History of cheese (contd)

More on cheese, extracted from online article:




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.


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.
However, throughout the Dark Ages little progress was made in developing new cheese types—or anything else.