How did people make cheese during the renaissance?!
Answers: The same way they make cheese now. Cheese making is a long tradition and it hasn't changed much except to grow in scale for commercial production.
Cheese dates back to before recorded history, perhaps as far back as 6,000 B.C. We know that cheese was part of the Sumerian diet, 4000 years before the birth of Christ, made from both cows’ and goats’ milk and stored in tall jars. Egyptian tomb murals circa 2000 B.C. show butter and cheese being made, and other murals which show milk stored in skin bags suspended from poles demonstrate a knowledge of dairy husbandry. An enormous variety of cheeses are made, in virtually every country on earth. Cheese varieties have been developed with the milk from a broad spectrum of animals—including the reindeer in Scandinavia, the boar in Africa, the water buffalo in Italy, the yak in Tibet, and the mare in Russia.
How old is the modern cheese you enjoy? Here are some dates compiled by one scholar:
Gorgonzola 879 A.D. Gouda 1697
Roquefort 1070 Gloucester 1697
Grana 1200 Stilton 1785
Cheddar 1500 Camembert 1791
Parmesan 1579
In the first century A.D., Pliny the Elder mentioned Cantal in his Historia Naturalis. Cantal, a cow’s milk cheese named after the Cantal Mountains in Auvergne, was originally produced by putting the curd into a formage, a wooden cylinder and the probable origin for the French and Italian words for cheese, fromage and formaggio, respectively.
Countless people made cheese, sold cheese, and ate cheese as a diet staple before these cheeses and others earned their place in the cheese pantheon, bringing recognition to their towns and nations. Here is a look at cheese through history.
In The Beginning
How did cheese come to be? First, man discovered that domestic animals could be milked. While no one can be certain who made the first cheese, we can be certain it was an accident. Legend is that nomadic tribes of Central Asia who carried milk in animal skin bags “discovered” cheese. They carried milk in saddlebags made from animal skins, and possibly made from the stomach, which contains the coagulating enzyme known as rennin. Or, fermentation of the milk sugars would cause the milk to curdle. The galloping motion of the horse, acting as churning, would effectively separate the milk into curds. The result, curds and whey, provided a refreshing whey drink as well as curds, which would be drained through perforated earthenware bowls or woven reed baskets, and lightly salted to provide a tasty and nourishing high protein food.
However, any people with milking animals would have “discovered” cheese and yogurt in a similar way. Any shepherd or farmer taking milk along with him in the stomach of slaughtered animal that is used as a canteen; or the beneficial microflora in a milkmaid’s oak bucket feeding on the simple sugars in the milk, releasing lactic acid that increases the acidity and causes coagulation. Before long, people learned that the curds could be aged over weeks or months, and then, pressed together to form large cakes of cheese.
Most scholars agree that the art of cheesemaking traveled from Asia Minor to Europe, where it flourished in the hands of the Romans.
The Romans Master Cheese
It was the Roman culture that developed the art of cheesemaking as we know it today. Roman cheesemakers were skilled artisans, and the Roman culture developed many varieties of cheese that resemble those we enjoy today. The Romans are credited with the first cheese aging, or cheese storage. They were aware of the affects of various ripening techniques upon the taste and character of a particular cheese.
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It is likely that the Romans brought cheese and the art of cheesemaking with them as they conquered Gaul—what we now know as France and England—where it was embraced enthusiastically. The ancestors of today’s French cheesemakers did their job by perfecting the art of cheese aging, which today is known by the French term, l’affinage.
The larger Roman houses had a separate cheese kitchen, the caseale, and special areas where cheeses could be matured. In larger towns, homemade cheeses could be taken to a special center to be smoked. Some written notes on cheesemaking survive:
Homer, circa 1184 B.C., refers to cheese being made in the mountain caves of Greece from the milk of sheep and goats, specifying a variety called Cynthos sold by the Greeks to the Romans (perhaps the Feta cheese of today).
Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 B.C., commented on cheese made from the milk of mares and asses. Russian koumiss is made from mare’s milk and is fermented to provide an alcoholic content of up to 3%.
Varro, circa 127 B.C., noted the difference in cheeses made from a number of locations and commented on their digestibility. By this time the use of rennet was commonplace, providing the cheesemaker with far greater control over the types of curd produced. Cheese had started to move from subsistence food, produced for home consumption, to a commercial product.
Columella, circa 50 A.D., wrote about how to make cheese in considerable detail. Cheesemakers today would be perfectly at home with many of the principles he set out so clearly more than 1900 years ago.
By 300 A.D., cheese was being regularly exported to countries along the Mediterranean seaboard. Trade had developed to such an extent that the emperor Diocletian had to fix maximum prices for a range of cheeses, including an apple-smoked cheese highly popular with Romans. Yet another cheese was stamped and sold under the brand name of La Luna, possibly the precursor of today’s Parmesan, name which first appeared in 1579.
Like other areas of knowledge, Roman cheesemaking expertise spread with their empire throughout Europe. Roman soldiers who had completed their military service and intermarried with the local populace, set up “coloniae” farms in retirement, where they may well have passed on their skills in cheesemaking.
With the collapse of the Roman Empire around 410, cheesemaking spread slowly via the Mediterranean, Aegean and Adriatic seas to Southern and Central Europe. The river valleys provided easy access and methods adopted for production were adapted to suit the different terrain and climatic conditions. Goats and sheep provided plenty of milk.
Stylistic Differences Evolve
Tribes such as the Helvetica, who had settled in the Swiss Alps, developed their own distinctive types of cheese. They were in fact so successful in doing this that for a period all export of their Emmental (the cheese with holes that Americans call “Swiss cheese”) was banned. In Central and Eastern Europe the displacement of people through centuries of war and invasion slowed down developments in cheesemaking until the Middle Ages. Production was often restricted to the more remote mountainous areas.
In the fertile lowlands of Europe, dairy husbandry developed at a faster pace and cheesemaking from cows’ milk became the norm. Hence, the particular development of cheeses such as Edam and Gouda in the Netherlands. This was much copied elsewhere under a variety of similar names such as Tybo and Fynbo. A hard-pressed cheese, relatively small in size, brine-salted and waxed to reduce moisture losses in storage, proved both marketable and easy to distribute.
France developed a wider range of cheeses from the rich agricultural areas in the south and west of that country. By and large, soft cheese production was preferred with a comparatively long making season. Hard-pressed cheese appeared to play a secondary role. To some extent this reflects the Latin culture of the nation, mirroring the cheese types produced in the Mediterranean areas as distinct from the hard-pressed cheese that were developed in the northern regions of Europe for storage and use in the long cold winter months that lay ahead.
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The Middle Ages and The Renaissance
From the decline of the Roman Empire until the discovery of America, monks in monasteries were the innovators in cheesemaking. In the Middle Ages they developed many of the classic varieties of cheese marketed today. During the Renaissance period cheese was considered unhealthy and suffered a decline in popularity. It regained favor by the nineteenth century, the period that saw the start of the move from farm to factory production.
Cheese Comes to the New World
Goat cheese was perhaps the first to make their way to new world. Goats were carried aboard ships as a sure source of fresh milk. They were on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria as Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492.
When the Pilgrims voyaged to America in 1620, the Mayflower was stocked with cheese. The art of cheesemaking quickly spread in the New World, but until the 19th century it remained a local farm industry. It wasn’t until 1851 that the first cheese factory in the United States was built, by Jesse Williams in Oneida County New York.
The biggest cheese event occurred in 1801, when an enterprising cheesemaker delivered a mammoth 1,235-pound wheel of cheese to President Thomas Jefferson. Washingtonians dubbed it the “big cheese,” coining a phrase which has come to describe someone of importance.
As the population of the country grew, so did the demand for cheese. The industry gradually moved westward and settled on the rich farmlands of Wisconsin. In 1845 a group of Swiss immigrants settled in Green County, Wisconsin and started the manufacturer of “foreign” cheese. The first factory was a Limburger plant, which opened in 1868. By 1880 there were 3,923 dairy factories nationwide, which reported to have made 216 million pounds of cheese that year valued at $17 million. The 1904 census, reporting only factory output, totaled over 317 million pounds, which grew to 418 million pounds in 1920...and to 2.2 billion pounds by 1970.
Cheese Today
Rising demand for cheese throughout the 1970s and 1980s brought total natural cheese production to more than 6 billion pounds by the beginning of the 1990s. Processed cheese also experienced a surge in consumer demand with annual production exceeding 2 billion pounds a year by the beginning of the 1990s.
Currently, more than one-third of all milk produced each year in the U.S. is used to manufacture cheese. The industry continues to grow due to consumer appetites for all types of cheese—and pizza. Fine farmstead and artisanal cheeses are a fraction of a percent of the industry, but this sector, too, has been growing due to an increasingly sophisticated palate and demand for more and better cheese.
The average American eats more than 31 pounds of cheese per year. Mozzarella is the most frequently-consumed cheese (think pizza) at 9.64 pounds per capita, followed by cheddar, long favorite eating and snacking cheese, at 9.39 pounds per capita. In supermarkets, processed American cheeses (580 million pounds), Cheddar (530 million pounds), and Mozzarella (250 million pounds) are the three big sellers. Americans have been branching out into specialty and artisan cheeses, averaging 4.3% of the volume in 2003, led by Asiago and Gorgonzola at about 50% growth, with Havarti up nearly 40%.
With about 300 different varieties of cheese available in the U.S., 31 pounds per capita and deducting 9.6 for Mozzarella, it doesn’t seem like we’re eating nearly enough cheese!
Content from the International Dairy Foods Association and The Cheese Book by Richard Widcome, Chartwell Books, 1978.
Books About Cheese
Cheese, by Max McCalman. This long awaited book is a welcome addition to any cheese lovers library. Click here for more information. The Cheese Plate, by Max McCalman. Artisanal's top cheese shares his love and appreciation of cheese. Click here for information. Totally Cheese Cookbook, by Helene Siege. Easy to follow recipes that are all about cheese. Click here for information.
Cheese Accoutrements
Red Cheese Wax. Seal your cheeses air tight with this reusable red cheese wax. Click here for information. Picnic Time Avanti Premium Tote. Premium picnic tote with deluxe service for two makes for a perfect day. Click here for information. Rosle Wire Cheese Slicer. This cheese slicer has two replaceable wires set at different distances from the center post. Click here for information.
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