August 12, 2017 • 35 mins
We're revisiting a classic episode, about cheese! It's been around for more than 9,000 years. But how did humans learn to make it? And how did all the different types of cheese develop?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. It is Saturday Classic Time. And then, just
just in case you have not heard of this yet,
this is an episode from our archive that we are
sharing again over the weekend to help newer listeners to
the show get a taste of our back catalog. If
you have listened to all of the podcast episodes already
and you are down for a real listen, this is
(00:23):
for you too, so welcome. Hey, newsflash, cheese is delicious
so good. I don't think most people would be surprised
by that information. Uh and just like everything else on earth, though,
it has a history all its own. This episode originally
aired in February, but the story of how cheese came
to be a staple of the human diet is just
as delicious today as it was four years ago. Maybe
(00:46):
grab some delicious bread or whatever else sounds yummy. We
heard from listeners when this episode first aired that it
made them quite hungry and join us for a little
bit of cheese history. Welcome to Stuff you missed in
history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hi, and
(01:13):
welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying, and today we're going to talk about
something we both love so much. Is it's like one
of our favoritest things. It is it is cheese. Cheese
has a nine thousand year history and the varieties that
we have of it today are mostly the products of
(01:34):
little tweaks that people have made throughout history for one
reason or another. Um. Basically, every cheese that we have
today has some kind of story to tell about where
it came from that's tied to the animals that were
being raised, what the weather and climate were like, the
people making the cheese, whether it had to be stored
or shipped or anything like that. UM. A lot of
(01:56):
these refinements come straight from human ingenuity and cure reosity,
but it's also a very necessity is the mother of
invention kind of story. Making cheese is a balancing act
with milk and how much moisture, salt, and bacteria are
in that milk, and what people's lives were like when
they were trying to make cheese. So I'm excited and
(02:18):
it's kind of interesting from an anthropological standpoint because as
people have spread out, cheese went with them. So it
really has um brought its own flavor to be punny. Unfortunately,
of two various cultures, Like cheese informs cultures in an
interesting way. Hand the cultures informed the cheese. Yes, I
(02:39):
love it. I did not mean for that to be
a pun, but that's what came out. We're being all
puney and reciprocal in the cheese cycle. So here's the
legend of where cheese came from. And and there are
a couple of problems with this legend. Uh that gets
it gets passed around, it's it's fact. So according to
the lore, someone, a person in some Arab country was
(03:04):
traveling a very long way carrying milk in a skin
that was made from an animal's stomach um. And when
he got ready to take a drink of milk, he
discovered it had curdled into cheese. Uh. This may have
been how people discovered rennet, which is the an enzyme
from animal stomach that is used to make cheese. But
it's probably not where cheese came from for a couple
(03:26):
of reasons. One is that before people started eating cheese,
milk was pretty much just for babies because adult humans
could not digest lactose um, they couldn't make lactase, which
is the enzyme that breaks up breaks down lactose after
they were babies. So unless this guy was traveling a
long way with a baby, he didn't really have a
(03:47):
good reason to be carrying a skin of milk with him.
Or maybe he was going to visit a baby. Maybe,
but maybe people didn't often carry milk around in skins
because it was a high risk of spoilage. It really
milk was consumed fresh and only buy babies until after
cheese was discovered slash invented. A more likely scenario is
(04:09):
that people discovered that if you left milk out, it
would solidify and coagulate, and if you've worked at it
a little bit, you can separate that into curds and
way and it's not far to get from that to cheese.
So that's a little more likely than the animal skin
carrying story. Just keep thinking about cheese. So the more
(04:30):
likely history, uh, you know, by about seven thousand BC,
people living in the Fertile Crescent had started to domesticate
animals and they were cultivating plants, so they had sheep
and goats, and goats in particular were used. Uh. They
were accustomed to living in relatively confined spaces like caves,
so they would have been very easy to domesticate at
(04:51):
that point. If you look at evidence from that long ago,
the goats and sheep that were being kept were probably
more about and meat than milk, because there wasn't an
overwhelming number of female animals versus male animals. Um. They
also look at what ages the animals were its slaughter.
(05:12):
Farming for wool also would have come later, because sheep
that far in the past didn't really have usable wool
as their hair um, so the earliest sheep probably mostly
used as a source of meat. So several things had
to have had to happen for people to wind up
making cheese. They had to have a reason to want
(05:35):
to pasture animals and use pastured animals as a as
a food source. They had to have animals that could
give them more milk than their own young needed, which
would have taken some generations of breeding to get animals
that produce more milk. I love this one. They had
to know how to milk the animals. That had to
(05:56):
have been an interesting trial and error yes, well, and
then the animals had to allow themselves to be milked
by people, which is another thing. You know, animals can
be very obstinate, so this is another thing that would
have required some effort. And lastly, they would have needed
a way to store the milk, but as we talked
about before, there are some difficulties with using skins for
(06:17):
storing milk. This worked out to be pottery um or
more specifically, the discovery that you could apply heat to
clay and turn it into pottery. And so once we
had all those things together at the same place at
the same time, people were able to develop cheese, and
this happened at about b C in the western half
(06:38):
of what is Turkey today. We can look at shards
of pottery from that era and know that people were
raising animals for milk because there are milk fat residues
and the pottery shards um and the proportion of male
and female animals also changes in the anthropological record at
that point, so you would could because you would need
(06:58):
more females to be produced in the milk. Yes. Now,
probably this milk started out as a food source for babies,
as we mentioned earlier, since humans had not adapted their
ability to process lactose. Uh. But they would have quickly
figured out since they didn't have refrigeration, that that milk
sitting out was going to coagulate, and that they could
(07:20):
turn up the curds and way when they started. Most
of the lactose stays in the way when you separate
the curds from the way, so adults could eat the
curds and get all the nutritional value with either no
problems or fewer problems. From a digestive standpoint, Yes, from
a digestive standpoint, if you or anyone you know is
(07:42):
lactose intolerant, you have a sense of what that is
all about. Um. So, curds were a really valuable source
of nourishments, so people had a good incentive to figure
out an easy way to separate curds from way, and
this came in the form of perforated ceramic canister. We
have lots of archaeological evidence for people using ceramic containers
(08:06):
with UH with perforations in them to separate curds and
whey uh. There's also been some series about woven baskets
as well, right, but those don't really scrutiny long term.
They don't hold up as well over thousands of years,
so we don't have as much concrete evidence of whether
people were using woven baskets to make cheese by separating
curds and whey um. Based on the fat residues in pottery,
(08:31):
we think people also figured out how to make things
like butter at about the same time. The earliest cheeses
were all They were fresh cheeses. They were more like
today's ricotta or other soft kind of curdy cheeses. People
would have eaten them quickly since they would spoil without refrigeration. UM.
(08:51):
They also may have sealed and buried these cheeses to
try to keep them out of the sun, keep them
a little cooler, and they would also the curds could
dry in the sun. UH And it's possible that rennant
the enzymes from animal stomach is used to ferment, were
discovered at this time as well. The record isn't super clear.
It's not as easy to find residue of something on
(09:13):
an animal skin that's broken down over time as it
would be ceramic, but it's a likelihood. So really, cheesemaking
then spread out from the Fertile Crescent. We have lots
of pottery shards as evidence that showed the progression of cheese,
along with lots and lots of other things spreading out
UH during the Neolithic migration, people were making cheese and
(09:35):
butter from the milk of cows, goats, and sheep um.
And one of the most recent discoveries of this progression
is from not too long ago, and it was a
seven thousand, five hundred year old piece of pottery that
was almost certainly used to make cheese and what is
Poland today. They did the same thing of looking at
(09:57):
the residues that were on the inside of the pottery
and what they were made of. And so for many years,
even with this uh migrational progression outward from where it started,
the cheeses still remained like the fresh acid coagulated and
rennet coagulated cheeses. So they still hadn't gotten to the
aged cheese concepts. And in some parts of the world
(10:18):
that that's that continued to be for always what people
were making. An example is in India. India has a
really old tradition of using dairy products with lots of
ghee which is clarified butter, and using kurds in their cuisine.
But the only cheese that's indigenous to India is paneer,
(10:39):
which is a soft cheese meant to be eaten fresh.
There are lots of different theories for why India did
not develop aged cheeses, and one of them is that
there is such a focus on food purity in religious
texts in that part of the world that people were
probably not down with the idea of letting things mold
on purpose and then eating them to Uh. The climate
(11:02):
in in India is also not great for the controlled
spoilage that is really what aging cheese is all about. Yeah,
you know, I'm imagining that conversation. No, no, it will
be delicious, No, it will be rotted. Uh. But thankfully
that worked out. Uh. And as soon as cheese became
an important important as part of people's diets, it also
(11:24):
took on religious significance. Offerings of cheese were made to
the gods, for example, the Sumerian goddess and Nana who
got daily offerings of cheese and butter, and a number
of Greek gods and goddesses who had cheese among their offerings.
There are also lots and lots of references to cheese
in many religious texts from all over the world. Uh.
(11:45):
It didn't take long though, before people started seeing the
need to be able to store cheese to eat it later.
Instead of being able to make it and consume it
within a day or two. So around four b c. E,
Hittite writing starts describing more thaie of cheese that sound
a little bit more like the harder cheeses that we
have today. We don't have really good evidence of all
(12:08):
of them. We have more descriptions in writing, but they
include descriptions like scoured cheese and hard soldier cheese. So
there's the logical conclusion that they developed ways of aging
the cheese to make it harder to take down the
water content and the cheese so that it would last
longer um and being able to form a rind on
(12:28):
the cheese. But we don't have a lot of, like
very clear pottery evidence to go with that. It's mostly
written descriptions that people are drawing conclusions from. The first
recorded shipment of cheese took place in twelve through the
Mediterranean Sea, which is further evidence that people have developed
cheeses that would keep. At that point, most of the
(12:50):
cheeses that were being shipped around were probably brind cheeses
like fetta that were stored in ceramic jars. And the
reason that even though these cheeses are very soft and wet.
The reason that they last for longer is that there's
lots and lots of salt in them. Um, if you
dry salt white cheese that has lots of moisture in it,
(13:10):
the way starts to come out and mix with the
salt and it makes this brine that keeps the cheese
fresher for a longer period of time. For Fetah, which
is delicious because I'm literally just rubbing my tummy and
licking my lips over here. That was one of the
hardest parts of researching this podcast is when I when
I got to a couple of the cheeses that are
delicious and also very salty, and I wanted some real bad.
(13:34):
So Grease became an important area for the development of cheese.
And just like with the earliest cheesemakers, the Greeks were
making fresh cheeses for daily eating, but they were also
exporting cheese, so they were developing these harder, hardier varieties
of cheese that could survive voyages. Yes, we have a
wonderful glimpse of how these hard cheeses were being made
(13:55):
in Grease, thanks in part to Odyssease's encounter with the
Cyclops in the Odyssey. Um. Even though that is a
work of fiction, we're pretty much seeing a play by
play of how people were making cheese at a time. Uh.
The Cyclops coagulated the milk, probably using rennet and maybe
also fix sapp and then he pressed and dried what
(14:16):
he got from that. Uh. The Odyssey doesn't mention that
he salted it, but probably based on other evidence at
the time, he would have been salted what he got
from that process, um, And he would have pressed it
and let it dry, and it would have formed a
rind as it dried. There were drying racks described in
(14:38):
Cyclops's cave, and so the result of this would have
been a dried pecorino or a caprino cheese. And this
is probably the first description of a rennet coagulated cheese
in literature. And the takeaway from the Odyssey is that
by ancient Greece people had figured out how to coagulate
press in salt cheeses in this way that would make
(15:00):
a grind and would be suitable for aging, which is
so fabulous that it's in the Odyssey, of all places,
this record of cheesemaking. Centuries later, people in Grease added
a cooking step also which allowed cheeses with an even
lower moisture content, which would make them last even longer.
And in Sicily, hard cheeses became wildly popular and by
(15:22):
the fourth century b C. Their native cuisine at that
point was full of grated cheese and cheese sauces. It
was so prevalent that there were cheese naysayers. They were
They were sort of the the Sicilian fourth century BC
version of the angry food critic, who would be like,
why does there have to be cheese sauce on everything?
(15:44):
Just let the fish stand on its own, because it's
so delicious, it's so yummy. So cheesemaking in Rome started
a lot like it did in Grease, with people making
heat coagulated fresh cheeses using these vessels which I called
milk boilers. So while the cheeses were these coagulated kurds
(16:06):
and whay kind of process, Uh, the vessels that they
were using were kind of unique to uh to what's
Italy today. Um. Based on the distribution of these milk boilers,
which were ceramic things that kept the milk from foaming
over the top. Uh, it's clear that making soft cheeses
(16:31):
were was an important staple in the Bronze Age all
over Rome. These were actually still in use in Italy
as ceramic milk boilers until the nineteenth century, and then
metal ones became in more common use after that point.
There is an interesting symbiosis um that happened between cheesemaking
(16:53):
and pig farming in Rome. The way that they were
extracting during the ricotta process was actually a great food
for fouttening up pigs and making them also delicious, So
they would milk lots of animals, get lots of milk,
separate the curds from the way, feed the way to pigs,
and then have work to eat. Uh as the Greek influence,
(17:16):
so we had just talked about how in Greece they
were making these smaller, harder cheeses. So as Greek influence
spread in Rome, hard Jesus did as well, and by
the seventh century BC, grated cheeses were a big part
of the diet in Rome also. And there are many
many Roman writers who put together very detailed agricultural manuals,
(17:40):
and if you care to do so, you can read
so much about how people were making cheese in ancient room.
Thanks to these writers. UH and in Rome people would
raise large flocks of sheep to produce both cheese and wool.
At that point they had developed sheep farming that was
geared more towards bowl production, and they used the way
left over again from the cheesemaking to feed the pigs.
(18:03):
And they also started experimenting. And this is where it
gets really good for me personally, with smoked cheeses uh,
and also cooked cheeses and much larger cheeses than the
smaller sized pecorino and caprinos. Uh. Those stay small so
that the the milk and fluid from the middle can
evaporate more and they'll keep longer. But then bigger cheeses
(18:26):
became technologically more doable. Right. The most famous giant thing
of cheese in in ancient room was called La Luna.
Probably the accounts at the time are really exaggerated because
they're described it as this like giant thing of cheese. Um.
It was probably not as giant as it has often described.
(18:50):
But people were using cooking and high pressure pressing to
get more of the liquid out of the middle so
that they were able to make bigger and bigger cheeses.
Is how how big is it described? Could a family
afore live in it um. One writer described it as
being able to provide lunches for hundreds of your servants
(19:12):
and from just one. Probably not actually that big, uh.
Some of this innovation of of combining cooking and high
pressure pressing may have come from the Celts, who were
living in the Alpine regions. They also were known as
great cheesemakers, and they had been making bigger cheeses than
the little ones that had been coming out of Greece.
(19:34):
The Celts may have also started the practice of salting
the smaller kurds before pressing them together into one larger cheese,
so again the salt was making it into the middle
of a bigger cheese cylinder and preventing spoilage. I like
how it's all about making the cheese bigger and bigger.
So much about making the cheese bigger, And there's obstacles
when you're working with those kinds of more manual processes
(19:58):
to try to get them middle of the cheese dry
enough so that it doesn't spoil in the middle while
the outside is drying. Now, So where what we've gotten
up to you at this point is the end of
the Roman Empire before the Roman Empire fell, it spread
(20:20):
military outposts and agricultural manner estates all over the place.
Both the military outposts and the manner estates had dairying
and cheesemaking tools, so when the Roman Empire fell, all
of that stuff was left behind that people then continued
to use to make their own new types of cheeses,
(20:42):
and those new types developed all sort of on their
own trajectories, based on the factors that we've already talked about,
Like there was human curiosity and ingenuity, but also, um,
you know what was available nearby, you know, weather conditions, uh,
what the people that were there already knew, etcetera. Uh.
(21:02):
So this continued to be true even as the manners
broke up into tinier farmers where people only had one
or two animals instead of like a whole herd to
produce cheese from. Right. So in in France, uh, soft
ripened peasant cheeses began to develop. This was basically using
the same cheesemaking methods that had been common in the Mediterranean,
(21:26):
but in the cooler climate of northern France. People could
hang onto their milk for a couple of days before
they made cheese out of it, so in the Mediterranean
that would have spoiled almost immediately, but where the weather
was cooler, you could milk your cow and then milk
your cow again the next day, and then maybe one
more day after that and put that all together to
make cheese out of and the cheet the milk from
(21:48):
the first day of milking at that point would have
more lactic acid bacteria in it. Being able to put
all of that together and then put what you got
as a result into a nice cool cellar meant that
you could control the spoilage that was going on. And
that's how friends cheesemakers were coming up with bloomy rind cheeses,
(22:10):
lactic cheeses, and washed rind cheeses. These were all things
that were having bacterial activity going on in the inside
of the cheese that was creating this rind that is
often edible, that is basically mold. Oh, you're making the
most hungry things delicious. Fault uh. And while manners uh,
(22:31):
we're crumbling into smaller farms in other parts of Europe.
In England, many of them stayed intact until the end
of the Middle Ages, so many of those manners had
like a dairy maid who would supervise all of the
dairy ing, and most of the cheese in those manners
came from the sheep rather than the cows for most
of the Middle Ages, and they continued to follow and
refine many of the more hard cheese trends that the
(22:53):
Romans had been using, so they have their whole own
cheese culture. Again, not meaning to be punny, but they're
our own methodologies and approach to it happening as well
right uh in the thirteenth century. So part way through
the Middle Ages, the sheep who were being used for
milking were also used for wool, and the cows used
for milking were also used for meat and leather. But
(23:16):
right around the thirteenth century people started to divide that
up a little bit, so sheep were there for wool,
there were dairy cows who were just for milking, and
then there were other cows that were being used for
their meat and their their leather. Um. This is also
about the time that the English dairying started to move
two cows from sheep because cow's milk separates more easily
(23:40):
into cream to make butter out of, and people were
becoming very fond of butter in England, a series of
illnesses and really wet seasons, which are bad for sheep,
also brought down the sheep population, making the use of
cow's milk to make cheese a little bit more of
a necessity. And in the mountains of Europe in the
(24:00):
Middle Ages, uh so the mountainous reasons, cheeses had to
be very sturdy and rugged, both because you had to
bring them down out of the mountains and later export them. Uh.
And for example, one of my very favorite cheeses so yummy, Oh,
I love the stuff. Uh. The animals were generally pastured
up on the mountains uh, and then the people working
(24:23):
with them would live there with the animals, make the
cheese there, and then it would have to travel downward.
This not that the people who were making cheese and
the Alps had to work around the lack of salt,
because to get salt to the animals where you were
doing the milking and making the cheese, you would have
to transport it up there, and that would be difficult
and expensive. So cheesemakers and the alps figured out ways
(24:44):
to cut the curds to make them smaller and cook
more of the moisture out of them. And put the
curds into a more wheel shaped form. A lot of
the cheeses before this point were more like cylinders than wheels,
so putting it into more of a wheel shaped form
would give more surface area for better evaporation. So some
of these Alpine cheese is actually had holes or eyes,
(25:07):
and that was from the collection of carbon dioxide during aging.
There was bacteria in there that would flourish in those
conditions and create these little pockets. Uh, they would give
off carbon dioxide as they reproduced, and that carbon dioxide
would collect. Yeah, it would collect in little holes, so
that the holes that you think of in Swiss cheese
that's from bacteria propagating cheese is really just disgusting and
(25:32):
so good I can get past any of the disgusting parts,
and that's actually incidentally what gives it that sort of
nutty flavor, right, so I'll take it. Another mountain cheese
that came from the Middle Ages is rogue furt, and
the veins and roque fruit cheese are from Penicillium roque fortie,
which grows in the caves where it was aged. Real
(25:53):
rogue fruit cheese today comes from these same caves where
it was originally aged in the Middle Ages and well
up infested with the s bacteria that gave it its
look and its flavor. Parmesan also came about during Middle Ages,
though it was not from the mountains, and the techniques
used to produce it are common in the mountains, but
there was plenty of salt in the Po River valley
(26:15):
where it originated, so they didn't have quite the same
limitations in terms of resource availability. But it uses techniques
very similar to the Alpine cheese, is just with the
salt that the Alpine people didn't have. And this is
where I wanted some really salty parmesan so bad yesterday
when I was working on the cheese. So by the
(26:35):
Middle Ages, a lot of the cheeses that we eat
today had had been developed, at least in their earlier forms.
I mean, there are many revisions and tweaks to cheeses
that have happened since then, but lots and lots of
the ones that we are most familiar with existed in
some form by the end of the Middle Ages. One
exception is the cheese that comes from Holland, where commercial
(26:58):
dairying did not even start and till the fifteenth century.
Because the land and the climate were just not right
for it. There had been some very small farming and
dairy operations on the coast since the Neolithic period, though,
but just not enough to really form an industry around it.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the aristocracy in
(27:20):
Holland started trying to reclaim Holland's frontier and turn it
into workable land. They did not have very many people
to try to do this, it was not a vastly
settled area, so they would reward peasants who would clear
and work land with big grants of land, and what
they were basically doing is trying to turn bogs into
farmlands by using pumps and dikes to get all the
(27:43):
water out of it. Um As they were able to
reclaim more land, they started by growing grains and then
eventually moved from growing food to dairy and then so
many cheeses. The dairy farms actually became really really specialized
and they put out an insane variety of cheese is
(28:03):
through various innovations in packaging, equipment, et cetera. Once they
had the technology, they went wild, sort of expanding and
customizing it, which I love English cheesemakers at the time,
we're responding to demand, while Holland didn't have those constraints,
so they could just invent new cheese that people wanted.
So that's where we get an assortment of deliciousness, including
(28:27):
edam gouda um. Different kinds of packaging came from that
sort of pocket of innovation, the round instead of square wheels.
Thank you Holland. There was a whole in England at
that particular point there was this whole kind of drama
going on with cheese. There was a cheesemonger's essentially union
(28:48):
that was recognized by the government that had been really
controlling that cheese making around London, and then that went
horribly awry and they had to start looking to other
parts of England to make cheese, and that led to
basically the whole of English cheesemaking being about how do
we meet the demands of London. Holland did not have
this problem. They kind of had a the rich luxury
(29:10):
of a playground relate. It just kind of developed cheese
they thought would be neat. So when you see these
these cheeses that have really lovely colored coatings, there's sort
of like a firm and resilient nuttiness to them. A
lot of that is coming from the combination of what
the climate is like in Holland and then the fact
that they sort of just got to go, let's think
(29:33):
up some new stuff. Let's see what happens if we
wash this cheese with this other animal product. Let's think
up cheese so good. Uh So, eventually colonists brought cheese
and cheesemaking pretty much everywhere that people were colonizing. She's
traveled with everybody because apparently a lot of people loved
(29:54):
it then too, Yes, and it's a very valuable new
food source. I mean it's it started as sort of
an necessity of how can we make this milk not
immediately be bad? And then people discovered that, yeah, this
is actually a good source of nourishment in a lot
of ways. Uh And the Industrial Revolution really changed things
because it mechanized a lot of these processes that had
(30:16):
been kind of what we would consider artisan handcrafted. Right. So,
whereas before the Industrial Revolution, making cheese was highly highly
dependent upon the weather and the climate and the altitude
and the everything, um, the Industrial Revolution made it possible
for people to kind of replicate those conditions in other places.
(30:40):
And so rather than saying, hey, okay, we have cheddar
cheese that we're making, and we're going to try to
figure out how to make cheddar cheese approximately in this
not very English climate, uh, and then winding up with
some other cheese, it's becomes a lot more possible during
the Industrial Revolution to say, Okay, we're going to replicate
(31:01):
this technique and also replicate the conditions that were present
elsewhere to make this cheese that that will be more
like what we are thinking about from where we used
to live. And in the US, you know, there wasn't
the long term cultural heritage that Europe had going into
cheese development, and the cheese factories just kind of blossomed. Uh.
(31:25):
People had I mean they had families, and people had
their family heritage and they knew how their grandmother had
made cheese before the family had made their way to
the to the colonies. But there was not quite the
institution of cheesemaking as this long many many generations of
things in one particular place. So the US became a
(31:46):
huge center of making an exporting cheese, and in some
cases traditional techniques have kind of died out because of
the mechanization mechanization as well as supply and demand. Mozzarella
in most places as not made the same way it
once was. Now it's it's the mozzarella was sort of
a handcrafted cheese in Italy that was made in very
(32:07):
small batches, and you can make it in a big
factory with machines, which a lot of the cheese today
big factory with machines rather than the previous handcrafted sort
of small batches. As we've seen with many things. There
is of course now an artisan cheese movement where people
are making things in small batches using the same basic
(32:29):
techniques that people were using hundreds or thousands of years ago.
M I just want to think about cheese for a
little while longer. Right now, you have today a lot
of efforts to sort of label the cheeses as quote
(32:50):
the real thing. So like roquefort, you can only call
a cheese roquefort if it was actually made in those caves.
People can apply eximate roquefort like cheeses elsewhere, but it
can't carry the name, right, it cannot carry the name.
There are protected designation of Origin or p d O
labels that label where the cheese came from. Or the
(33:14):
geographical indication or the the g I label of where
the cheese came from. And it's sort of like wines
and how Champagne's are only supposed to come from Champagne
and not California sparkling wines. Not everyne right, and not
every blue cheese is rot. Oh. I love cheese. It's
(33:38):
hard not to wax rhapsodic about cheese. There is so much.
That's when when I said, hey, let's do a podcast
about cheese. I think what you said is I could
do I can't remember which cheese it was that you said.
We were like, I could do a whole podcast about
probably probably or she toast, which is the Norwegian cheese
that I'm a big fan of. I think it's usually
(33:58):
called brunost over there. We call it. That's kind of
the what it's usually exported as. But it's phenomenal and
it has a sweet, nutty it's a brown cheese. It's phenomenal. Yes,
So don't say that a lot. There is so much
to learn about cheese beyond this sort of the origins
of cheese is that we've talked about today. We will
link to lots of places to learn about more about
(34:21):
cheese and our show notes when we put those up
after this podcast comes out. Hey, since these episodes that
we're sharing our past classics, we have some updated information
that will supersede the contact stuff you've heard before. If
(34:41):
you want to email us, our email address is History
Podcast at houst works dot com, and you can find
us across the spectrum of social media as miss did History.
You can also find us at missed in history dot com,
and you can visit our parent company, how stu Works,
at how stu works dot com. For more on this
(35:03):
and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
Happy Saturday. It is Saturday Classic Time. And then, just
just in case you have not heard of this yet,
this is an episode from our archive that we are
sharing again over the weekend to help newer listeners to
the show get a taste of our back catalog. If
you have listened to all of the podcast episodes already
and you are down for a real listen, this is
(00:23):
for you too, so welcome. Hey, newsflash, cheese is delicious
so good. I don't think most people would be surprised
by that information. Uh and just like everything else on earth, though,
it has a history all its own. This episode originally
aired in February, but the story of how cheese came
to be a staple of the human diet is just
as delicious today as it was four years ago. Maybe
(00:46):
grab some delicious bread or whatever else sounds yummy. We
heard from listeners when this episode first aired that it
made them quite hungry and join us for a little
bit of cheese history. Welcome to Stuff you missed in
history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hi, and
(01:13):
welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying, and today we're going to talk about
something we both love so much. Is it's like one
of our favoritest things. It is it is cheese. Cheese
has a nine thousand year history and the varieties that
we have of it today are mostly the products of
(01:34):
little tweaks that people have made throughout history for one
reason or another. Um. Basically, every cheese that we have
today has some kind of story to tell about where
it came from that's tied to the animals that were
being raised, what the weather and climate were like, the
people making the cheese, whether it had to be stored
or shipped or anything like that. UM. A lot of
(01:56):
these refinements come straight from human ingenuity and cure reosity,
but it's also a very necessity is the mother of
invention kind of story. Making cheese is a balancing act
with milk and how much moisture, salt, and bacteria are
in that milk, and what people's lives were like when
they were trying to make cheese. So I'm excited and
(02:18):
it's kind of interesting from an anthropological standpoint because as
people have spread out, cheese went with them. So it
really has um brought its own flavor to be punny. Unfortunately,
of two various cultures, Like cheese informs cultures in an
interesting way. Hand the cultures informed the cheese. Yes, I
(02:39):
love it. I did not mean for that to be
a pun, but that's what came out. We're being all
puney and reciprocal in the cheese cycle. So here's the
legend of where cheese came from. And and there are
a couple of problems with this legend. Uh that gets
it gets passed around, it's it's fact. So according to
the lore, someone, a person in some Arab country was
(03:04):
traveling a very long way carrying milk in a skin
that was made from an animal's stomach um. And when
he got ready to take a drink of milk, he
discovered it had curdled into cheese. Uh. This may have
been how people discovered rennet, which is the an enzyme
from animal stomach that is used to make cheese. But
it's probably not where cheese came from for a couple
(03:26):
of reasons. One is that before people started eating cheese,
milk was pretty much just for babies because adult humans
could not digest lactose um, they couldn't make lactase, which
is the enzyme that breaks up breaks down lactose after
they were babies. So unless this guy was traveling a
long way with a baby, he didn't really have a
(03:47):
good reason to be carrying a skin of milk with him.
Or maybe he was going to visit a baby. Maybe,
but maybe people didn't often carry milk around in skins
because it was a high risk of spoilage. It really
milk was consumed fresh and only buy babies until after
cheese was discovered slash invented. A more likely scenario is
(04:09):
that people discovered that if you left milk out, it
would solidify and coagulate, and if you've worked at it
a little bit, you can separate that into curds and
way and it's not far to get from that to cheese.
So that's a little more likely than the animal skin
carrying story. Just keep thinking about cheese. So the more
(04:30):
likely history, uh, you know, by about seven thousand BC,
people living in the Fertile Crescent had started to domesticate
animals and they were cultivating plants, so they had sheep
and goats, and goats in particular were used. Uh. They
were accustomed to living in relatively confined spaces like caves,
so they would have been very easy to domesticate at
(04:51):
that point. If you look at evidence from that long ago,
the goats and sheep that were being kept were probably
more about and meat than milk, because there wasn't an
overwhelming number of female animals versus male animals. Um. They
also look at what ages the animals were its slaughter.
(05:12):
Farming for wool also would have come later, because sheep
that far in the past didn't really have usable wool
as their hair um, so the earliest sheep probably mostly
used as a source of meat. So several things had
to have had to happen for people to wind up
making cheese. They had to have a reason to want
(05:35):
to pasture animals and use pastured animals as a as
a food source. They had to have animals that could
give them more milk than their own young needed, which
would have taken some generations of breeding to get animals
that produce more milk. I love this one. They had
to know how to milk the animals. That had to
(05:56):
have been an interesting trial and error yes, well, and
then the animals had to allow themselves to be milked
by people, which is another thing. You know, animals can
be very obstinate, so this is another thing that would
have required some effort. And lastly, they would have needed
a way to store the milk, but as we talked
about before, there are some difficulties with using skins for
(06:17):
storing milk. This worked out to be pottery um or
more specifically, the discovery that you could apply heat to
clay and turn it into pottery. And so once we
had all those things together at the same place at
the same time, people were able to develop cheese, and
this happened at about b C in the western half
(06:38):
of what is Turkey today. We can look at shards
of pottery from that era and know that people were
raising animals for milk because there are milk fat residues
and the pottery shards um and the proportion of male
and female animals also changes in the anthropological record at
that point, so you would could because you would need
(06:58):
more females to be produced in the milk. Yes. Now,
probably this milk started out as a food source for babies,
as we mentioned earlier, since humans had not adapted their
ability to process lactose. Uh. But they would have quickly
figured out since they didn't have refrigeration, that that milk
sitting out was going to coagulate, and that they could
(07:20):
turn up the curds and way when they started. Most
of the lactose stays in the way when you separate
the curds from the way, so adults could eat the
curds and get all the nutritional value with either no
problems or fewer problems. From a digestive standpoint, Yes, from
a digestive standpoint, if you or anyone you know is
(07:42):
lactose intolerant, you have a sense of what that is
all about. Um. So, curds were a really valuable source
of nourishments, so people had a good incentive to figure
out an easy way to separate curds from way, and
this came in the form of perforated ceramic canister. We
have lots of archaeological evidence for people using ceramic containers
(08:06):
with UH with perforations in them to separate curds and
whey uh. There's also been some series about woven baskets
as well, right, but those don't really scrutiny long term.
They don't hold up as well over thousands of years,
so we don't have as much concrete evidence of whether
people were using woven baskets to make cheese by separating
curds and whey um. Based on the fat residues in pottery,
(08:31):
we think people also figured out how to make things
like butter at about the same time. The earliest cheeses
were all They were fresh cheeses. They were more like
today's ricotta or other soft kind of curdy cheeses. People
would have eaten them quickly since they would spoil without refrigeration. UM.
(08:51):
They also may have sealed and buried these cheeses to
try to keep them out of the sun, keep them
a little cooler, and they would also the curds could
dry in the sun. UH And it's possible that rennant
the enzymes from animal stomach is used to ferment, were
discovered at this time as well. The record isn't super clear.
It's not as easy to find residue of something on
(09:13):
an animal skin that's broken down over time as it
would be ceramic, but it's a likelihood. So really, cheesemaking
then spread out from the Fertile Crescent. We have lots
of pottery shards as evidence that showed the progression of cheese,
along with lots and lots of other things spreading out
UH during the Neolithic migration, people were making cheese and
(09:35):
butter from the milk of cows, goats, and sheep um.
And one of the most recent discoveries of this progression
is from not too long ago, and it was a
seven thousand, five hundred year old piece of pottery that
was almost certainly used to make cheese and what is
Poland today. They did the same thing of looking at
(09:57):
the residues that were on the inside of the pottery
and what they were made of. And so for many years,
even with this uh migrational progression outward from where it started,
the cheeses still remained like the fresh acid coagulated and
rennet coagulated cheeses. So they still hadn't gotten to the
aged cheese concepts. And in some parts of the world
(10:18):
that that's that continued to be for always what people
were making. An example is in India. India has a
really old tradition of using dairy products with lots of
ghee which is clarified butter, and using kurds in their cuisine.
But the only cheese that's indigenous to India is paneer,
(10:39):
which is a soft cheese meant to be eaten fresh.
There are lots of different theories for why India did
not develop aged cheeses, and one of them is that
there is such a focus on food purity in religious
texts in that part of the world that people were
probably not down with the idea of letting things mold
on purpose and then eating them to Uh. The climate
(11:02):
in in India is also not great for the controlled
spoilage that is really what aging cheese is all about. Yeah,
you know, I'm imagining that conversation. No, no, it will
be delicious, No, it will be rotted. Uh. But thankfully
that worked out. Uh. And as soon as cheese became
an important important as part of people's diets, it also
(11:24):
took on religious significance. Offerings of cheese were made to
the gods, for example, the Sumerian goddess and Nana who
got daily offerings of cheese and butter, and a number
of Greek gods and goddesses who had cheese among their offerings.
There are also lots and lots of references to cheese
in many religious texts from all over the world. Uh.
(11:45):
It didn't take long though, before people started seeing the
need to be able to store cheese to eat it later.
Instead of being able to make it and consume it
within a day or two. So around four b c. E,
Hittite writing starts describing more thaie of cheese that sound
a little bit more like the harder cheeses that we
have today. We don't have really good evidence of all
(12:08):
of them. We have more descriptions in writing, but they
include descriptions like scoured cheese and hard soldier cheese. So
there's the logical conclusion that they developed ways of aging
the cheese to make it harder to take down the
water content and the cheese so that it would last
longer um and being able to form a rind on
(12:28):
the cheese. But we don't have a lot of, like
very clear pottery evidence to go with that. It's mostly
written descriptions that people are drawing conclusions from. The first
recorded shipment of cheese took place in twelve through the
Mediterranean Sea, which is further evidence that people have developed
cheeses that would keep. At that point, most of the
(12:50):
cheeses that were being shipped around were probably brind cheeses
like fetta that were stored in ceramic jars. And the
reason that even though these cheeses are very soft and wet.
The reason that they last for longer is that there's
lots and lots of salt in them. Um, if you
dry salt white cheese that has lots of moisture in it,
(13:10):
the way starts to come out and mix with the
salt and it makes this brine that keeps the cheese
fresher for a longer period of time. For Fetah, which
is delicious because I'm literally just rubbing my tummy and
licking my lips over here. That was one of the
hardest parts of researching this podcast is when I when
I got to a couple of the cheeses that are
delicious and also very salty, and I wanted some real bad.
(13:34):
So Grease became an important area for the development of cheese.
And just like with the earliest cheesemakers, the Greeks were
making fresh cheeses for daily eating, but they were also
exporting cheese, so they were developing these harder, hardier varieties
of cheese that could survive voyages. Yes, we have a
wonderful glimpse of how these hard cheeses were being made
(13:55):
in Grease, thanks in part to Odyssease's encounter with the
Cyclops in the Odyssey. Um. Even though that is a
work of fiction, we're pretty much seeing a play by
play of how people were making cheese at a time. Uh.
The Cyclops coagulated the milk, probably using rennet and maybe
also fix sapp and then he pressed and dried what
(14:16):
he got from that. Uh. The Odyssey doesn't mention that
he salted it, but probably based on other evidence at
the time, he would have been salted what he got
from that process, um, And he would have pressed it
and let it dry, and it would have formed a
rind as it dried. There were drying racks described in
(14:38):
Cyclops's cave, and so the result of this would have
been a dried pecorino or a caprino cheese. And this
is probably the first description of a rennet coagulated cheese
in literature. And the takeaway from the Odyssey is that
by ancient Greece people had figured out how to coagulate
press in salt cheeses in this way that would make
(15:00):
a grind and would be suitable for aging, which is
so fabulous that it's in the Odyssey, of all places,
this record of cheesemaking. Centuries later, people in Grease added
a cooking step also which allowed cheeses with an even
lower moisture content, which would make them last even longer.
And in Sicily, hard cheeses became wildly popular and by
(15:22):
the fourth century b C. Their native cuisine at that
point was full of grated cheese and cheese sauces. It
was so prevalent that there were cheese naysayers. They were
They were sort of the the Sicilian fourth century BC
version of the angry food critic, who would be like,
why does there have to be cheese sauce on everything?
(15:44):
Just let the fish stand on its own, because it's
so delicious, it's so yummy. So cheesemaking in Rome started
a lot like it did in Grease, with people making
heat coagulated fresh cheeses using these vessels which I called
milk boilers. So while the cheeses were these coagulated kurds
(16:06):
and whay kind of process, Uh, the vessels that they
were using were kind of unique to uh to what's
Italy today. Um. Based on the distribution of these milk boilers,
which were ceramic things that kept the milk from foaming
over the top. Uh, it's clear that making soft cheeses
(16:31):
were was an important staple in the Bronze Age all
over Rome. These were actually still in use in Italy
as ceramic milk boilers until the nineteenth century, and then
metal ones became in more common use after that point.
There is an interesting symbiosis um that happened between cheesemaking
(16:53):
and pig farming in Rome. The way that they were
extracting during the ricotta process was actually a great food
for fouttening up pigs and making them also delicious, So
they would milk lots of animals, get lots of milk,
separate the curds from the way, feed the way to pigs,
and then have work to eat. Uh as the Greek influence,
(17:16):
so we had just talked about how in Greece they
were making these smaller, harder cheeses. So as Greek influence
spread in Rome, hard Jesus did as well, and by
the seventh century BC, grated cheeses were a big part
of the diet in Rome also. And there are many
many Roman writers who put together very detailed agricultural manuals,
(17:40):
and if you care to do so, you can read
so much about how people were making cheese in ancient room.
Thanks to these writers. UH and in Rome people would
raise large flocks of sheep to produce both cheese and wool.
At that point they had developed sheep farming that was
geared more towards bowl production, and they used the way
left over again from the cheesemaking to feed the pigs.
(18:03):
And they also started experimenting. And this is where it
gets really good for me personally, with smoked cheeses uh,
and also cooked cheeses and much larger cheeses than the
smaller sized pecorino and caprinos. Uh. Those stay small so
that the the milk and fluid from the middle can
evaporate more and they'll keep longer. But then bigger cheeses
(18:26):
became technologically more doable. Right. The most famous giant thing
of cheese in in ancient room was called La Luna.
Probably the accounts at the time are really exaggerated because
they're described it as this like giant thing of cheese. Um.
It was probably not as giant as it has often described.
(18:50):
But people were using cooking and high pressure pressing to
get more of the liquid out of the middle so
that they were able to make bigger and bigger cheeses.
Is how how big is it described? Could a family
afore live in it um. One writer described it as
being able to provide lunches for hundreds of your servants
(19:12):
and from just one. Probably not actually that big, uh.
Some of this innovation of of combining cooking and high
pressure pressing may have come from the Celts, who were
living in the Alpine regions. They also were known as
great cheesemakers, and they had been making bigger cheeses than
the little ones that had been coming out of Greece.
(19:34):
The Celts may have also started the practice of salting
the smaller kurds before pressing them together into one larger cheese,
so again the salt was making it into the middle
of a bigger cheese cylinder and preventing spoilage. I like
how it's all about making the cheese bigger and bigger.
So much about making the cheese bigger, And there's obstacles
when you're working with those kinds of more manual processes
(19:58):
to try to get them middle of the cheese dry
enough so that it doesn't spoil in the middle while
the outside is drying. Now, So where what we've gotten
up to you at this point is the end of
the Roman Empire before the Roman Empire fell, it spread
(20:20):
military outposts and agricultural manner estates all over the place.
Both the military outposts and the manner estates had dairying
and cheesemaking tools, so when the Roman Empire fell, all
of that stuff was left behind that people then continued
to use to make their own new types of cheeses,
(20:42):
and those new types developed all sort of on their
own trajectories, based on the factors that we've already talked about,
Like there was human curiosity and ingenuity, but also, um,
you know what was available nearby, you know, weather conditions, uh,
what the people that were there already knew, etcetera. Uh.
(21:02):
So this continued to be true even as the manners
broke up into tinier farmers where people only had one
or two animals instead of like a whole herd to
produce cheese from. Right. So in in France, uh, soft
ripened peasant cheeses began to develop. This was basically using
the same cheesemaking methods that had been common in the Mediterranean,
(21:26):
but in the cooler climate of northern France. People could
hang onto their milk for a couple of days before
they made cheese out of it, so in the Mediterranean
that would have spoiled almost immediately, but where the weather
was cooler, you could milk your cow and then milk
your cow again the next day, and then maybe one
more day after that and put that all together to
make cheese out of and the cheet the milk from
(21:48):
the first day of milking at that point would have
more lactic acid bacteria in it. Being able to put
all of that together and then put what you got
as a result into a nice cool cellar meant that
you could control the spoilage that was going on. And
that's how friends cheesemakers were coming up with bloomy rind cheeses,
(22:10):
lactic cheeses, and washed rind cheeses. These were all things
that were having bacterial activity going on in the inside
of the cheese that was creating this rind that is
often edible, that is basically mold. Oh, you're making the
most hungry things delicious. Fault uh. And while manners uh,
(22:31):
we're crumbling into smaller farms in other parts of Europe.
In England, many of them stayed intact until the end
of the Middle Ages, so many of those manners had
like a dairy maid who would supervise all of the
dairy ing, and most of the cheese in those manners
came from the sheep rather than the cows for most
of the Middle Ages, and they continued to follow and
refine many of the more hard cheese trends that the
(22:53):
Romans had been using, so they have their whole own
cheese culture. Again, not meaning to be punny, but they're
our own methodologies and approach to it happening as well
right uh in the thirteenth century. So part way through
the Middle Ages, the sheep who were being used for
milking were also used for wool, and the cows used
for milking were also used for meat and leather. But
(23:16):
right around the thirteenth century people started to divide that
up a little bit, so sheep were there for wool,
there were dairy cows who were just for milking, and
then there were other cows that were being used for
their meat and their their leather. Um. This is also
about the time that the English dairying started to move
two cows from sheep because cow's milk separates more easily
(23:40):
into cream to make butter out of, and people were
becoming very fond of butter in England, a series of
illnesses and really wet seasons, which are bad for sheep,
also brought down the sheep population, making the use of
cow's milk to make cheese a little bit more of
a necessity. And in the mountains of Europe in the
(24:00):
Middle Ages, uh so the mountainous reasons, cheeses had to
be very sturdy and rugged, both because you had to
bring them down out of the mountains and later export them. Uh.
And for example, one of my very favorite cheeses so yummy, Oh,
I love the stuff. Uh. The animals were generally pastured
up on the mountains uh, and then the people working
(24:23):
with them would live there with the animals, make the
cheese there, and then it would have to travel downward.
This not that the people who were making cheese and
the Alps had to work around the lack of salt,
because to get salt to the animals where you were
doing the milking and making the cheese, you would have
to transport it up there, and that would be difficult
and expensive. So cheesemakers and the alps figured out ways
(24:44):
to cut the curds to make them smaller and cook
more of the moisture out of them. And put the
curds into a more wheel shaped form. A lot of
the cheeses before this point were more like cylinders than wheels,
so putting it into more of a wheel shaped form
would give more surface area for better evaporation. So some
of these Alpine cheese is actually had holes or eyes,
(25:07):
and that was from the collection of carbon dioxide during aging.
There was bacteria in there that would flourish in those
conditions and create these little pockets. Uh, they would give
off carbon dioxide as they reproduced, and that carbon dioxide
would collect. Yeah, it would collect in little holes, so
that the holes that you think of in Swiss cheese
that's from bacteria propagating cheese is really just disgusting and
(25:32):
so good I can get past any of the disgusting parts,
and that's actually incidentally what gives it that sort of
nutty flavor, right, so I'll take it. Another mountain cheese
that came from the Middle Ages is rogue furt, and
the veins and roque fruit cheese are from Penicillium roque fortie,
which grows in the caves where it was aged. Real
(25:53):
rogue fruit cheese today comes from these same caves where
it was originally aged in the Middle Ages and well
up infested with the s bacteria that gave it its
look and its flavor. Parmesan also came about during Middle Ages,
though it was not from the mountains, and the techniques
used to produce it are common in the mountains, but
there was plenty of salt in the Po River valley
(26:15):
where it originated, so they didn't have quite the same
limitations in terms of resource availability. But it uses techniques
very similar to the Alpine cheese, is just with the
salt that the Alpine people didn't have. And this is
where I wanted some really salty parmesan so bad yesterday
when I was working on the cheese. So by the
(26:35):
Middle Ages, a lot of the cheeses that we eat
today had had been developed, at least in their earlier forms.
I mean, there are many revisions and tweaks to cheeses
that have happened since then, but lots and lots of
the ones that we are most familiar with existed in
some form by the end of the Middle Ages. One
exception is the cheese that comes from Holland, where commercial
(26:58):
dairying did not even start and till the fifteenth century.
Because the land and the climate were just not right
for it. There had been some very small farming and
dairy operations on the coast since the Neolithic period, though,
but just not enough to really form an industry around it.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the aristocracy in
(27:20):
Holland started trying to reclaim Holland's frontier and turn it
into workable land. They did not have very many people
to try to do this, it was not a vastly
settled area, so they would reward peasants who would clear
and work land with big grants of land, and what
they were basically doing is trying to turn bogs into
farmlands by using pumps and dikes to get all the
(27:43):
water out of it. Um As they were able to
reclaim more land, they started by growing grains and then
eventually moved from growing food to dairy and then so
many cheeses. The dairy farms actually became really really specialized
and they put out an insane variety of cheese is
(28:03):
through various innovations in packaging, equipment, et cetera. Once they
had the technology, they went wild, sort of expanding and
customizing it, which I love English cheesemakers at the time,
we're responding to demand, while Holland didn't have those constraints,
so they could just invent new cheese that people wanted.
So that's where we get an assortment of deliciousness, including
(28:27):
edam gouda um. Different kinds of packaging came from that
sort of pocket of innovation, the round instead of square wheels.
Thank you Holland. There was a whole in England at
that particular point there was this whole kind of drama
going on with cheese. There was a cheesemonger's essentially union
(28:48):
that was recognized by the government that had been really
controlling that cheese making around London, and then that went
horribly awry and they had to start looking to other
parts of England to make cheese, and that led to
basically the whole of English cheesemaking being about how do
we meet the demands of London. Holland did not have
this problem. They kind of had a the rich luxury
(29:10):
of a playground relate. It just kind of developed cheese
they thought would be neat. So when you see these
these cheeses that have really lovely colored coatings, there's sort
of like a firm and resilient nuttiness to them. A
lot of that is coming from the combination of what
the climate is like in Holland and then the fact
that they sort of just got to go, let's think
(29:33):
up some new stuff. Let's see what happens if we
wash this cheese with this other animal product. Let's think
up cheese so good. Uh So, eventually colonists brought cheese
and cheesemaking pretty much everywhere that people were colonizing. She's
traveled with everybody because apparently a lot of people loved
(29:54):
it then too, Yes, and it's a very valuable new
food source. I mean it's it started as sort of
an necessity of how can we make this milk not
immediately be bad? And then people discovered that, yeah, this
is actually a good source of nourishment in a lot
of ways. Uh And the Industrial Revolution really changed things
because it mechanized a lot of these processes that had
(30:16):
been kind of what we would consider artisan handcrafted. Right. So,
whereas before the Industrial Revolution, making cheese was highly highly
dependent upon the weather and the climate and the altitude
and the everything, um, the Industrial Revolution made it possible
for people to kind of replicate those conditions in other places.
(30:40):
And so rather than saying, hey, okay, we have cheddar
cheese that we're making, and we're going to try to
figure out how to make cheddar cheese approximately in this
not very English climate, uh, and then winding up with
some other cheese, it's becomes a lot more possible during
the Industrial Revolution to say, Okay, we're going to replicate
(31:01):
this technique and also replicate the conditions that were present
elsewhere to make this cheese that that will be more
like what we are thinking about from where we used
to live. And in the US, you know, there wasn't
the long term cultural heritage that Europe had going into
cheese development, and the cheese factories just kind of blossomed. Uh.
(31:25):
People had I mean they had families, and people had
their family heritage and they knew how their grandmother had
made cheese before the family had made their way to
the to the colonies. But there was not quite the
institution of cheesemaking as this long many many generations of
things in one particular place. So the US became a
(31:46):
huge center of making an exporting cheese, and in some
cases traditional techniques have kind of died out because of
the mechanization mechanization as well as supply and demand. Mozzarella
in most places as not made the same way it
once was. Now it's it's the mozzarella was sort of
a handcrafted cheese in Italy that was made in very
(32:07):
small batches, and you can make it in a big
factory with machines, which a lot of the cheese today
big factory with machines rather than the previous handcrafted sort
of small batches. As we've seen with many things. There
is of course now an artisan cheese movement where people
are making things in small batches using the same basic
(32:29):
techniques that people were using hundreds or thousands of years ago.
M I just want to think about cheese for a
little while longer. Right now, you have today a lot
of efforts to sort of label the cheeses as quote
(32:50):
the real thing. So like roquefort, you can only call
a cheese roquefort if it was actually made in those caves.
People can apply eximate roquefort like cheeses elsewhere, but it
can't carry the name, right, it cannot carry the name.
There are protected designation of Origin or p d O
labels that label where the cheese came from. Or the
(33:14):
geographical indication or the the g I label of where
the cheese came from. And it's sort of like wines
and how Champagne's are only supposed to come from Champagne
and not California sparkling wines. Not everyne right, and not
every blue cheese is rot. Oh. I love cheese. It's
(33:38):
hard not to wax rhapsodic about cheese. There is so much.
That's when when I said, hey, let's do a podcast
about cheese. I think what you said is I could
do I can't remember which cheese it was that you said.
We were like, I could do a whole podcast about
probably probably or she toast, which is the Norwegian cheese
that I'm a big fan of. I think it's usually
(33:58):
called brunost over there. We call it. That's kind of
the what it's usually exported as. But it's phenomenal and
it has a sweet, nutty it's a brown cheese. It's phenomenal. Yes,
So don't say that a lot. There is so much
to learn about cheese beyond this sort of the origins
of cheese is that we've talked about today. We will
link to lots of places to learn about more about
(34:21):
cheese and our show notes when we put those up
after this podcast comes out. Hey, since these episodes that
we're sharing our past classics, we have some updated information
that will supersede the contact stuff you've heard before. If
(34:41):
you want to email us, our email address is History
Podcast at houst works dot com, and you can find
us across the spectrum of social media as miss did History.
You can also find us at missed in history dot com,
and you can visit our parent company, how stu Works,
at how stu works dot com. For more on this
(35:03):
and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
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