-making technique were at some stage introduced from outside – from the south, in fact.
Ancient authors reported that cheese was made by the pastoralists of what is now southern Russia. ‘The nomads pitch their felt tents on the wagons on which they spend their lives’, writes the Roman geographer and historian Strabo in his Geography. ‘Around the tents are the herds from which they get their milk and cheese and meat. They follow the grazing herds, ever shifting to find pasture; in winter they are around the marshes of the Sea of Azov, in summer in the steppes.’ That was as far as Roman knowledge extended to the north-east, but we may surely extrapolate a little. If cheese was known at the western end of the Eurasian steppes, it was known at the eastern end too, in Mongolia, where nowadays goat’s-, sheep’s-, cow’s- and yak’s-milk cheeses are all made; it was known in central Asia, where it remains significant today.
This leads us across the roof of the world to China, where it has been argued that the northern Chinese eventually avoided the use of milk and cheese specifically to distinguish themselves from these nomadic peoples to their north-west. Cheese is by no means unknown in Chinese food history, however. China today produces about asmuch cheese, year by year, as Great Britain – a rather small quantity per head of population, therefore, but not negligible. In the north it is indeed unfamiliar, but Yunnan in southwestern China has a speciality in goat’s-milk cheese, which is preferred fresh, as it often is elsewhere.
South East Asia and India are almost cheese-free with the exception of India’s panır, a delicacy introduced in medieval times from Iran, a white unsalted fresh cheese that is appropriate to its Hindu context because it is curdled with an acid such as lemon juice or vinegar. To complete this rapid survey of the Old World, North Africa is among the most ancient cheese-making regions; Strabo confirms (as we would expect) that cheese remained familiar there, well beyond the reach of Roman power, two millennia ago. Cheese is still a significant food item north of the Sahara, in the lower and middle Nile valley, in Ethiopia and Somalia. In Egypt, northeastern Africa and Saudi Arabia a fresh white cheese, jubna bayda’, known in Egypt as damyatı, is the most popular type; the chewier ˆhal¯um, traditionally made from mixed goat’s and sheep’s milk, is also familiar all around the eastern Mediterranean. Camel’s-milk cheese – laborious to make because the fat does not separate easily – has been known in the region for at least two thousand years.
Southwards, however, there is a sharp dividing line, running across the whole African continent from northwest to east, beyond which nearly the whole adult population is lactose-intolerant. In central and southern Africa, therefore, cheese is scarcely consumed at all, except by the Khoe-San of South Africa and Namibia and by Europeans. The peoples of America and Australia before European settlement did not use milk as a food in any form. Europeans introduced their domestic animals and began to make cheese in the way they knew from home. At first cheese-making practices did not differ much from those in Europe. The potential for change existed (so it may seem from hindsight) in the large-scale farming and long-distance trade of this ‘New World’; and the way ahead had already been indicated by seventeenth-century municipal Cheddar, made by a ‘cooperative’ that accepted milk from every local farmer to produce each day’s cheese.
Cheddar was not alone: the big Alpine cheeses were also made co-operatively. But it was the Cheddar type of cheese that was made in New England, and it was in New England, in 1851 and after, that milk began to be collected on a larger and larger scale, by true associations and co-operatives, and eventually by businesses also. By the late nineteenth century cheese factories were being built in other countries too, and the economies of scale were so compelling that, flavour and quality notwithstanding, in the early twenty-first century factory cheeses are the norm and farm cheeses are the exception. A second contribution of the US was the development of processed cheese, a stable amalgam containing cheese and non-cheese in roughly equal amounts (the non-cheese components introduce extra salt, milk fats and lactose to the cocktail).
Today the US produces annually more than twice as much cheese as France, making it by far the largest producer in the world. It has in the past rarely been lauded for cheese quality, but US cheese can no longer be summarily dismissed in this way. Small in production terms but sometimes outstanding in the quality they achieve, artisanal cheese-makers have fought a long war for their country’s gastronomic reputation; they win laurels even on European battle grounds.
By Andrew Dalby in the book 'Cheese, A Global History',Reaktion Books, London, 2009, p. 30-51. Edited to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
The Idea of Cheese
The story necessarily begins with milk, a good and nourishing food for humans.We learn this fact instinctively, as infants, by feeding on mother’s milk; if we keep domestic animals we may learn it over again by observing how their young are fed and, more adventurously, by tasting the milk ourselves. That is certainly how our ancestors in the western half of the Old World learned to use the milk of domestic animals.
So when did the milk of these animals begin to be used? Archaeologists hesitate. Nearly thirty years ago Andrew Sherratt bounced them towards an answer with his hypothesis of a ‘secondary products revolution’ around 3500 BC in the Near East. Before that date, he argued, humans in Eurasia kept domesticated animals only for the meat, bones and hide available when they were slaughtered. After that date the idea of additional, ‘renewable’ uses of animals, for the milk, wool and labour that they offered without killing them, was adopted rapidly in western Asia, in Europe and as far east as India.
The theory was based largely on negative evidence, because secondary uses of animal products in pre-industrial societies left little trace for an archaeologist of the early 1980s to find. But Sherratt succeeded in his aim. In the last 25 years researchers’ attention has increasingly focused on the question, and routes to a more reliable answer have been explored. One answer will come by way of kill-off patterns;in other words, the age at slaughter of domestic animals, as evident from surviving bones. If correctly interpreted, these results should show whether herds and flocks were keptmostly for meat or whether wool and milk production were main activities. Another answer will come from analysis of lipid and protein residues in pots, which can be made to reveal whether they once contained meat fats or milk fats.But the data so far known is hardly conclusive.
Kill-off patterns have been thought to change in the direction of dairy farming by 4000 BC in central and southeastern Europe.From lipid analysis it is clear that the collecting of milk was taking place by about the same date even in southern Britain, a long way from the likely centres of innovation.
Milk is a very unstable food.Without refrigeration it spoils within days, even within hours in hot weather; without modern means of packing and transport it will not travel.In addition the supply is irregular: in nature there are long seasons when cows, goats and sheep produce no milk, although farmers have learned to extend the period of lactation.
Milk becomes a fully reliable resource when it can be converted into a product that will keep; until that was possible farmers needed to rely extensively on slaughtering to maintain a supply of protein (as we would say) through the year. So the discovery of cheese may well have been central to the putative secondary products revolution. First, at whatever date,herders began to milk their animals for human nutrition. At some later time they learned to make the milk into cheese, a stable and regular food source. This in itself could have catalysed the real revolution, the beginning of heavy reliance on dairy farming.
To return to the discovery itself, it was surely no momentous event. Milk, left to stand, will quickly sour from the action of lactic acid bacteria and may begin to curdle. If one carries or stores it in a bag made from an animal’s stomach, it will encounter rennet – the enzyme which, in the stomach, curdles milk as a step in the process of digestion – and this will start, or will magically hasten, the curdling process.
Some alternative substances will be found, by accident or experiment, to have a similar effect. The resulting curds will become easier to deal with as whey drains out of them; they will be more useful still if they are pressed to encourage further draining. Salt, perhaps already known to be useful in preparing meat for storage, can be used in much the same way and will turn out to be similarly useful as an additive to young cheese.
There is a remaining problem. Mammals, including humans, once they have been weaned, lose the ability to digest lactose, because their digestive systems cease to produce the necessary enzyme lactase. Themajority of adult humans worldwide today cannot digest fresh milk, though the ability to do so, a new development at some unidentified prehistoric moment, is shared by most people in northeast and north Africa, Europe, northern and western Asia, and by some people in southern Asia and the Americas.
Now it is true that really well-aged cheese, being almost lactose-free, poses no problem to those who are lactose intolerant;but the practice of maturing cheese for a year or more depends on complex procedures and specialized labour; there must have been a gap of hundreds if not thousands of years between the first young cheese and the first extra vieux cheese.
It is also true that pulled-curd or pasta filata cheese, such as traditional mozzarella and provolone, contains practically no lactose even though fresh. But this, too, is not a simple method: the curd, after draining, is typically steeped in very hot whey for several hours; then, as it rises to the surface, it is drained again and repeatedly kneaded and pulled to an elastic texture and finally cut into cheeses (some kinds are eaten fresh, some matured). However pleasing its texture, however useful its digestibility, the idea of pasta filata surely did not arise overnight.The conclusion asserts itself. The novel ability to digest milk must, in its historical origin, somehow coincide with the origin of dairy farming, because, without that ability, milk and most of the products made from it would have been useless. Frederick Simoons drew attention to this conjuncture thirty years ago, but bio-cultural history has not yet contributed all that it one day will to the development of a full prehistory of cheese.
The Spread of Cheese
Analysis of lipid residues may very soon prove or disprove it.Meanwhile the earliest direct evidence for cheese comes from Egypt, thanks to the remarkable climate which preserves organic substances that would long since have disappeared almost everywhere else. So it is that a strange substance found in two jars from a tomb of the Egyptian First Dynasty (c.3100 to 2900 BC), with inscriptions that were read as ‘rwt of the north’ and ‘rwt of the south’, was examined (but not, apparently, tasted) by a succession of puzzled archaeologists and was eventually pronounced to be cheese.
The identification was not helped by the fact that ‘rwt’ was a doubtful reading; in any case it is an unknown word, the ancient Egyptian term for cheese being otherwise unrecorded. There is, however, no doubt that the monarchs of the first dynasty were credited with having united Egypt (the ‘two lands’, as the country was called for some time afterwards); there is also no doubt that Egyptians by this time were practised cattle-herders. Presenting cheese from both north and south to a deceased First Dynasty dignitary would make perfect political sense. If these conclusions are correct, they offer a hint that there were at least two kinds of cheese, worth distinguishing by their geographical origin, in Egypt of 3000 BC. We have not only the earliest surviving cheese, but the earliest recorded appellations. At the same date the Sumerian civilization was flourishing in southern Iraq. Sumerian literature, written in a language unrelated to any modern tongue, was gradually deciphered during the last century with the help of bilingual texts and glossaries in Akkadian. The Sumerian word for cheese, ga-har, is found in literature from the late third millennium BC.
Cheese from cow’s, goat’s and sheep’s milk was known; a distinction, significant to shepherds ever since, was already made between small cheeses, likely to be used when fresh, and large cheeses made for longer maturing.There is more: the Sumerian-Akkadian glossaries include lists of food, and among these lists are ‘white cheese’, ‘fresh cheese’, ‘rich cheese’, ‘sharp cheese’ and various flavours making up a total of twenty distinct cheeses, distinct at least in the minds of the Akkadian teachers of Sumerian. Most of them surely had a distinct identity in the Sumerian texts themselves, and therefore, we may reasonably deduce, in the markets of Sumerian cities in the late third millennium.
In Akkadian the basic word for cheese was eqıdum, and there were several more names for cheeses in addition to the eighteen or twenty identified from the Sumerian glossary;some of the names were borrowed from neighbouring languages both west and east.Nagahu wasmaybe the name for a smelly cheese, because the word was also used as an insult; kabu, literally ‘dung’, when used as a cheese name might (like French crottin) allude to the shape rather than the smell.
It appears from glossaries that there were cheeses flavoured with wine, dates and various herbs, but how the flavour was added is not known. A few cookery recipes survive in Akkadian, and they tell us that cheese was used as an ingredient. In Hittite writings, from central Anatolia in the mid second millennium BC, we find that a cheese could be large or small; it could be huelpi: ‘fresh’, damaššanzi: ‘pressed’, paršan: ‘broken, crumbled’, iškallan: ‘torn’, hašhaššan: perhaps ‘scraped’. It could be ‘dry’ and ‘old’; it could be ‘incised’ (perhaps marked to show its origin); there was even ‘aged soldier cheese’, which might or might not have been better than it sounds. Such adjectives are interesting less for what they say than for the oppositions they imply: cheese was, by this time, evaluated on several scales. It was doled out in purpurruš: ‘balls’ or in ‘loaves’ (presumably a difference between small and large whole cheeses) which might be broken into paršulli: ‘chunks’, like those from a Parmesan. In the ancient Near East, probably the part of the world where cheese was firstmade, early literature offers us just these few tantalizing glimpses of cheese gastronomy: thismuch and no more. Later, cheese was an occasional cooking ingredient in medieval Arabic cuisine; it is still a significant food in these countries today, though far less varied, and gastronomically less compelling, than in western Europe. We now move westwards. In an excavation on the small Greek island of Therasia, at a settlement buried by the Santorini eruption at or near 1627 BC, a grey substance was found which nineteenth-century archaeologists belived to be cheese. Cheese is mentioned in Linear B tablets, written in southern Greece and Crete during the thirteenth century BC. In these laconic accounts cheese is measured in units – whole cheeses – and the standard Mycenaean cheese was not so very small if we reflect that on one such tablet, a list of requisites for feasting from ‘Nestor’s palace’ at Pylos, ten cheeses are listed alongside an amount calculated at 86.4 litres of wine.
Oddly enough we can compare this with a calculation from the same part of Greece about a thousand years later: The man who was appointed victualler at Phigaleia would bring each day three choai [8 litres] of wine, one medimnos [50 litres] of barley meal, five mnai [2½ kg] of cheese, and whatever was needed to season the sacrificial meat. The city provided . . . three sheep, a cook, a rack for waterjars, tables, benches and all such furniture . . . The meal began with cheese and barley mash served on bronze platters . . . Alongside the barley and cheese came charcuterie and salt as relish. When they had blessed this food, each man might drink a little from an earthenware vessel, and the server would say: ‘Eudeipnias, Dine well!’
Much of Greece is poor cattle-raising country; in early times most of its cheese was from sheep’s and goat’s milk, but scientists such as Aristotle (who wrote in the fourth century BC) had made observations well beyond the local context. Milk contains a serum called orros ‘whey’ and a solid called tyros ‘cheese’; the thicker the milk, the more cheese. The milk of animals without upper incisors coagulates and, under domestication, ismade into cheese . . . Camel’s milk is lightest, mare’s second, ass’s third; cow’s milk is thickest . . .
Some animals produce enough milk for their young and an additional quantity that can be set aside and turned into cheese. This is true particularly of sheep and goats, and to a smaller extent cows; mare’s milk and ass’s milk are incorporated in Phrygian cheese. There is more cheese in cow’s milk than goat’s milk: herders say that they get nineteen trophalides worth one obol a piece from one amphora [26 litres] of goat’s milk, whereas from that quantity of cow’s milk they get thirty.
Aristotle does not discuss the maturing of cheese. From reading him one might assume that the small trophalides, fresh cheeses selling for a tiny silver coin, were typical; also that science can explain everything. Even the very oldest texts – the Homeric epics – show that this is not the whole story. In the Iliad Nestor, after a busy day at the siege of Troy, is revived by a posset consisting of grated cheese mixed into wine, and the poet tells us exactly how it was done: ‘First she moved a table up to them, a fine polished table with a dark gleaming stand, and on it she placed a bronze dish with an onion in it as relish to the drink, and also yellow honey; and next came the heap of holy barley meal; and then a splendid goblet . . . in which she made a kykeon “posset” for them with Pramnian wine, and grated goat’s cheese into it with a bronze grater, and sprinkled barley meal on it, and invited them to drink.’
We notice the bronze grater – they are occasionally found at Greek archaeological sites of this period – and the cheese that was not just mature but hard enough to grate. Some of the epic detail seems incongruous; even more so when it is echoed in the Odyssey as Odysseus and his men are welcomed to Circe’s magic island: ‘She led them in and sat them on chairs and stools, and stirred for them cheese and barley meal and yellow honey into Pramnian wine, and mixed harmful drugs with the food’, with the result that Odysseus’s men were turned into pigs; but the kykeon, a mixture made by stirring in just the way that milk is stirred while it curdles, had deep religious overtones.
The gods were not far off when butter or cheese was made in the mountain pastures. ‘Often on the mountain tops, when the torchlit feast delights the gods, you have brought along your golden bowl – a big pail such as shepherds have – and filled it with lioness’s milk and made a big firm cheese for Apollo, Killer of Argos’, sang Alkman, the poet of early Sparta, picturing a ritual that combines the real and the supernatural.
Greece in Roman and medieval times continued to produce cheese. It came particularly from the northern mountains and the big island of Crete, where European travellers often saw it for sale. ‘They make a great many cheeses’, wrote the pilgrim Pietro Casola of his landfall at Chania in 1497. ‘It is a pity they are so salty. I saw great warehouses full of them, some in which the brine, or salmoria as we would say, was two feet deep, and the large cheeses were floating in it. Those in charge told me that the cheeses could not be preserved in any other way, being so rich . . . they sell a great quantity to the ships that call there: it was astonishing to see the number of cheeses taken on board our own galley.’ In modern Greece, although cheeses matured brine are still among the best known, there is an unexpected variety of local cheeses, still mostly from goat’s and sheep’s milk.
The Roman Empire, with its army, its administration and its roads, fostered trade in high quality commodities throughout the Mediterranean; this was the only period in history when the whole Mediterranean coastline was open to travel under a single government. Italy itself, Spain, Gaul (France), the Alpine provinces, Greece and Anatolia (Turkey) are all named in literature and documents as producers of cheese. For example, the fantasy plot of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) has a well-constructed naturalistic opening in which the hero shares a journey in the hills of central Greece with a commercial traveller: ‘I’ll tell you my trade: I hunt about through Thessaly, Aetolia, Boeotia, for honey and cheese and all that line of grocery.’ For the Romans, as for the Hittites before them, cheese was a typical army food, alongside bacon and vinegary wine.
Cheese was made throughout western and central Europe long before the Roman Empire; but we can know little about it. In this sense alone, the history of cheese in Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and Italy may reasonably be said to begin with the Romans. All these countries continued to produce cheese through medieval times, and the general names for cheese in the Romance languages are inherited from Latin caseus (queijo, queso, cacio, cas) or from a late Latin forma as the term for a cheese-mould and hence for a cheese shaped in a mould (fourme, fromage, formaggio).
As available information increases, around the year 1500, we find Italy, France and Switzerland very prominent as producers and exporters, a position that all three countries have retained. Spain and Austria, though less is known of their cheeses in the intervening period, are important producers nowadays; Portugal and Belgium are not without good local cheese.
North of this large region are more countries sufficiently influenced by the Empire and its culture to have borrowed their name for cheese from Latin caseus (Irish caise, Welsh caws, English cheese, Dutch kaas,German Käse). These countries produced cheese before and during Roman times – Roman sources confirm it – but their recorded cheese history begins with the Middle Ages. Among them, Holland gained special fame in the seventeenth century for its good, big, round, bright-coloured cheeses known abroad under such names as Dutch cheese and Tête de mort. All these countries have remained important producers, except Ireland, whose cheese tradition was largely wiped out under British rule.
In Britain itself the restrictions of Word War inflicted lasting damage on cheese traditions, damage that has taken many decades to repair.
Beyond this again are countries that lay wholly beyond the reach of the Empire’s trade. In general, until relatively modern times, few or no details are known of their cheeses; if there appears now to be less diversity in their cheese traditions, a smaller time depthmight explain the fact. This applies to Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Baltic republics, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and the former Yugoslav countries, Bulgaria, Romania,Moldavia, Ukraine and Russia. The general Balto-Slavic word for cheese (Russian sir ) is cognate, via proto-Indo-European, with English sour ; a second term (Russian tvarog), used for ‘cottage cheese, fresh cheese’, is borrowed into modern German as Quark with the same meaning. Meanwhile the original Germanic term, source of the modern Scandinavian ost, was borrowed long ago into Finnish, as juusto: ‘cheese’.
The borrowings that resulted in German Käse, English cheese and Finnish juusto are not evidence that these peoples had no earlier knowledge of cheese, but they do suggest that improvements in cheese-making technique were at some stage introduced from outside – from the south, in fact.
Ancient authors reported that cheese was made by the pastoralists of what is now southern Russia. ‘The nomads pitch their felt tents on the wagons on which they spend their lives’, writes the Roman geographer and historian Strabo in his Geography. ‘Around the tents are the herds from which they get their milk and cheese and meat. They follow the grazing herds, ever shifting to find pasture; in winter they are around the marshes of the Sea of Azov, in summer in the steppes.’ That was as far as Roman knowledge extended to the north-east, but we may surely extrapolate a little. If cheese was known at the western end of the Eurasian steppes, it was known at the eastern end too, in Mongolia, where nowadays goat’s-, sheep’s-, cow’s- and yak’s-milk cheeses are all made; it was known in central Asia, where it remains significant today.
This leads us across the roof of the world to China, where it has been argued that the northern Chinese eventually avoided the use of milk and cheese specifically to distinguish themselves from these nomadic peoples to their north-west. Cheese is by no means unknown in Chinese food history, however. China today produces about asmuch cheese, year by year, as Great Britain – a rather small quantity per head of population, therefore, but not negligible. In the north it is indeed unfamiliar, but Yunnan in southwestern China has a speciality in goat’s-milk cheese, which is preferred fresh, as it often is elsewhere.
South East Asia and India are almost cheese-free with the exception of India’s panır, a delicacy introduced in medieval times from Iran, a white unsalted fresh cheese that is appropriate to its Hindu context because it is curdled with an acid such as lemon juice or vinegar. To complete this rapid survey of the Old World, North Africa is among the most ancient cheese-making regions; Strabo confirms (as we would expect) that cheese remained familiar there, well beyond the reach of Roman power, two millennia ago. Cheese is still a significant food item north of the Sahara, in the lower and middle Nile valley, in Ethiopia and Somalia. In Egypt, northeastern Africa and Saudi Arabia a fresh white cheese, jubna bayda’, known in Egypt as damyatı, is the most popular type; the chewier ˆhal¯um, traditionally made from mixed goat’s and sheep’s milk, is also familiar all around the eastern Mediterranean. Camel’s-milk cheese – laborious to make because the fat does not separate easily – has been known in the region for at least two thousand years.
Cheddar was not alone: the big Alpine cheeses were also made co-operatively. But it was the Cheddar type of cheese that was made in New England, and it was in New England, in 1851 and after, that milk began to be collected on a larger and larger scale, by true associations and co-operatives, and eventually by businesses also. By the late nineteenth century cheese factories were being built in other countries too, and the economies of scale were so compelling that, flavour and quality notwithstanding, in the early twenty-first century factory cheeses are the norm and farm cheeses are the exception. A second contribution of the US was the development of processed cheese, a stable amalgam containing cheese and non-cheese in roughly equal amounts (the non-cheese components introduce extra salt, milk fats and lactose to the cocktail).
Today the US produces annually more than twice as much cheese as France, making it by far the largest producer in the world. It has in the past rarely been lauded for cheese quality, but US cheese can no longer be summarily dismissed in this way. Small in production terms but sometimes outstanding in the quality they achieve, artisanal cheese-makers have fought a long war for their country’s gastronomic reputation; they win laurels even on European battle grounds.
By Andrew Dalby in the book 'Cheese, A Global History',Reaktion Books, London, 2009, p. 30-51. Edited to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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