Bless’d are the Cheese Makers

Author: van Broekhoven, W., (2009), “Bless’d are the Cheese Makers”, first published in The Imperial Courier, Volume 4, Issue 4, THE RMRS, pp. 5-7.

Cheese seems to be as old as humanity itself and nobody knows when or how it was invented. It may have been a hunter who discovered that the stomach contents of a killed young animal were rather tasty. Or it may have been that somebody stirred fresh milk with a fig tree branch, for instance to keep the cream from rising, and found the milk turning solid. We will never know. What we do know, however, it that cheese, in all its numerous forms and tastes, would never have become so popular if it had not been taken to the edges of the world by the conquering Roman armies.

The Romans were very familiar with cheese. Pliny, to the eternal chagrin of the modern Italians, wrote very enthusiastic about a cheese from Nemausus (Nîmes) in France as being the most popular in Rome. He also describes, around the year 40, a recipe that clearly resembles a blue cheese like Roquefort. The French Cantal and the English Cheddar are also copies of Roman cheeses. The Romans exported and imported cheese from all over the known world. One of the world’s first ever brand names was La Luna, the moon. Not hard to imagine how they invented that name.

The modern word “cheese” stems from the familiarly sounding Latin word caseus. Likewise, so does the Dutch “kaas”, German “käse”, Spanish “queso” and Portuguese “queijo”, even if these native forms of cheese were different from that introduced by the Romans. Regardless, not only was the product itself adopted, but also the way of producing it. This, in some cases, led to other names. For instance, caseus formaticus, or cheese made in a mould (forma), developed into the words “fromage” in French and “formaggio” in Italian.

Soldiers in the Roman army, as Vegetius mentions, were usually recruited from men born and bred on farms. It is highly likely, therefore, that they were familiar with the process of domestic cheese making. Indeed, some of the more luxurious houses even had special cheese kitchens. For those used to such a Mediterranean lifestyle, cheeses were largely made from sheep and goats’ milk. Interestingly, Romans were aware that the milk of animals with more than four nipples, like dogs or pigs, was unsuitable for cheese making and thus cow’s milk was not favoured. Contrast that with the farmers of North-western Europe who kept cows and who, on the whole, produced soft cheeses.

Enter the Romans who, having observed that soft cheeses tended to spoil rather quickly, had already introduced rennet, or coagulum as they called it, into their cheese making process before they began their incursions further North. Indeed, the Romans would have been very familiar with using rennet from sources as ancient as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The Cyclops Polyphemus is described as running a veritable dairy farm and is watched by Odysseus during the process of milking sheep and making cheese from their milk. Likewise, from the Iliad, soldiers would have known they could use the juice of the fig tree as a substitute for rennet. In book five, for example, Homer writes, when Ares has been speared and blood flows from his wound: “even as the juice of the fig speedily maketh to grow the white milk that is liquid but is quickly curdled as a man stirreth it, even so swiftly healed the furious Ares.” It is unsurprisingly, therefore, that Roman soldiers would have known of the process and thus became instrumental in spreading the use of rennet to the peoples across the wider empire. By doing so they introduced various hard cheeses which were noted as improving in taste with age.

The ancient sources, in this case Aristotle, even tell us the way fig juice (ancient Greek: opos) was harvested: “The juices flowing from an incision in green bark is caught on some wool. The wool is then washed and rinsed into a little milk, and if this be mixed with other milk it curdles it.” But not only fig juice works as a rennet. The Roman writer Columella, who devotes a full chapter of his book De Agricultura (“On agriculture”) to the making of cheese, also mentions wild thistle (Cynara cardunculus), the seed of saffron or rennet of animal origin like kid or lamb. The rennet (Greek: pytia) of an animal would be found in the stomach of the still milk drinking young where it would curdle through the action of the enzyme called chymosine. Today the enzyme is produced using a chemical process, but in earlier times rennet would have been extracted from the material found in the animal donor’s stomach. Interestingly, human babies produce the same material as well: it’s the stuff that soils your clothes when they burp!

The use of rennet would have been quite a revelation to the farmers. The combination of cow's milk and rennet certainly left its mark on Dutch history as it made possible the typical hard durable cheese for which Holland became famous. It is quite possible that retired Roman soldiers, who quite frequently settled in an area where they were once stationed, took up the trade of professional cheese makers starting a new and lasting industry in the area. Along the Dutch part of the old Roman border, the Limes, quite a few cities sprang up whose names are forever linked with cheese; Woerden, Bodegraven and not forgetting Gouda, a name that has become synonymous with cheese in several languages.

Experiments in producing and storing cheese across the ancient world created as wide a variety of cheese types as today. For example, the mixing of sheep’s milk and goat’s milk produced a cheese typical of Sicily, whereas the blending of mare’s milk and the milk of the she-ass produced Phrygian cheese. The use of salt, brine or herbs all produced new delicacies. According to Columella, some people dropped green pine cones in the bucket before milking and only removed them after curdling, or let thyme, strained through a sieve, coagulate with the milk. The smoke of an oven, preferably that using apple tree wood, made brined cheese even more durable and added a pleasant flavour.

Cheeses of all kinds of flavour and various shapes and sizes appeared all over the Roman world: “Meta” or pyramid formed cheeses from Sassina in North-eastern Italy, the square “quadrate” of Tolose (Toulouse) to name but two. Cheeses weighing 1000 pounds are mentioned in the sources together with the little caseolus. Indeed, a small cheese mould of caseolus size found in Bodegraven was probably once used by a soldier to make a cheese that was easy to carry on patrols.

The recipes mentioned by Columella and other classical authors are, at least for trained cheese-makers familiar with the amounts and temperatures involved, easy to understand and reproduce. Experiments by the author with authentically reconstructed tools have recreated cheeses that would suit very well the tastes of a modern audience. Indeed, when we choose a cheese platter at dinner we continue the old Roman tradition. It was probably a polite Roman host, who knew that his guest could be lactose intolerant, who introduced his guest to a choice of fruits and sweets.

It is the versatility of cheese that has guaranteed its survival through the ages; it is something for everyone for every time of day. Whether sharp and dry or creamy and soft, whether its scent is delicately aromatic or downright smelly, cheese has been with us for a long time and will be with us for an even longer time.

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Sources:

1. The various works of Pliny, Homer, Aristotle and Columella.

2. van Riet, J., (2008), Kaas Uit Het Hart (“Cheese from the Heart”), Stichting Groene Hart, Nederlands.

3. Dalby, A., (2003), Food in the Ancient World from A to Z, London: Routledge, pp. 80-81.