Where Did Cheese Really Come From?

Cheese. You know it. You love him. In Western culture, it

come

s in almost all shapes, sizes, and states of being, and we eat it with almost everything. Some of you may be eating

cheese

right now. See you Maria. But what do we

really

know about

cheese

,

where

it

come

s from and who made it? Well get ready, because we're coming back. From its simple beginnings to what it has become today, Weird History will talk about the history of cheese. Before we get started, be sure to subscribe to the Weird History channel and let us know in the comments below what your favorite cheese is.

Now sit down with a charcuterie board and some wine. We're about to put cheese on it. The moon is made of green cheese. John Heywood Problems. The history of cheese is shrouded in as much legend and tradition as a plastic-wrapped package of Kraft singles. The history of cheese origin is somewhat murky and it can be difficult to differentiate between myth and reality. At some point in history, some people may have believed that the Moon was made of cheese. Well, in this case they are right. This lunar surface is actually Wabash Cannonball, an ashy-crusted goat cheese that originates from Indiana.

Kind of like the moon, but with more corn and Larry Birds. But before we talk about cheese, let's start with milk. After all, we wouldn't have great cheese without some moomoo juice. Milk has been intertwined with culture and religion for thousands of years. Let's go back to the heavens

where

the Greeks originated the word galaxy from the word gala, which means milk. Greek mythology says that the Milky Way formed when Hera, wife of Zeus and goddess of femininity, spilled her breast milk while she was feeding her son Heracles. Each of her little milk droplets is equivalent to a star in the night sky.

When contemplating the vastness of the universe, one can't help but think: wow, that's a ton of milk. How big was that child? Was it a single squirt or was it an "oh gee, I wasn't paying attention and left the faucet on" situation? The mysteries of the universe. Hindus also have a story about the origin of the milk universe in that the creation of the stars and the galaxy was done by Vishnu, who did it by churning a huge sea of ​​milk. It needs more salt. Even throughout Christianity, the Virgin Mary is often depicted showing her breastfeeding breast.

As far as science goes, milk is what makes a mammal a mammal. The term mammal in Latin means breast and is part of mammal, which is the ability to produce milk. But when did we start drinking milk other than our own? Who discovered that we could get milk from cows and what did he think he was doing at the time? Billy Connolly. The rise of livestock and agriculture, as well as the domestication of animals such as sheep and goats, led man to his first foray into the consumption of milk. The evidence points to a time close to 9,000 BC.

C. in which the first people to milk animals were the Sumerians, one of the first known civilizations, who lived in southern Mesopotamia, what today would be the region of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Sheep and goats were first used for milk for several reasons. In addition to their generally more pleasant disposition, these animals were used to living in smaller spaces, such as caves, which made it easier to corral them into a small space. The cows would end up being locked up around the year 7,000 BC. C. in the region of what is now Türkiye. Domesticated animals were first used as wet nurses where babies drank milk from the animal itself.

The act of touching an animal's bite has taken place throughout history, both real and legendary. The founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, are depicted feeding on a mother wolf who raised her twin brothers. But how can babies drink milk, let alone other animals? After all, aren't we all lactose intolerant? We know someone who is. Look at him, watching this video, shaking. There was a time when adults began to drink milk and, around 5,500 BC. C., adults developed lactose persistence, or maintained the enzyme lactase in the intestine, allowing them to drink and digest milk. Babies can drink milk without all the stomach mumbo jumbo due to rennet.

Rennet is an enzyme found in the stomach of mammals that curdles the casein in milk and converts lactose into lactic acid. Generally, that enzyme disappears after you leave your mother. We'll see in a moment why rennet is important for cheese. And what is cheese? Milk corpse. James Joyce, Ulysses. In Greek mythology, Apollo's son Aristaeus, who was the god of shepherds and beekeeping, was also the god who invented cheese. If you're giving credit to a god for bringing it into the world, cheese was probably very important to the Greeks. But in reality, cheese probably existed a few thousand years before the Greek gods were created.

The current myth about the origins of cheese is that years ago, some random guy, presumably in the Middle East, was carrying milk in a bag made from the stomach of an animal and inadvertently discovered that when he went to drink some milk, had lumps of curd. . Let's quickly see how cheese is actually made. Basically, making cheese is taking warm milk, adding a starter culture and rennet. Lactic acid coagulates the milk and rennet separates the curds from the whey. Traditional rennet is obtained from the stomach of a calf. Early cheese was probably a simplified version of this process.

There is evidence that Neolithic farmers made cheese around 8,000 BC. C. in Mesopotamia. At the same time, the Neolithic was gaining strength, which brought with it the development of pottery and ceramics, which helped make cheese a reality. Ceramics and pottery helped not only with the storage and transportation of food, but the first versions of colanders or sieves also emerged. With a warm Middle Eastern climate, as well as natural regional bacteria, milk would spoil, ferment, and coagulate quickly. These curds would be the first base and a version of the cheese we all know and love today. After seeing this happen, it was only a matter of time before people started tasting these pieces of curd and realized that it was more digestible than milk.

With this preservation capacity, dairy products were able to spread throughout the region more quickly. This gave the people of the region an advantage when it came to their survival. A few thousand years later is when we see evidence of more and more cheese appearing in the Middle East and Europe. Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality. Clifton Fadiman. About 5,000 years ago, ancient Egypt was believed to make cheese. Using reeds, the Egyptians made one of the first versions of cottage cheese, made with goat's milk. Egyptian pharaohs were buried with cheese in their urns, giving them a tasty treat for the afterlife.

I hope you brought enough for everyone. In 2010, at a burial site near Cairo, in the Saqqara Necropolis, archaeologists discovered a whitish mass solidified in vessels that belonged to a high-ranking Egyptian official. This whitish mass ended up being the oldest cheese ever discovered. We all love well-aged cheese, but it is highly recommended to avoid this particular piece. Going back to Greece or Greece 2, the Greeks created an early version of briny, salty feta cheese, as well as a harder sheep's milk cheese similar to today's Pecorino. The Iliad, written in 1762 BC. C., mentions cheese and the coagulation of curds, linking it with healing.

The Odyssey does it too, where Homer tells how the Cyclops made cheese, putting curds in a basket so it could drain. The Greeks used an offering of cheese to the gods, and even the rite of passage for a young Spartan was to steal cheese. But when you think of Greece, you obviously think of feta cheese. It is such a popular cheese that it represents approximately 70% of the cheese consumed by Greeks. Today, feta cheese is protected by EU legislation. The cheese known as feta can only be produced in certain regions of Greece. We'll get to more product designations later.

Let's go to Rome, and when we are in ancient Rome, let's do what both rich and poor Romans do. Eat cheese. The ancient Romans commonly enjoyed it as an appetizer before meals and even topped it as a dessert. You would think that milk would receive the same treatment, but milk tended to be consumed by farmers and in northern Europe. The Romans would consider them low class and call them barbarians. And if you know the ancient Romans, anyone who wasn't Roman was a barbarian. When in Rome, be malicious. Rome produced a variety of soft and hard cheeses, as well as cheese imported from its conquered lands.

As the Roman Empire expanded across Europe and the Mediterranean, the logistical problem of feeding the nearly 500,000 Roman soldiers was a challenge. But hard cheeses became the preferred ready-to-eat food of Roman soldiers. Many soldiers also served as cheesemakers. A soldier's daily ration would be one ounce of Pecorino, a hard cheese or, as the Romans would call it, a dry cheese. Pecora translates from Italian as sheep. But it would be a few centuries later when we would see the emergence of one of the most emblematic cow cheeses in Italy. This would be just around the corner, because as the Roman Empire collapsed and power shifted, manners passed from the aristocracy to the church, where around the 7th century we would see the rise of monastic cheeses.

Have you not poured me out like milk and curdled me like cheese? Job, talking about God. It may be shocking to hear, but the church of all places has been one of the most influential people in food. Monks have played a key role in the development of staple foods such as beer and wine. They have also contributed greatly to the creation and preservation of cheese recipes and traditions. Making cheese was a fairly natural choice, as most monasteries also raised sheep, cows and goats. The monks also lived a solitary life, so making cheese, something that was labor-intensive and time-consuming, would totally complement their lifestyle.

We can thank Saint Benedict, patron saint of Europe and true saint of cheese. Benedict lived in the late 400s and early 500s AD. and he was a religious reformer who was instrumental in building monasteries. These monks, dedicated to self-sufficiency and manual labor, helped bring a smelly new cheese wrinkle to the world: washed rind cheese. On your average, everyday cheese board, washed-rind cheeses are synonymous with being, well, smelly, stinky, and unpleasant. A washed rind simply means that the cheese, usually a soft cow's milk cheese, has been washed in brine. Washing causes the surface to attract a variety of bacteria, and it's those bacteria that help give most washes a reddish color and pucker-nosed smell.

As you can see in this piece of washed Langres bark, those white tufts are the fusarium domesticum mold, but they are safe and delicious to eat. Most brines are salt water, but beer, wine, brandy, and spices can also be used. Using beer or wine for washing also makes a lot of sense, since many monks already made both. Cheese, beer and wine? Yes please. Monks, the OG BYOB. Most of the monasteries were in Switzerland, Belgium and France. The monks experimented with milk varieties and processing and helped create classic stinky legends like Limburger, Époisses and Muenster. In fact, muenster, which gets its name from the Latin word monasterium, which translates as monastery, was created around 1371 by Benedictine monks and not this guy.

I know I know. I was disappointed too. One of the most famous stinky cheeses, sometimes called the king of cheeses, is Époisses from France. Created in the late 16th century by the Cistercian monastery of Époisses, the recipe remained in the church for more than 200 years before being given to the farmers of Burgundy. Even everyone's favorite resort, Napoleon, was a fan of this spicy delight. Today in Paris, because Époisses is so original, it is illegal to wear it on public transportation. Say, stinky. The monasteries did not limit themselves to preserving the washed bark. Having contributed to the development and perfection of well-known cheeses such as Roquefort, Parmesan and Tete de Moine, which translates as monk's head.

Another saint to thank is St. Gall, who in the Appenzell region contributed to the appearance of Alpine cheeses. As mountain cheeses spread through Switzerland near the French border, Gruyere emerged. In fact, Gruyere was so popular that the canton of Bern took control of the Gruyere region. He then moved the cheesemakers throughout the region to establish themselves and grow the cheese business. Alpine cheeses are an example of transhumance, in which livestock, depending on the season, move to feed, usually in the highlands during thesummer and in the lowlands during winter, where it feeds on grass, straw and forage to make seasonal cheese. and what a delicious Mont d'Or.

Around 774 AD, the monks of the city of Brie created the famous Brie, or Brie de Meaux. The cheese became much more popular when Charlemagne stopped by the monastery and tried a piece. He was so impressed with the creamy brie that he had it delivered to his castle regularly. Charlemagne basically invented DoorDash. In the 14th century, the upper Po River Valley in Italy is where Parmesan was developed, at least the version we know and love today. Thanks to the intuition of local monks, they developed an irrigation system and turned the lowlands of the Po Valley into a fertile agricultural area for cows to graze, and cow's milk cheese quickly gained popularity.

Advances in livestock raising and land maintenance helped the Dutch become the originals or cheeseheads of the Dutch language. That term was not intended to be attractive. The Dutch were thought to be a joke. People who just sat around and ate cheese all day, which sounds like pretty cool people in my opinion. But the Dutch weren't just lying around watching the windmills turn. They had been making cheese since they were occupied by the Romans around 54 BC. C. and they were actually way ahead of the game. While the Romans taught the Dutch how to make hard cheese, the Dutch took it to a new level.

The quest to feed their population required them to offer something for trade. Thanks to his understanding of how to create ideal grazing lands, his cattle became better fed, leading to increased milk production. From then on, the Netherlands became a global milk trading force, and it would be around 1184 when the first records of the famous Gouda, or pronounced "how-da" if we're trying to be Dutch about it, appeared. Being a dry cheese meant that Gouda could be transported to the ends of the world. Speaking of shelf life, let's jump to the 16th century, when England developed cheddar cheese.

Originally named for the city, cheddar is also a verb, cheddaring, which is a unique process in cheesemaking that involves cutting strained curds, stacking them, and stacking them again to extract more whey. It is a process that makes cheddar cheese a fairly soft textured cheese and increases its ability to have a longer shelf life. England exported the cheddar cheese-making process to its colonies, including Ireland, Canada, Australia, and the United States. American cheesemakers, for the most part, stuck to making cheddar cheese exclusively until about the end of the Civil War. Cheddar cheese is also unique because it was one of the first mass-produced cheeses through industrialization, and it would be a moment that would change the course of cheese and its making forever.

You can't make everyone happy. You are not cheese. Anonymous. When you think of industrialization, you may think of England and smokestacks. But this also applies to cheeses and the farm. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the rise of industrialization, along with some key inventions and innovations, would lead to an era of mass production, in which it would help expand access to cheese, but artisanal producers would suffer. In the United States in the 1840s, as railroads developed across the country, the distance a cheese could cover also grew. To meet demand, cooperatives developed and began combining their milk for cheese production.

In 1851, Rome, New York, is where Jesse Williams would build the first cheese factory in the United States. This factory would be of great help in creating large quantities of processed cheese. Independently owned cheesemakers could maintain the volume and efficiency of the burgeoning American cheese factories, which were popping up across the United States. Wisconsin alone would become home to more than 1,500 cheese factories, earning it the nickname Cheesehead. But as we know now, it's the Dutch, not Wisconsinites, who have the OG cheese heads. And in 1864, Louis Pasteur developed pasteurization, which involves heating milk to kill bacteria and germs found in raw milk.

It would take a little more than 70 years, but in 1935 the first industrial cheese would be made with pasteurized milk. Artisanal cheesemakers would argue that pasteurizing milk also kills the good bacteria in the cheese. In 1918, the United States would see the emergence of one of the most curious cheeses in the world, Velveeta. Created by Emil Frey of the Monroe Cheese Company, Velveeta was a happy accident and was originally intended to melt and reuse leftover cheese, blending it into a velvety texture. Kraft would buy the company 10 years later and modify the formula. Kraft's nutritious Velveeta is full of health thanks to milk.

In 1954, with refrigeration and the rise of the grocery store, the birth of the milk tanker was almost the nail in the coffin for artisanal cheese. Industrialization also had another consequence. They took jobs away from women. In the traditional world of cheesemaking, women were the drivers of production, being at the same time milkers and cheesemakers and also guardians of the recipes. Factories were dominated by men and the perception that women were not capable of working there drove them out of the industry. As production in factories increased, so did the number of ingredients. Moving from the traditional cheese ingredients, milk, salt, rennet, enzymes, to a sample of some modern cheese, skim milk, whey, milk protein concentrate, sodium citrate, corn syrup solids, salt, whey , part-skim milk, cheese culture, sodium phosphate, milk, lactic acid, sorbic acid, natural and artificial flavors, carrageenans, apocarotene, beta-carotene, titanium dioxide, autolyzed yeast extract, citric acid, vitamin A palmitate, fat dairy and riboflavin.

In 2016, delicious Kraft Parmesan cheese contains cellulose, which is a filler made from wood chips, which is added to prevent the grated cheese from clumping. Mmm, fiber. After industrialization, war was another important factor in the disappearance of artisanal cheeses. In England, between fluctuating prices, rationing, and the call for cheesemakers, farm-made cheese almost completely disappeared after the First and Second World Wars. Industrial cheeses were cheaper, easier and more convenient, but they also caused the increase. from industrial feedlots, which have an impact on the environment and the animals, as the animals are confined indoors and cannot be outside on pastures, eating their natural grass diet.

With industrialization, not only did they lose quality and flavor, but sometimes the animals themselves did as well. For example, let's take black sheep cheese. This cheese comes from a black-haired version of the Manchego breed of sheep, which is usually white. The black sheep truly lives up to its black sheep label and was brought to the brink of extinction, largely due to the animal producing less milk than its white counterpart. Now it's all looking pretty bleak for the little local mom and pop cheese team. But who was going to save the real cheese? You have to be a romantic to invest your money, your time and your cheese.

Antonio Bourdain. In the United States, one group you can thank for the return of artisanal cheeses were the hippies. Yes it's correct. Those dirty, peace-loving, counterculture flower children during the 1960s helped lead the resurgence of farmhouse cheesemaking. Aided by the foodie boom of the '70s, American craft cheeses continued to grow through the '80s and '90s, and it was in the early 2000s that, like craft beer, whiskey, and wine, cheeses proliferated. artisanal cheese producers. In 2012, more than 800 small cheesemakers produced more than 300 different artisanal cheeses, more than double the previous six years. Today, the USDA reported that processed cheese consumption has decreased by 4%.

The rise of artisanal cheeses benefited the aforementioned Manchego black sheep, which may produce less milk, but the milk they produce is creamier and more flavorful and has since seen a resurgence. Outside of Spain, cheese people were kept busy in other parts of Europe developing a system to protect both the cheese and the region of origin by providing a standard for intellectual property, especially given the long overall history of many of the cheeses. The AOC, or Appellation D'Origine Controlee, was first developed for wines in 1919, and the cheese soon gained protection under the AOC along with the blue sheep's milk cheese, Roquefort, which first earned that distinction in 1925.

Very appropriate given its history, that in 1393, Charles VI essentially implemented an early version of AOC when he granted a monopoly for the village of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon in the Aveyron region of southern France. Each king subsequently renewed this grant, which helped conceptualize the AOC designation. AOC as a kind of quality assurance that covers all aspects of the process, from geography, terroir, climate, recipe, even a person's specific input. Terroir was mentioned on that list and is a word you hear a lot in the food world. This is how the environment of each region helps shape the character and quality of the cheese produced.

The AOC designation protected cheesemakers from being scammed. Even our stinky friend, Époisses. This cheese had practically disappeared from French farms by the mid-1950s. Farmers helped resurrect this stinker with locals' regional knowledge of the recipe. The cheese gained popularity and gained AOC status in 1991. Charles de Gaulle once said: De Gaulle may have underestimated that count. Today, in France alone there are between 1,000 and 1,600 different types of cheese, of which about 40 varieties have received the AOC designation. While France has the AOC designation, many other countries, including Italy and Switzerland, use other acronyms, such as DOC or Denominazione D'Origine Controllata, to indicate when a cheese has this designation.

In the United States, due to separate trade laws, we can produce and sell parmesan, call it parmesan, but it is not true parmesan. For authentic Parmigiano, look for Parmigiano-Reggiano. This regional version meets the diet of the livestock, the duration and age of the cheese and the geographical area of ​​production, meaning that to maintain its authenticity, the cheese must come from the Italian provinces of Parma and Reggio Emilia. While Europe has protected many regional cheeses, some well-known names such as cheddar and gouda are used more generically, thus saying less about where the cheese comes from and more of a way to describe the style product itself.

While many aspects of cheese have changed over thousands of years, many have remained the same. Throughout its history, we have seen cheese go through a cycle of birth, death and rebirth. And seeing how cheese is made, it seems appropriate to me. Given the impact on our environment, our changing landscape, where will cheese be in the next 50 years? But as long as there's good, real cheese here, you can also enjoy a slice, slice or slice, and remember to support local regional cheesemakers. So what do you think? What are the foods you would like to have a complete story about?

Let us know in the comments below. And while you're at it, check out some of these other food videos from our Weird History.