Everyday Italian: Perfectly Period Party Platters - Part I
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| O, for a muse of cheese... |
Where this nonsense all started
A couple of years ago I got a book for Christmas called A Cheesemonger's History of the British Isles. It is a good book - well written and organised, and all about one of the best things on Earth. It got me to thinking, though, "what about a cheesemonger's history of renaissance Italy? Hmm?" Which led me to, first of all, head straight to my good friend Bartolomeo Scappi to see what he had to say on the subject, and second, buy a bunch of reference books, two of which are in languages I don't speak (or write, or read), and one which is so deeply scientific I feel both smarter and dumber whenever I flip through it.
This research is ongoing, but last Autumn I was asked by Their Excellencies Terra Pomeria, in An Tir, if I wanted to teach a class as part of their ongoing online series. Something something moment of weakness something so I said 'sure!' Then several months went by, during which I sort of started to translate a thing, and kind of poked at the pile of books I'd amassed. Then I had the standard "DEAR GOD THIS THING IS IN TWO WEEKS" panic, buckled down to get it together, and then I got Covid so had, in the end, to push it out by a month. When I did, in fact, manage to present this nonsense to a group of folks over Zoom in mid-March.
According to a nice lady from Meridies, I talk really fast, for which I apologise. But I'd rather chew glass than do presentations, so I was a bit anxious, even though I tried to slow it down.
Anyway...
I thought, for posterity, and for people who can't or won't watch the video, I'd capture the presentation here, in at least three parts, beginning with the whirlwind review of The History of Cheese (up to a certain point, and with lots of omissions).
“A chunk of parmigiano reggiano, eaten with a pear or some kind of fruit compote, is truly a dish fit for a king.”
A brief timeline of cheese
It began with the Ancients
Picture it…Anatolia, 7000 bce. It’s the tail end of the neolithic period, and people are thinking about settling down, maybe investing in some real estate, try to build a decent life…the Anatolian dream. For that to work, though, they needed reliable food sources, and that was best achieved through the domestication of animals.
Goats and sheep, as it happens, were also interested in living la dolce vita, and so a lovely relationship was born. Humans, being prone to innovation and easy sources of food, most probably got the bright idea of milk as a food source from watching their new friends feed their young. Thankfully, human babies, it turns out, have an enzyme that allows them to process the milk sugar called lactase.
The adults, it turns out, did not, so while this discovery worked out well for the infants, it went probably less well for the grown-ups. Which leads me to a myth-busting moment: Contrary to popular belief, it’s because of this adult lactose intolerance that the idea of some nomad guy putting milk in his water skin made of an animal stomach on one end of his journey, and magically discovering cheese on the other doesn’t hold up - the responses to lactose intolerance were probably the same then as they are today, so intentionally setting yourself up for a trip filled with runny poo and bathroom breaks seems deeply, deeply unlikely.
Meanwhile, somewhere within the next 5000 years that followed, or so, our Anatolian friends figured out heat sources. Heat led to pottery. Pottery led to better milk storage possibilities. Milk storage led to random fermentation through free-floating bacteria in the air. And it's that fermentation, friends, that led to curds. Fermentation is, broadly speaking, a process that converts the sugars in a thing, and you’ll remember that it was the sugars that were hard to digest past infancy. While this development was less meaningful for the infants, it started to work out very well for the grownups.
It’s also around this time that the possibility of rennet - the stomach lining of livestock - might have been experimented with as a coagulant on demand, rather than having to rely on random airborne bacteria.
About a thousand years later, our Anatolian friends grew up, moved out of their parents’ hut, and started to chase their destiny toward Northern Europe. With this diaspora came lots of changes and opportunities to meet up with dairy-producing animals, like cattle, but it also meant an important evolution in humans - lactose tolerance.
The slightly-less-but-still-ancient Ancients
So, now we’re into the boom time of early civilisation. People were living together in groups, and forming communities, notably the nascent city of Uruk. This meant that space was needed for buildings, so our animal friends were pushed out to the fringes, and often taken as large groups to really great grazing areas - a thing called ‘transhumanance - which improved the quality of the dairy and wool they produced. At the same time, transportation solutions improved – literally with the invention of the wheel – so people could get their very nice dairy and wool products to other communities, which spun up a lively trade.
Underscoring the importance of dairy and cheese to these, our ancestors, was the rise of the cult of Innana in Uruk. The legend reports that the goddess, when selecting her husband from amongst her human followers, wisely chose the shepherd Dumuzi because he could keep her in regular supply of milk, yoghurt, butter, and, of course, cheese. The other guy could only give her money. ::eyeroll::
This led to offerings of these things, both during special yearly rites and every day, in order to keep the Queen of Heaven happy and taking care of her people. (It probably goes without saying that, as religious cults go, this one was getting a lot of things right.)
For anyone familiar with religion, it should come as no surprise that, with all of these offerings, the temples got involved with the management and maintenance of the flocks and their produce, which, in turn, led to the development of clear writing and accounting so they could keep track of their cheese. It didn’t take long for the city of Ur to become a major centre for dairy production, as related on the cuniform tablets we all know and love.
Also around this time, the Bible tells a story of Abraham serving curds to God and two of his angels who had popped by for a visit indicating, first of all, that there was more widely spread adult lactose tolerance, but also the elevated status of cheese as a food. By the time of Abraham cheese was big business but, because it was perishable and difficult to transport, probably mostly limited to the ruling and temple elite. The written evidence supports several different terms for cheese, including additives, flavours, size and shape.
On the road
Moving Westward in the waning millennia BCE, trade drove innovations in preservation and transportation. Salt had been used as a preservative for quite some time, so applying it to the outside of a lump of cheese made sense. What that did was to dry the cheese out quite a bit and turn it into something akin to modern pecorino. What that could also do, however, was to simply draw out the moisture and turn it into brine, creating a cheese very similar to what we now call Feta. Both of these were significantly easier to transport across the Mediterranean to the hungry folks in Greece.
At the same time, a bunch of people who had found their way to the Alps and places further North, were developing their own dairying culture, which included cattle along with their goats and sheep. Another benefit of this region was the availability of cold storage, which is useful enough just by itself, but this particular innovation allowed for something new: ageing.
Cheese was common with Celtic people by this time, and their and others migrations led to Italy and Sicily becoming major producers of rennet-coagulated aged cheeses in the 1st millennium BCE.
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