Cheese

 Cheese has been a staple food in the West for a very long time, probably going back to the period when people around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East first started keeping flocks of sheep and goats, close to 10,000 years ago.  Milk is an excellent source of protein, but it doesn't keep well without refrigeration, and it is only available part of the time, when the mother sheep or goat or cow has just given birth.  Also, a lot of people develop intolerance to the lactic acid in milk (though if one keeps drinking it all the time growing up, this intolerance is much less likely).  Cheese to the rescue!

To make cheese, fresh milk is deliberately curdled using rennet, which used to come from an animal's stomach lining.  The cow gives birth and starts producing milk, you kill the calf to have a tasty veal dinner, and now you have the calf's stomach lining as rennet to make cheese from the milk the cow continues to produce while you keep milking her.  (Note:  modern cheese uses cultures for the curdling process, not requiring death of a calf or kid or lamb every time.)

Properly curdled milk gives you curds and whey, basically cottage cheese.  This can be pressed to get the whey out, formed into a wheel or other shape, sometimes washed or heated, and aged so it develops a rind and hardens up.  Some cheese, like Roquefort, is aged in caves where interesting molds are found, to give it the distinctive blue veins.  There are hundreds of different kinds of cheese, some very local productions, some made in big factories.  Some of the modern French varieties are about as specific as "Madame Grangier makes this cheese in the spring from the milk of her cows Bessie and Bossie."

The Romans enjoyed cheese, and our word comes from the Latin caseus, meaning (you guessed it) cheese.  They distinguished between caseus (any kind of cheese) and caseus formatus, the latter specifically hard cheese made (formed) into a wheel.  This formatus was one of the foods given to soldiers in the legions, and is the root of the modern French  "fromage" and Italian "formaggio" (both of course meaning cheese).

The medieval diet included a lot of cheese.  It was more readily available than meat and acceptable to monks as meat was not.  Even those wealthy enough to enjoy meat on a regular basis would eat cheese or fish on Fridays instead of meat.

A story told about Charlemagne related that he visited a monastery on a Friday, and because they had no fish, they served him their local cheese (which would have been considered second-rate for a king, behind a nice trout).  When Charlemagne started cutting off the rind, the abbot unwisely corrected him, saying the rind was perfectly edible.  Now, no one tells the king he's doing something wrong.  Charlemagne pretended not to mind, ate the rind, said it was all very good, then got his revenge by ordering the abbot to send the royal court 200 big wheels of this tasty cheese every year.  After five years of the abbot scrambling madly to get enough milk to make this much cheese, leaving nothing for his monks, Charlemagne forgave him, but he'd learned his lesson!

Final note:  So-called "cheese food product" is an abomination before the Lord.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval food and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.