April 8, 2013 • 39 mins
Cheese has been around for more than 9,000 years. But how did humans learn to make it? Journey with Tracy and Holly to ancient Anatolia, where, people had begun to store milk in pottery and take other steps that set the stage for this delicious invention.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hi, and 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
(00:20):
so much. Is It's like one of our favoritest things.
It is. It is cheese. She's has a nine thousand
year history and the varieties that we have of it
today are mostly the products of little tweaks that people
have made throughout history for one reason or another. UM. Basically,
(00:41):
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 these refinements come straight from human ingenuity
and cure reosity, but it's also a very necessity. Is
(01:02):
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 it's kind of interesting from an anthropological
standpoint because as people have spread out, cheese went with
(01:24):
them yet so it really has um brought its own
flavor to be punny. Unfortunately, Oh of two various cultures,
like cheese informs cultures in an interesting way. Hands of
the cultures informed the cheese. Yes, I 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
(01:46):
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 traveling a very long
way carrying milk in a skin that was made from
(02:07):
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 of reasons. One is that
(02:28):
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 good reason to be carrying
(02:48):
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 that people discovered that if
(03:10):
you left milk out, it would solidify and coagulate, and
if you worked at at a little bit, you could
separate that into kurds 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 likely history, uh, you know,
(03:32):
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 that point. If you look at
(03:53):
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. Farming for wool also would have
(04:14):
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 to pasture animals and use pastured
(04:38):
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 have been an interesting trial and error. Yes, well,
(04:58):
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 storing milk. This worked out to be pottery um
(05:20):
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 of what is Turkey today. We can look at
shards of pottery from that era and know that people
(05:43):
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 more females to be produced in the milk. Yes, Now,
probably this milk started out as a food source for babies.
(06:05):
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
turn up the curds and way when they started. Most
of the lactose stays in the way when you separate
(06:27):
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
lactose intolerant, you have a sense of what that is
all about. Um. So curds were really valuable source of nourishments,
(06:51):
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 with UH
with perforations in them to separate curds and whey um.
There's also been some series about woven baskets as well,
(07:13):
right but those don't really to scrutiny long term. They
don't hold up as well over thousands of years that
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,
we think people also figured out how to make things
like butter at about the same time. The earliest cheeses
(07:37):
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.
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 dry
(08:00):
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
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
(08:23):
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 butter
from the milk of cows, goats, and sheep um. And
one of the most recent discoveries of this progression is
(08:44):
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 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,
(09:07):
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
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,
(09:31):
which is clarified butter and using Kurds in their cuisine.
But the only cheese that's indigenous to India is paneer,
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's such a focus on food purity in religious texts
(09:52):
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. Uh. The climate 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,
(10:14):
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 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
(10:35):
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. 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. Hittite writing
(10:58):
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 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
(11:19):
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 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
(11:40):
of cheese took place in twelve through the Mediterranean Sea,
which is further evidence that people had developed cheeses that
would keep At that point most of the cheeses that
were being shipped around were probably brined cheeses like fetta
that were stored in ceramic jars. And the reason that
even though these cheeses are very soft and wet, the
(12:01):
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,
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. You st for fetah,
which is delicious because I'm literally just rubbing my tommy
(12:23):
and looking 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. 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
(12:44):
they were also exporting cheese, so they were developing these harder,
hardier varieties of cheese that could serve my voyages. Yes,
we have a wonderful glimpse of how these hard cheeses
were being made 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
(13:04):
a play by play of how people were making cheese
at the time. Uh. The Cyclops coagulated the milk, probably
using rennet and maybe also fixed app and then he
pressed and dried what 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
(13:24):
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 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
(13:48):
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 and salt cheeses in this way.
That would make 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
(14:10):
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 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
(14:33):
were They were sort of the the Sicilian fourth century
BCE version of the angry food critic, who would be like,
why does there have to be cheese sauce on everything?
Just let the fish stand on its own, because it's
so delicious, it's so uny. So cheesemaking in Rome started
a lot like it did in Greece, with people making
(14:56):
heat coagulated fresh cheeses using these vessels which are called
milk boilers. So while the cheeses were these coagulated kurds
and way 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,
(15:21):
which were ceramic things that kept the milk from foaming
over the top. Uh. It's clear that making soft cheeses
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
(15:42):
metal ones became in more common use after that point.
There is an interesting symbiosis UM that happened between cheesemaking
and pig farming in Rome. The way that they were
extracting during the ricotta process was actually a great food.
Were fattening up pigs and making them also delicious, so
(16:04):
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,
so we had just talked about how in Greece they
were making these smaller, harder cheeses. So as Greek influence
spread in Rome, hard cheeses did as well, and by
(16:26):
the seventh century b c. 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,
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
(16:49):
would raise large flocks of sheep to produce both cheese
and wool. At that point they had developed UH sheep
farming that was geared more towards wool production, and they
used the way left over again from the cheesemaking to
feed the pigs. 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
(17:12):
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 became technologically more doable. Right. The most
famous giant thing of cheese in in ancient room was
(17:36):
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, 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
(17:58):
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 and from just one. Probably
not actually that big, uh. Some of this innovation of
(18:18):
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. The Celts may have also
started the practice of salting the smaller kurds before pressing
(18:39):
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. So much about making the cheese bigger,
And there's obstacles when you're working with those kinds of
more manual processes to try to get them middle of
(19:00):
the cheese dry enough so that it doesn't spoil in
the middle while the outside is drying. Yeah, that's no
good 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 military outposts and
agricultural manner estates all over the place. Both the military
(19:22):
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, and those new
types developed all sort of on their own trajectories based
(19:43):
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 So
this continued to be even as the manners broke up
into tinier farmers where people only had one or two
(20:03):
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, but in the
cooler climate of northern France, people could hang onto their
(20:25):
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 the first day
of milking at that point would have more lactic acid
(20:47):
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 spoil it that was going on. And that's how
friends cheesemakers were coming up with bloomy rind cheeses, lactic cheeses,
and washed rind cheeses. These were all things that were
(21:10):
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 bald uh. And while manners uh we're crumbling
into smaller farms in other parts of Europe, in England,
(21:30):
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 Romans had
been using, so they have their whole own cheese culture,
(21:53):
again not meaning to be punny, but their own methodologies
and approach to it happening as well. Right 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 right around the thirteenth
century people started to divide that up a little bit,
(22:16):
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 to cows from sheep,
because cow's milk separates more easily into cream to make
(22:36):
butter out of h 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 Middle Ages UH,
(22:57):
for the mountainous reasons, cheeses had to be very sturred
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 m oh,
I love the stuff. Uh. The animals were generally pastured
up on the mountains uh, and then the people working
(23:18):
with them would live there with the animals, make the
cheese there, and then it would have to travel downward.
This note 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
(23:40):
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,
(24:02):
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 them. 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.
(24:27):
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
(24:49):
rogue fruit cheese today comes from these same caves where
it was originally aged in the Middle Ages and wound
up infested with the bacteria that gave it its look
and its flavor. Uh. 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
(25:11):
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
(25:31):
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
(25:53):
dairying did not even start until 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 Holland
(26:16):
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
(26:36):
using pumps and dikes to get all the 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 a an insane variety of cheeses through various innovations
(27:00):
in packaging, equipments, etcetera. 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 edam gouda um. Different kinds
(27:25):
of packaging came from that sort of pocket of innovation,
the round instead of square wheels. Thank you Holland. Right,
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 that was recognized by
the government that had been really controlling the cheesemaking around London,
(27:47):
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 chiefemaking
being about how do we meet the demands of London.
Holland did not have this problem. They kind of had
a the rich luxury of a playground relate. It just
(28:08):
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've sort of just got
to go, let's think up some new stuff. Let's see
(28:31):
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 it then too. Yes, and it's
(28:51):
a very valuable new food source. I mean it's it
started as sort of a necessity of how can we
make this milk not immediately be bad? Uh? 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 been kind of what we
(29:13):
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. And so rather than saying, hey, okay,
(29:38):
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
gonna replicate this technique and also replicate the condition and
(30:00):
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. People had, I mean they had families,
(30:23):
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 huge center of making an exporting cheese,
(30:45):
and in some cases traditional techniques have kind of died
out because of the mechani mechanization as well as supply
and demand. Mozzarella in most places is not made the
same way it once was. Now it's it's the mozzarella
was sort of a hand crafted cheese in Italy that
was made in very small batches, and you can make
(31:05):
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 techniques that people were using hundreds
(31:27):
or thousands of years ago. Mm I just want to
think about cheese for a little while longer. Now you
have today a lot of efforts to sort of label
the cheeses as quote the real thing, So like roquefort,
you can only call a cheese roquefort if it was
actually made in those caves people can approximate roquefort like
(31:51):
cheeses elsewhere, but can't carry the name right. It cannot
carry the name. There are protected designation of Origin or
p D labels that label where the cheese came from,
or the 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
(32:14):
from Champagne and not California sparkling wines Champagne, right, and
not every blue cheese is rogue. All I love cheese.
It's hard not to wax rhapsodic about cheese. There is
so much. That's when when I said, hey, let's do
(32:34):
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 year Probam probably or she toast, which
is the Norwegian cheese that I'm a big fan of.
I think it's usually called brunost over there. We call it.
That's kind of the it's usually exported as but it's
(32:55):
phenomenal when it has a sweet, nutty it's a brown cheese.
It's phenomenal. Yes, So there is so much to learn
about cheese beyond this sort of the origins of cheeses
that we've talked about today. We will link to lots
of places to learn about more about cheese in our
show notes when we put those up after this podcast
comes out. And am I to understand that you also
(33:18):
have a bit of listener mail. I do have. I
have to listener mails. They are both from Facebook and
they are both about Johnny Applesey. The first is from Benjamin,
and Benjamin says you mentioned that John Chapman died when
he was seventy and that it was impressive given the
life expectancy at the time was forty years. While both
facts are correct, the comparison is invalid. Life expectancy was
(33:41):
so low because of the high rate of infant and
child mortality, not that forty was the age most adults
were dying. While living to seventy is impressive, it's not
far out of the expected lifespan of an adult at
the time. This is true, so forty is an average
based on infant death as well as people that were
living to be in their seven right. And what's funny
(34:02):
is that both both podcasts. We recorded two podcasts about
people right at the same time. There was the Johnny
Appleseed one and the Marjorie Kemp one, and both in
both cases the people were writing had remarked on their
age at death and how old that was compared to uh,
the average. UM. I found this awesome site, but I
(34:23):
will link to you in our show notes where you
can graph life expectancies from birth versus from age five
versus from age twenty one. Um. And really once you've
got to age, once you got past age five, you've
got a bunch of more years of life expectancy. Um.
And then once you got to age twenty one also
similarly extra years of life expectancy. So a lot of
(34:47):
people were dying between birth and five, but if you
got past five, and especially if you got past twenty one,
then you were more likely to live a lot longer.
So thank you Benjamin for pointing that out. And we
will link to this awesome, awesome mapping history site that
I found so cool, so cool, I've spent way too
much time doing that this morning when I was meant
to be doing other things. Um. The other listener mail
(35:11):
that I have about Johnny Appleseed is from Jeremy. Jeremy says,
I love stuff you missed in history class and love
your recent podcast on Johnny Appleseed. I listen to your
interesting and informative talks while I take my fine racing
Dotson on long walks around town. I am a new
church minister, and I'm not going to say where he
is the pastor, because I think that might be well
(35:33):
retained privacy. He would like some in case he would
like that. But he is a new Church minister, and
we have always been proud of this quirky character who
did so much to spread the word of Swedenborg in
the early eighteen hundreds. We have several signs of Johnny's
trees in town here, and there are many descendants in
our congregation of people that he converted. I love that
you referred to the New Church as intellectual. It is
(35:56):
true that it is great for explaining Christian teaching. One
thing I would note is that although Johnny was unusual,
I doubt that it is true that he had talked
of having two spirit wives, as this would never fit
with a New Church theology. While it's true that the
New Church had this kind of a Heyday in the
USA and the eighteen hundreds, especially after the Civil War.
It still exists and is growing today all over the world.
(36:19):
He says, keep up the great work. So thank you
very much, Jeremy. That's such a great insight from a
perspective we would not normally have access to. It is great.
Um The source of my source about the spirit wive things.
So the source was the Johnny Applesseeed book that we
talked about in the podcast. My sources source was by N. N.
Hill and others, Uh, The History of co Shockton County, Ohio.
(36:43):
It's pasted in present seventeen forty eight eighty one, containing
a comprehensive history of Ohio, a complete history of co
Shockton County, a history of its soldiers in late war,
biographies and histories of pioneer families, et cetera. That is
the entire title. It's from eighty one. You can read
the entire thing in archive dot org if you want,
which is incredible. Um So, I don't know what that
(37:07):
particular books source was, but the other information that it
has about Johnny Appleseed looks to be correct. Um So,
while I do not know, we're certain where that information
came from I will say that uh, as is often
the case, h one person's behavior should not be seen
as representative of an entire religion. Yeah. Well, and we
(37:30):
also know from that podcast that he did love to
tell stories and sometimes love to tell odd and interesting
stories to entertain people. So we can't know unless we
really did pretty deep far back, and we may not
have access to that information. If the germ of that
may have been in something like that, or if he
really believed it, you don't. I don't really know, but
now we know that that is totally not down outside
(37:53):
of New Church teaching. So thank you very much Benjamin
and Jeremy for your thoughts on these two. I'm going
to put a link to both that and inordinately long
titled book um and the Mapping History site in our
share notes if you would like to look at them.
If you would like to talk to us, there are
so many ways that you can. We are on Facebook
(38:15):
at facebook dot com slash history class stuff. We're on
Twitter at missed in History. We're also at missed in
History dot tumbler dot com, and you can email us
at History Podcast at Discovery dot com if you would
like to learn more about what we talked about today,
which I absolutely do. You can go to our website
and put the word cheese in the search bar and
you will find How Cheese Works, which has lots of
(38:38):
information about why cheese does the way it does, and
a little history section at the end. You can do
all of that in a whole lot more at our website,
which is how stuff Works dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff
works dot com. This episode of Stuff You Missed in
(39:05):
History Class is brought to you by Audible
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hi, and 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
(00:20):
so much. Is It's like one of our favoritest things.
It is. It is cheese. She's has a nine thousand
year history and the varieties that we have of it
today are mostly the products of little tweaks that people
have made throughout history for one reason or another. UM. Basically,
(00:41):
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 these refinements come straight from human ingenuity
and cure reosity, but it's also a very necessity. Is
(01:02):
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 it's kind of interesting from an anthropological
standpoint because as people have spread out, cheese went with
(01:24):
them yet so it really has um brought its own
flavor to be punny. Unfortunately, Oh of two various cultures,
like cheese informs cultures in an interesting way. Hands of
the cultures informed the cheese. Yes, I 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
(01:46):
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 traveling a very long
way carrying milk in a skin that was made from
(02:07):
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 of reasons. One is that
(02:28):
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 good reason to be carrying
(02:48):
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 that people discovered that if
(03:10):
you left milk out, it would solidify and coagulate, and
if you worked at at a little bit, you could
separate that into kurds 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 likely history, uh, you know,
(03:32):
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 that point. If you look at
(03:53):
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. Farming for wool also would have
(04:14):
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 to pasture animals and use pastured
(04:38):
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 have been an interesting trial and error. Yes, well,
(04:58):
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 storing milk. This worked out to be pottery um
(05:20):
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 of what is Turkey today. We can look at
shards of pottery from that era and know that people
(05:43):
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 more females to be produced in the milk. Yes, Now,
probably this milk started out as a food source for babies.
(06:05):
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
turn up the curds and way when they started. Most
of the lactose stays in the way when you separate
(06:27):
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
lactose intolerant, you have a sense of what that is
all about. Um. So curds were really valuable source of nourishments,
(06:51):
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 with UH
with perforations in them to separate curds and whey um.
There's also been some series about woven baskets as well,
(07:13):
right but those don't really to scrutiny long term. They
don't hold up as well over thousands of years that
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,
we think people also figured out how to make things
like butter at about the same time. The earliest cheeses
(07:37):
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.
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 dry
(08:00):
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
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
(08:23):
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 butter
from the milk of cows, goats, and sheep um. And
one of the most recent discoveries of this progression is
(08:44):
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 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,
(09:07):
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
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,
(09:31):
which is clarified butter and using Kurds in their cuisine.
But the only cheese that's indigenous to India is paneer,
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's such a focus on food purity in religious texts
(09:52):
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. Uh. The climate 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,
(10:14):
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 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
(10:35):
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. 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. Hittite writing
(10:58):
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 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
(11:19):
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 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
(11:40):
of cheese took place in twelve through the Mediterranean Sea,
which is further evidence that people had developed cheeses that
would keep At that point most of the cheeses that
were being shipped around were probably brined cheeses like fetta
that were stored in ceramic jars. And the reason that
even though these cheeses are very soft and wet, the
(12:01):
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,
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. You st for fetah,
which is delicious because I'm literally just rubbing my tommy
(12:23):
and looking 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. 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
(12:44):
they were also exporting cheese, so they were developing these harder,
hardier varieties of cheese that could serve my voyages. Yes,
we have a wonderful glimpse of how these hard cheeses
were being made 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
(13:04):
a play by play of how people were making cheese
at the time. Uh. The Cyclops coagulated the milk, probably
using rennet and maybe also fixed app and then he
pressed and dried what 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
(13:24):
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 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
(13:48):
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 and salt cheeses in this way.
That would make 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
(14:10):
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 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
(14:33):
were They were sort of the the Sicilian fourth century
BCE version of the angry food critic, who would be like,
why does there have to be cheese sauce on everything?
Just let the fish stand on its own, because it's
so delicious, it's so uny. So cheesemaking in Rome started
a lot like it did in Greece, with people making
(14:56):
heat coagulated fresh cheeses using these vessels which are called
milk boilers. So while the cheeses were these coagulated kurds
and way 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,
(15:21):
which were ceramic things that kept the milk from foaming
over the top. Uh. It's clear that making soft cheeses
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
(15:42):
metal ones became in more common use after that point.
There is an interesting symbiosis UM that happened between cheesemaking
and pig farming in Rome. The way that they were
extracting during the ricotta process was actually a great food.
Were fattening up pigs and making them also delicious, so
(16:04):
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,
so we had just talked about how in Greece they
were making these smaller, harder cheeses. So as Greek influence
spread in Rome, hard cheeses did as well, and by
(16:26):
the seventh century b c. 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,
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
(16:49):
would raise large flocks of sheep to produce both cheese
and wool. At that point they had developed UH sheep
farming that was geared more towards wool production, and they
used the way left over again from the cheesemaking to
feed the pigs. 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
(17:12):
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 became technologically more doable. Right. The most
famous giant thing of cheese in in ancient room was
(17:36):
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, 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
(17:58):
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 and from just one. Probably
not actually that big, uh. Some of this innovation of
(18:18):
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. The Celts may have also
started the practice of salting the smaller kurds before pressing
(18:39):
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. So much about making the cheese bigger,
And there's obstacles when you're working with those kinds of
more manual processes to try to get them middle of
(19:00):
the cheese dry enough so that it doesn't spoil in
the middle while the outside is drying. Yeah, that's no
good 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 military outposts and
agricultural manner estates all over the place. Both the military
(19:22):
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, and those new
types developed all sort of on their own trajectories based
(19:43):
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 So
this continued to be even as the manners broke up
into tinier farmers where people only had one or two
(20:03):
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, but in the
cooler climate of northern France, people could hang onto their
(20:25):
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 the first day
of milking at that point would have more lactic acid
(20:47):
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 spoil it that was going on. And that's how
friends cheesemakers were coming up with bloomy rind cheeses, lactic cheeses,
and washed rind cheeses. These were all things that were
(21:10):
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 bald uh. And while manners uh we're crumbling
into smaller farms in other parts of Europe, in England,
(21:30):
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 Romans had
been using, so they have their whole own cheese culture,
(21:53):
again not meaning to be punny, but their own methodologies
and approach to it happening as well. Right 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 right around the thirteenth
century people started to divide that up a little bit,
(22:16):
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 to cows from sheep,
because cow's milk separates more easily into cream to make
(22:36):
butter out of h 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 Middle Ages UH,
(22:57):
for the mountainous reasons, cheeses had to be very sturred
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 m oh,
I love the stuff. Uh. The animals were generally pastured
up on the mountains uh, and then the people working
(23:18):
with them would live there with the animals, make the
cheese there, and then it would have to travel downward.
This note 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
(23:40):
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,
(24:02):
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 them. 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.
(24:27):
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
(24:49):
rogue fruit cheese today comes from these same caves where
it was originally aged in the Middle Ages and wound
up infested with the bacteria that gave it its look
and its flavor. Uh. 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
(25:11):
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
(25:31):
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
(25:53):
dairying did not even start until 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 Holland
(26:16):
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
(26:36):
using pumps and dikes to get all the 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 a an insane variety of cheeses through various innovations
(27:00):
in packaging, equipments, etcetera. 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 edam gouda um. Different kinds
(27:25):
of packaging came from that sort of pocket of innovation,
the round instead of square wheels. Thank you Holland. Right,
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 that was recognized by
the government that had been really controlling the cheesemaking around London,
(27:47):
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 chiefemaking
being about how do we meet the demands of London.
Holland did not have this problem. They kind of had
a the rich luxury of a playground relate. It just
(28:08):
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've sort of just got
to go, let's think up some new stuff. Let's see
(28:31):
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 it then too. Yes, and it's
(28:51):
a very valuable new food source. I mean it's it
started as sort of a necessity of how can we
make this milk not immediately be bad? Uh? 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 been kind of what we
(29:13):
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. And so rather than saying, hey, okay,
(29:38):
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
gonna replicate this technique and also replicate the condition and
(30:00):
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. People had, I mean they had families,
(30:23):
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 huge center of making an exporting cheese,
(30:45):
and in some cases traditional techniques have kind of died
out because of the mechani mechanization as well as supply
and demand. Mozzarella in most places is not made the
same way it once was. Now it's it's the mozzarella
was sort of a hand crafted cheese in Italy that
was made in very small batches, and you can make
(31:05):
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 techniques that people were using hundreds
(31:27):
or thousands of years ago. Mm I just want to
think about cheese for a little while longer. Now you
have today a lot of efforts to sort of label
the cheeses as quote the real thing, So like roquefort,
you can only call a cheese roquefort if it was
actually made in those caves people can approximate roquefort like
(31:51):
cheeses elsewhere, but can't carry the name right. It cannot
carry the name. There are protected designation of Origin or
p D labels that label where the cheese came from,
or the 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
(32:14):
from Champagne and not California sparkling wines Champagne, right, and
not every blue cheese is rogue. All I love cheese.
It's hard not to wax rhapsodic about cheese. There is
so much. That's when when I said, hey, let's do
(32:34):
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 year Probam probably or she toast, which
is the Norwegian cheese that I'm a big fan of.
I think it's usually called brunost over there. We call it.
That's kind of the it's usually exported as but it's
(32:55):
phenomenal when it has a sweet, nutty it's a brown cheese.
It's phenomenal. Yes, So there is so much to learn
about cheese beyond this sort of the origins of cheeses
that we've talked about today. We will link to lots
of places to learn about more about cheese in our
show notes when we put those up after this podcast
comes out. And am I to understand that you also
(33:18):
have a bit of listener mail. I do have. I
have to listener mails. They are both from Facebook and
they are both about Johnny Applesey. The first is from Benjamin,
and Benjamin says you mentioned that John Chapman died when
he was seventy and that it was impressive given the
life expectancy at the time was forty years. While both
facts are correct, the comparison is invalid. Life expectancy was
(33:41):
so low because of the high rate of infant and
child mortality, not that forty was the age most adults
were dying. While living to seventy is impressive, it's not
far out of the expected lifespan of an adult at
the time. This is true, so forty is an average
based on infant death as well as people that were
living to be in their seven right. And what's funny
(34:02):
is that both both podcasts. We recorded two podcasts about
people right at the same time. There was the Johnny
Appleseed one and the Marjorie Kemp one, and both in
both cases the people were writing had remarked on their
age at death and how old that was compared to uh,
the average. UM. I found this awesome site, but I
(34:23):
will link to you in our show notes where you
can graph life expectancies from birth versus from age five
versus from age twenty one. Um. And really once you've
got to age, once you got past age five, you've
got a bunch of more years of life expectancy. Um.
And then once you got to age twenty one also
similarly extra years of life expectancy. So a lot of
(34:47):
people were dying between birth and five, but if you
got past five, and especially if you got past twenty one,
then you were more likely to live a lot longer.
So thank you Benjamin for pointing that out. And we
will link to this awesome, awesome mapping history site that
I found so cool, so cool, I've spent way too
much time doing that this morning when I was meant
to be doing other things. Um. The other listener mail
(35:11):
that I have about Johnny Appleseed is from Jeremy. Jeremy says,
I love stuff you missed in history class and love
your recent podcast on Johnny Appleseed. I listen to your
interesting and informative talks while I take my fine racing
Dotson on long walks around town. I am a new
church minister, and I'm not going to say where he
is the pastor, because I think that might be well
(35:33):
retained privacy. He would like some in case he would
like that. But he is a new Church minister, and
we have always been proud of this quirky character who
did so much to spread the word of Swedenborg in
the early eighteen hundreds. We have several signs of Johnny's
trees in town here, and there are many descendants in
our congregation of people that he converted. I love that
you referred to the New Church as intellectual. It is
(35:56):
true that it is great for explaining Christian teaching. One
thing I would note is that although Johnny was unusual,
I doubt that it is true that he had talked
of having two spirit wives, as this would never fit
with a New Church theology. While it's true that the
New Church had this kind of a Heyday in the
USA and the eighteen hundreds, especially after the Civil War.
It still exists and is growing today all over the world.
(36:19):
He says, keep up the great work. So thank you
very much, Jeremy. That's such a great insight from a
perspective we would not normally have access to. It is great.
Um The source of my source about the spirit wive things.
So the source was the Johnny Applesseeed book that we
talked about in the podcast. My sources source was by N. N.
Hill and others, Uh, The History of co Shockton County, Ohio.
(36:43):
It's pasted in present seventeen forty eight eighty one, containing
a comprehensive history of Ohio, a complete history of co
Shockton County, a history of its soldiers in late war,
biographies and histories of pioneer families, et cetera. That is
the entire title. It's from eighty one. You can read
the entire thing in archive dot org if you want,
which is incredible. Um So, I don't know what that
(37:07):
particular books source was, but the other information that it
has about Johnny Appleseed looks to be correct. Um So,
while I do not know, we're certain where that information
came from I will say that uh, as is often
the case, h one person's behavior should not be seen
as representative of an entire religion. Yeah. Well, and we
(37:30):
also know from that podcast that he did love to
tell stories and sometimes love to tell odd and interesting
stories to entertain people. So we can't know unless we
really did pretty deep far back, and we may not
have access to that information. If the germ of that
may have been in something like that, or if he
really believed it, you don't. I don't really know, but
now we know that that is totally not down outside
(37:53):
of New Church teaching. So thank you very much Benjamin
and Jeremy for your thoughts on these two. I'm going
to put a link to both that and inordinately long
titled book um and the Mapping History site in our
share notes if you would like to look at them.
If you would like to talk to us, there are
so many ways that you can. We are on Facebook
(38:15):
at facebook dot com slash history class stuff. We're on
Twitter at missed in History. We're also at missed in
History dot tumbler dot com, and you can email us
at History Podcast at Discovery dot com if you would
like to learn more about what we talked about today,
which I absolutely do. You can go to our website
and put the word cheese in the search bar and
you will find How Cheese Works, which has lots of
(38:38):
information about why cheese does the way it does, and
a little history section at the end. You can do
all of that in a whole lot more at our website,
which is how stuff Works dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff
works dot com. This episode of Stuff You Missed in
(39:05):
History Class is brought to you by Audible
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