Happy Saturday. It is Saturday Classic Time. And then, just just in case you have not heard of this yet, this is an episode from our archive that we are sharing again over the weekend to help newer listeners to the show get a taste of our back catalog. If you have listened to all of the podcast episodes already and you are down for a real listen, this is for you too, so welcome. Hey, newsflash, cheese is delicious so good. I don't think most people would be surprised by that information. Uh and just like everything else on earth, though, it has a history all its own. This episode originally aired in February, but the story of how cheese came to be a staple of the human diet is just as delicious today as it was four years ago. Maybe grab some delicious bread or whatever else sounds yummy. We heard from listeners when this episode first aired that it made them quite hungry and join us for a little bit of cheese history. 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 so much. Is it's like one of our favoritest things. It is it is cheese. Cheese 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, 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 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 them. So it really has um brought its own flavor to be punny. Unfortunately, of two various cultures, Like cheese informs cultures in an interesting way. Hand 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 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 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 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 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 you left milk out, it would solidify and coagulate, and if you've worked at it a little bit, you can separate that into curds 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 a really valuable source of nourishments, 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 uh. There's also been some series about woven baskets as well, right, but those don't really scrutiny long term. They don't hold up as well over thousands of years, so 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 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 could dry 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 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 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, 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 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 is such a focus on food purity in religious texts 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 to 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, 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 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. E, Hittite writing 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 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 of cheese took place in twelve through the Mediterranean Sea, which is further evidence that people have developed cheeses that would keep. At that point, most of the cheeses that were being shipped around were probably brind cheeses like fetta that were stored in ceramic jars. And the reason that even though these cheeses are very soft and wet. The 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. For Fetah, which is delicious because I'm literally just rubbing my tummy and licking 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 they were also exporting cheese, so they were developing these harder, hardier varieties of cheese that could survive 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 a play by play of how people were making cheese at a time. Uh. The Cyclops coagulated the milk, probably using rennet and maybe also fix sapp 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 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 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 in 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 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 were They were sort of the the Sicilian fourth century BC 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 yummy. So cheesemaking in Rome started a lot like it did in Grease, with people making heat coagulated fresh cheeses using these vessels which I called milk boilers. So while the cheeses were these coagulated kurds and whay 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, 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 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 for fouttening up pigs and making them also delicious, So 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 Jesus did as well, and by the seventh century BC, 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 would raise large flocks of sheep to produce both cheese and wool. At that point they had developed sheep farming that was geared more towards bowl 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 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 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 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 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 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 and 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 the cheese dry enough so that it doesn't spoil in the middle while the outside is drying. 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 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 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 true even as the manners broke up into tinier farmers where people only had one or two 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 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 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 spoilage 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 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. Fault uh. And while manners uh, we're crumbling into smaller farms in other parts of Europe. In England, 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. Again, not meaning to be punny, but they're our own methodologies and approach to it happening as well right uh 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, 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 two cows from sheep because cow's milk separates more easily into cream to make butter out of, 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 so the mountainous reasons, cheeses had to be very sturdy 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 so yummy, Oh, I love the stuff. Uh. The animals were generally pastured up on the mountains uh, and then the people working with them would live there with the animals, make the cheese there, and then it would have to travel downward. This not 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 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, 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. 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 and 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 rogue fruit cheese today comes from these same caves where it was originally aged in the Middle Ages and well up infested with the s bacteria that gave it its look and its flavor. 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 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 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 dairying did not even start and till 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 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 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 an insane variety of cheese is through various innovations in packaging, equipment, et cetera. 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 of packaging came from that sort of pocket of innovation, the round instead of square wheels. Thank you Holland. 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 that cheese making around London, 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 cheesemaking 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 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 sort of just got to go, let's think up some new stuff. Let's see 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 a very valuable new food source. I mean it's it started as sort of an necessity of how can we make this milk not immediately be bad? 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 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, 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 going to replicate this technique and also replicate the conditions 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, 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, and in some cases traditional techniques have kind of died out because of the mechanization mechanization as well as supply and demand. Mozzarella in most places as not made the same way it once was. Now it's it's the mozzarella was sort of a handcrafted cheese in Italy that was made in very small batches, and you can make 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 or thousands of years ago. M I just want to think about cheese for a little while longer. Right 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 apply eximate roquefort like cheeses elsewhere, but it can't carry the name, right, it cannot carry the name. There are protected designation of Origin or p d O 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 from Champagne and not California sparkling wines. Not everyne right, and not every blue cheese is rot. Oh. 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 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 probably 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 what it's usually exported as. But it's phenomenal and it has a sweet, nutty it's a brown cheese. It's phenomenal. Yes, So don't say that a lot. There is so much to learn about cheese beyond this sort of the origins of cheese is that we've talked about today. We will link to lots of places to learn about more about cheese and our show notes when we put those up after this podcast comes out. Hey, since these episodes that we're sharing our past classics, we have some updated information that will supersede the contact stuff you've heard before. If you want to email us, our email address is History Podcast at houst works dot com, and you can find us across the spectrum of social media as miss did History. You can also find us at missed in history dot com, and you can visit our parent company, how stu Works, at how stu works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.

Happy Saturday. It is Saturday Classic Time. And then, just just in case you have not heard of this yet, this is an episode from our archive that we are sharing again over the weekend to help newer listeners to the show get a taste of our back catalog. If you have listened to all of the podcast episodes already and you are down for a real listen, this is for you too, so welcome. Hey, newsflash, cheese is delicious so good. I don't think most people would be surprised by that information. Uh and just like everything else on earth, though, it has a history all its own. This episode originally aired in February, but the story of how cheese came to be a staple of the human diet is just as delicious today as it was four years ago. Maybe grab some delicious bread or whatever else sounds yummy. We heard from listeners when this episode first aired that it made them quite hungry and join us for a little bit of cheese history. 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 so much. Is it's like one of our favoritest things. It is it is cheese. Cheese 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, 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 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 them. So it really has um brought its own flavor to be punny. Unfortunately, of two various cultures, Like cheese informs cultures in an interesting way. Hand 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 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 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 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 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 you left milk out, it would solidify and coagulate, and if you've worked at it a little bit, you can separate that into curds 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 a really valuable source of nourishments, 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 uh. There's also been some series about woven baskets as well, right, but those don't really scrutiny long term. They don't hold up as well over thousands of years, so 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 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 could dry 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 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 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, 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 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 is such a focus on food purity in religious texts 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 to 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, 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 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. E, Hittite writing 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 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 of cheese took place in twelve through the Mediterranean Sea, which is further evidence that people have developed cheeses that would keep. At that point, most of the cheeses that were being shipped around were probably brind cheeses like fetta that were stored in ceramic jars. And the reason that even though these cheeses are very soft and wet. The 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. For Fetah, which is delicious because I'm literally just rubbing my tummy and licking 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 they were also exporting cheese, so they were developing these harder, hardier varieties of cheese that could survive 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 a play by play of how people were making cheese at a time. Uh. The Cyclops coagulated the milk, probably using rennet and maybe also fix sapp 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 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 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 in 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 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 were They were sort of the the Sicilian fourth century BC 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 yummy. So cheesemaking in Rome started a lot like it did in Grease, with people making heat coagulated fresh cheeses using these vessels which I called milk boilers. So while the cheeses were these coagulated kurds and whay 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, 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 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 for fouttening up pigs and making them also delicious, So 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 Jesus did as well, and by the seventh century BC, 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 would raise large flocks of sheep to produce both cheese and wool. At that point they had developed sheep farming that was geared more towards bowl 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 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 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 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 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 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 and 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 the cheese dry enough so that it doesn't spoil in the middle while the outside is drying. 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 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 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 true even as the manners broke up into tinier farmers where people only had one or two 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 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 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 spoilage 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 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. Fault uh. And while manners uh, we're crumbling into smaller farms in other parts of Europe. In England, 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. Again, not meaning to be punny, but they're our own methodologies and approach to it happening as well right uh 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, 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 two cows from sheep because cow's milk separates more easily into cream to make butter out of, 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 so the mountainous reasons, cheeses had to be very sturdy 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 so yummy, Oh, I love the stuff. Uh. The animals were generally pastured up on the mountains uh, and then the people working with them would live there with the animals, make the cheese there, and then it would have to travel downward. This not 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 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, 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. 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 and 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 rogue fruit cheese today comes from these same caves where it was originally aged in the Middle Ages and well up infested with the s bacteria that gave it its look and its flavor. 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 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 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 dairying did not even start and till 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 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 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 an insane variety of cheese is through various innovations in packaging, equipment, et cetera. 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 of packaging came from that sort of pocket of innovation, the round instead of square wheels. Thank you Holland. 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 that cheese making around London, 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 cheesemaking 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 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 sort of just got to go, let's think up some new stuff. Let's see 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 a very valuable new food source. I mean it's it started as sort of an necessity of how can we make this milk not immediately be bad? 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 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, 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 going to replicate this technique and also replicate the conditions 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, 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, and in some cases traditional techniques have kind of died out because of the mechanization mechanization as well as supply and demand. Mozzarella in most places as not made the same way it once was. Now it's it's the mozzarella was sort of a handcrafted cheese in Italy that was made in very small batches, and you can make 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 or thousands of years ago. M I just want to think about cheese for a little while longer. Right 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 apply eximate roquefort like cheeses elsewhere, but it can't carry the name, right, it cannot carry the name. There are protected designation of Origin or p d O 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 from Champagne and not California sparkling wines. Not everyne right, and not every blue cheese is rot. Oh. 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 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 probably 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 what it's usually exported as. But it's phenomenal and it has a sweet, nutty it's a brown cheese. It's phenomenal. Yes, So don't say that a lot. There is so much to learn about cheese beyond this sort of the origins of cheese is that we've talked about today. We will link to lots of places to learn about more about cheese and our show notes when we put those up after this podcast comes out. Hey, since these episodes that we're sharing our past classics, we have some updated information that will supersede the contact stuff you've heard before. If you want to email us, our email address is History Podcast at houst works dot com, and you can find us across the spectrum of social media as miss did History. You can also find us at missed in history dot com, and you can visit our parent company, how stu Works, at how stu works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.