Discover interesting facts about cheese


Nowadays cheese

Ancient Greek mythology credited Aristaeusart in Europe was slow during the centuries
with the discovery of cheese. Homer's Odysseyafter Rome's fall. Many of the cheeses we
(8th century BCE) describes the Cyclopsknow best today were first recorded in the
making and storing sheep's and goats' milklate Middle Ages or after— cheeses
cheese.  From  Samuel  Butler's  translation:like cheddar around 1500 CE, Parmesan in
1597,  Gouda  in 1697, and Camembert in 1791.
We soon reached his cave, but he was out
shepherding, so we went inside and took stockIn 1546, John Heywood wrote in Proverbes that
of all that we could see. His cheese-racks"the moon is made of a greene cheese."
were loaded with cheeses, and he had more(Greene refers here not to the color, as many
lambs  and  kids  than his pens could hold...now think, but to being new or unaged.)[3]
Variations on this sentiment were long
When he had so done he sat down and milkedrepeated. Although some people assumed that
his ewes and goats, all in due course, andthis was a serious belief in the era before
then let each of them have her own young. Hespace exploration, it is more likely that
curdled half the milk and set it aside inHeywood  was  indulging  in  nonsense.
wicker  strainers...
Modern  era
By Roman times, cheese was an everyday food
and cheesemaking a mature art, not veryUntil its modern spread along with European
different from what it is today. Columella'sculture, cheese was nearly unheard of in
De Re Rustica (circa 65 CE) details aoriental cultures, uninvented in the
cheesemaking process involving rennetpre-columbian Americas, and of only limited
coagulation, pressing of the curd, salting,use in sub-mediterranean Africa, mainly being
and aging. Pliny's Natural History (77 CE)widespread and popular only in Europe and
devotes a chapter (XI, 97) to describing theareas influenced strongly by its cultures.
diversity of cheeses enjoyed by Romans of theBut with the spread, first of European
early Empire. He stated that the best cheesesimperialism, and later of Euro-American
came from the villages near Nîmes, but didculture and food, cheese has gradually become
not keep long and had to be eaten fresh.known and increasingly popular worldwide,
Cheeses of the Alps and Apennines were asthough still rarely considered a part of
remarkable for their variety then as now. Alocal  ethnic  cuisine.
Ligurian cheese was noted for being made
mostly from sheep's milk, and some cheesesThe first factory for the industrial
produced nearby were stated to weigh as muchproduction of cheese opened in Switzerland in
as a thousand pounds each. Goats' milk cheese1815, but it was in the United States where
was a recent taste in Rome, improved over thelarge-scale production first found real
"medicinal taste" of Gaul's similar cheesessuccess. Credit usually goes to Jesse
by smoking. Of cheeses from overseas, PlinyWilliams, a dairy farmer from Rome, New York,
preferred  those  of  Bithynia in Asia Minor.who in 1851 started making cheese in an
assembly-line fashion using the milk from
Post-classical  Europeneighboring farms. Within decades hundreds of
such  dairy  associations  existed.
Rome spread a uniform set of cheesemaking
techniques throughout much of Europe, andThe 1860s saw the beginnings of mass-produced
introduced cheesemaking to areas without arennet, and by the turn of the century
previous history of it. As Rome declined andscientists were producing pure microbial
long-distance trade collapsed, cheese incultures. Before then, bacteria in
Europe diversified further, with variouscheesemaking had come from the environment or
locales developing their own distinctivefrom recycling an earlier batch's whey; the
cheesemaking traditions and products. Francepure cultures meant a more standardized
and Italy are the nations with the mostcheese  could  be  produced.
diversity in locally made cheeses—
today with approximately 400 each. (A FrenchFactory-made cheese overtook traditional
proverb holds there is a different Frenchcheesemaking in the World War II era, and
cheese for every day of the year, and Charlesfactories have been the source of most cheese
de Gaulle once asked "how can you govern ain America and Europe ever since. Today,
country in which there are 246 kinds ofAmericans buy more processed cheese than
cheese?" Still, the advancement of the cheese"real", factory-made or not.



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