Cheese History

Here's a wonderful article about cheese history. It's amazing how the different cultures around the world have invented uses for something as ordinary (and exraordinary) as cheese.

The Wonder of Cheese
by Antonio Gazquez Ortiz

Looking back in history we can speculate on how man first came upon the production of cheese, possibly just by coincidence or intuition. Regardless of how it happened, it was thousands of years ago.

It could have been that on the evening of an ordinary day after milking his sheep, a shepherd lay down under a shadowy tree and satisfied his appetite with the product of his animals: a bowl of creamy and tasty milk. The morning after, he woke up happy but with such a sensation of emptiness in his stomach, that made him think of the bowl of milk he drank the night before. He grabbed the bowl with the leftover milk. However, instead of milk he found a miracle: a few flowers had dropped in the milk and the milk had thickened. He felt so hungry though that he tried the cream. Never had he tried such a delicacy before!

I also heard that the same shepherd, after observing for long time, discovered that those lambs, which died for unknown reasons, housed in their stomachs this same creamed milk. So, he tried that too. It looked like the one he had found in the bowl, and that made him reflect on the matter. That is how he figured out the mystery of cheese.

First references to the use of cream cheese appears in the Third Brahman Book of Manu, where worshipping the gods by pouring liquid butter over the sacrifice pyre is encouraged. According to Herodotus, the first cheese makers were Scythians who prepared it by shaking milk in animal skins. They prepared sheep's milk cheese and goat cheese. However, the oldest existing image on making of cheese is one belonging to the Frieze of the Milk Shop from Ur around 3000 B.C.

Cheese was produced by the first Jews in Jericho by taking part of the innards of sheep and mixing it with milk. By Homer's time there are reports of the existence of expert producers of cheese. There are references to the production of cheese in The Odyssey. Greeks used the juice extracted from freshly collected figs or cardoon flowers to thicken the milk. Thus, Aristotle in his third book of History of Animals wrote: "fig tree latex and the wild cardoon flower thicken the milk. So, the fig tree sap is squeezed and collected in wool."

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And while you are at it, check out some of these fun, easy and delicious recipes for cheese appetizers.

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