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.

Yogurt

When we think of medieval foods, do we think of yogurt?  After all, it seems sort of New Age-y.  But it was one of the "foreign" foods that reached Europe during the Middle Ages, as discussed with other examples in my previous post.  Europe was never sealed off from the rest of the world, and if they hadn't gotten a lot of new foods from elsewhere, they might have been eating bread and dandelion greens and not much else.

Yogurt is basically fermented milk, fermented with Lactobacillus, a kind of bacteria that digests milk but doesn't cause disease.  It's quite easy to make, just heat the yogurt to the right temperature in the right conditions, and the bacteria go to work.  (These days commercial yogurt has the right bacteria in the right amounts mixed in, whereas medieval yogurt had to hope they were there.  Not knowing that bacteria existed meant they had to watch for their effect.)

Medieval people had cows but no easy way to store milk.  Pasteurization was not invented until the nineteenth century (which both sterilizes milk and extends its life.)  So milk either had to be drunk very fresh, or else made into butter and cheese, or else made into yogurt, which would last longer than fresh milk though not as long as butter or cheese.

Yogurt probably goes back to the ancient Near East (Mesopotamia), though there is a strong tradition that it was invented by the Mongols, who supposedly filled up their saddle bags with milk, which then thickened and fermented due to the heat of the horse and rider.  (I find this very questionable--how about you?)  The Mongols at any rate eat yogurt today, though the term "fermented mares' milk" may put off the squeamish.

Wherever it began, yogurt became widespread in antiquity in India and the eastern Mediterranean.  The Greeks seem to have eaten it, though calling it oxygala.   The Russians took it up, probably getting it from the Byzantines along with Orthodoxy.  The Turks, who moved into the Mediterranean basin in the eleventh century, were very fond of it and called it yoghurt.

Though yogurt was common in the Mediterranean region in the Middle Ages, northern Europe was slow to take it up.  One story says that it only became popular in France in the sixteenth century, when an Arabic physician cured the king of a digestive upset by feeding him yogurt.

Because the English and the Germans who were the primary settlers of the American Thirteen Colonies had not eaten yogurt at home, it was slow to reach the US.  It really only became common in the early twentieth century, being pushed as a healthful way to eat better and live longer by Mr. Kellogg, who also invented corn flakes (marketed for the same purpose).

Many now claim that yogurt is digestible even for all of those who are lactose-intolerant—which is a high proportion of a population that stops drinking milk once weaned from mother's milk.  It is also claimed that yogurt can restore a healthy bacterial balance in one's digestive system.  These may all be true, though there's still enough New Age-y overtone to American yogurt that one has to wonder.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

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