Evidence of cheesemaking has been found dating back to 2800 bce, but the discovery of cheese would have come about as a happy accident. Any milk left to warm by a fire or stored in a sack made from the stomach of an animal would have soured, causing the milk solids (the curds) and liquid (the whey) to coagulate and separate, allowing humans to learn that their most precious commodity, milk, could be preserved in the form of cheese and, eventually, that rennet found in the stomach of the milk-producing animal was the coagulant.
The Story of Cheese
Now, some 5,000 years later, cheese is made all over the world with all kinds of milk, from reindeer’s milk in Lapland, to buffalo’s milk in Australia, and yak’s milk in the Kingdom of Bhutan. The miracle of cheese is that, although milk tastes virtually the same the world over, the diversity of textures, tastes, and aromas is almost infinite, and virtually any cheese can be made anywhere in the world.
The size, shape, and milk of a cheese, however, has been determined by such diverse external forces as historical events, centuries of experimentation, religious orders, and the terrain, while the nuances of texture and taste are influenced by the raw materials—the type and breed of animal, the soil, the grazing, the climate, microclimate, and ingenuity of the cheesemaker.
European cheeses owe much to the Greeks’ knowledge and, later, the Romans, who built on that knowledge and took their recipes for making cheese across Europe to feed their legions as their Empire spread—a legacy clearly seen throughout Europe to this day. The Middle Ages saw the proliferation of monastic orders across Europe and into Britain and Ireland, particularly the Benedictine and, later, the Cistercian monks, who developed the cheeses we know today as Trappist or monastery cheeses, of which Maroilles of Northern France was probably the first.
Historically, a cheese’s size was determined by the amount of milk available and the proximity to the nearest market; hence, mountain cheese tended to be large, with the farmers combining their milk to make slow-ripening cheeses they could sell at the end of the summer months when the cows returned to the valleys. Those made in the valleys and near large markets would have been smaller, quicker to ripen, and sold at weekly markets. Shape was determined by the sophistication of the maker and the raw materials available to make the molds—whether woven grass, fired clay, or wood.
Today, Europe’s traditional cheeses are typically made in designated areas by various artisan producers whose combined volume is sufficiently high that the cheese can be found around the world. Classic examples include raw milk Camembert de Normandie, made by only five producers and Parmigiano-Reggiano, made by around 830 small producers. Artisan cheeses developed in the last 30 years or so, however, tend to be invented by individual cheesemakers and are often hard to find outside their region or country of origin, even if made in large volumes.