Everyday Italian: Perfectly Period Party Platters - Part II

 

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In the last episode, we covered how cheese likely got started as the world's best food product, and how it made its way over to Europe. That's all very well and good, but now the fun can really start.

Read Part I here.

Early Italy

By the time of the Etruscans, (c. 900 — c. 27 bce) cheese had broadly developed into two distinct camps: dry cheese, or caseus aridus, and wet cheese, caseus mollis. Other technology started springing up around this time, too, including a preponderance of cheese graters in Etruscan tombs, as well as the development of clay milk boilers, an innovation to keep heat-coagulated cheeses from boiling over and losing all of the tasty, tasty curd.

Etruscan cheese grater
photo: riproduzioni storiche

While fresh, ricotta-style cheeses have been around since more or less the beginning, there was also a shift toward aged pecorino and caprino (which come from the Italian words for sheep and goat).

In the press

To the delight of food historians, food writing got its start around this time but, unlike the influencers today, it was from boring agriculturalists not foodies.

In the 2nd century BCE, Cato the Elder wrote De Agro Cultura, a sort of farming manual for Roman Estates. He really only focused on dairying as a secondary product to olive oil and wine, but certainly had opinions on how big of a flock different sized estates should have, and the types of cheese that should be produced from them. His suggestion that half the cheeses be ‘dry’, which likely means types made early in the season then dried and ripened for a few months, implies that tenant cheesemakers likely had access to at least a remedial ageing facility. Most likely just a shack with some shelves and a bit of temperature regulation. Dry cheeses were very popular with the Roman elite, and probably made the estate some decent money through sales.

A few years later, Varro penned his Rerum Rusticarum, another farming manual, but more in-depth and practical than Cato’s. By this time, estates typically had multiple flocks of sheep. Varro, having grown up on an estate himself, detailed everything from flock management to shepherd management. He was also the first to discuss rennet coagulation in terms of actual measurements and preferred sources, and - for my vegetarian and vegan friends - was the first to write about using a combination of fig sap and vinegar as a coagulant.

Columella was, “the most comprehensive, systematic, and arguably the most impressive agriculturalist of antiquity.” His Res Rustica is made up of twelve volumes, including an entire section of the seventh book dedicated to cheese. He emphasises quality control from the start, suggesting that one never use more than the absolute minimum amount of rennet needed for coagulation because, as we now know, too much can lead to fat and protein breakdown during ageing which will ruin the cheese. He also offered advice on temperature maintenance during coagulation and setting, as well as alternate coagulants. Importantly, Columella understood that achieving high-quality cheese was a delicate balancing act of proper moisture control.

By the time Columella was writing, several regions in the Italian peninsula were known for their exceptional cheeses, so available varieties were already starting to appear and move into other markets. Martial, a poet and author, documented his favourite cheeses in Xenia, the thirteenth book of his series on hospitality. 

Martial broadly talked about four domestic cheese regions: Vestine, Trebula, Velabrum, and Luna.

• Vestine cheese, a product of the central part of the peninsula, was apparently very common as a breakfast cheese.

• Trebula cheese, from around what is now Abruzzo, Lazzo and Umbria, was prized as an excellent cheese for using in cooking

• Velabrum cheeses hailed from the greater Rome area, and were frequently smoked. Pliny the Elder commented on these in particular, at some point, indicating that smoked goat-milk cheese was especially delicious.

• Luna cheese was really big.
  (Apparently it was also tasty, but the important point, here, is that cheese making innovation had advanced to the point where cheesemakers could manage that delicate balance of moisture control that Columella talked about in remarkably large quantities.)

Meanwhile, at the same time all of these shenanigans were happening further down the peninsula, Celtic folks wandered over the alps into the Northern bits, and brought their cows, technology, and dairy culture with them, and by the middle ages things really started getting good.

The Middle Ages

Over time, the grand Roman villas became Medieval manor farms, made up of great big tracts of farmland, large collections of livestock, and mouths to feed. 

With the rise of Christianity and the subsequent religious communities came the development of monasteries made up of great big tracts of farmland, large collections of livestock, and mouths to feed.

Whereas Romans had slaves to do all of the heavy lifting, Manor farms and monasteries had peasants as tenant farmers, maintaining that age-old tradition of the haves and have-nots.

Thankfully, though, all of these people made and ate cheese and people needing to do the best they could with limited resources is where things really started to take off.

The evolution of style

So, when you’re a peasant, if you’re lucky you might have one cow or sheep or goat of your own or that you are, at least, responsible for. Making a reasonable amount of cheese takes a fairly large amount of milk, so it’s wildly unlikely that you’d get enough in a single milking to make cheese, which means you’re keeping it all in a bucket, somewhere, and adding to it until you have enough to be useful. 

Bloomy-rind and washed-rind

Bloomy-rind cheese

This extended storage creates an interesting environment for things like lactic acid bacteria, which has a profound impact on how the cheese develops and matures. By the early middle ages, especially in cooler climates, this was leading to some pretty glorious bloomy-rind and washed-rind cheeses, similar to cheeses like Brie.

Alpine

Alpine cheese

Alpine cheeses, from points further North, also continued to evolve during the early middle ages – the same transhumanance we saw in ancient times was very much at play, here. Dairy livestock from combined tenant-farming families were herded up the mountains in the spring, milked, and cheeses made and aged in chalets built up there for the purpose. The huge volume of milk plus the limited space for cheesemaking, though, meant that cheese was often being made twice a day - sometimes immediately, sometimes the next day after the milk was left to cool overnight. The resulting cheese was given back to the community who ate it, of course, but also used it to pay part of their tenancy to the local abbey. The enormous volume of milk produced also meant that cheeses needed to be fairly large, as well as durable and long-lived in order to survive the trek back down the mountain and further afield.

These cheesemakers developed manufacturing innovations to reduce the need for salt in the preserving and ageing process so they didn’t have to haul heavy bags of the stuff up the mountains with them, yet still make cheese that would be dry enough to be durable and that would age well.

The results of these innovations were a collection of cheeses with sturdy rinds, firm elastic innards, and a nutty flavour – Gruyére is an excellent example of this style.

Blue

Blue cheese

Another delicious surprise developed out of being able to store cheeses in caves, which conveniently tend to maintain a constant, usefully cool temperature. This is great for ageing cheeses, but - as it happens - it’s also great for the growth of some moulds. Cheeses made by a slower rennet coagulation, no cooking and heavy salting end up with a high acid and salt content, which certain strains of mould really like. Turns out, humans really liked it too, so cheesemakers refined their processes to encourage this mould growth, and that’s how we have the gloriousness of blue cheeses.

Roquefort is a good example of this - it’s a sheep’s milk blue cheese style that dates to the 11th century from the Roquefort region of France that, for a while, was part of a vast monastic enterprise that included a near-monopoly by Templars and other orders. Because of course they did.

Grana

Grana-style cheese

It wouldn’t be a presentation about cheese in Italy without talking about the hard, Grana-style cheeses. These originated in the Po valley of Northern Italy, and were largely developed in the Alpine tradition. While no one is certain when these types first appeared, they were well on their way by the 14th century. 

These cheeses are characterised by their hardness, which is achieved by a heavier-handed application of salt compared to their Alpine brethren, smaller curds, and extensive cooking which is much easier to do in the lowlands than it is on the side of a mountain. This made for a higher-salt, lower-moisture cheese that made it really quite durable and much easier to age for longer. This allowed cheesemakers to make the enormous wheels you still see today.

Everything about this process set these cheeses on the road to immediate and long-lasting popularity. They were large, indestructible, tasty, and convenient to Venice, one of the world’s largest trade cities, making these Parmesan-style cheeses highly-prized trade goods, even as far away as England.

A couple of wise guys

Two resources really stand out as definitive, from this period. First, we know a lot about the cheese trade in the high- to late middle ages because of a merchant from Prato named Francesco Datini, whose extensive account books and records were discovered in the late 19th century, and provide an incredible look into not only his life, but that of the merchant class in general in the 14th and 15th centuries. Additionally, the letters between himself and his wife, who stayed in Prato while he lived and worked in Florence, also provide excellent insight into the running of medieval households. 

Datini got his start in the arms trade, but his business eventually shifted to providing luxury goods to Cardinals, which included busy trading in cheese. From his records, we get a clear listing of the types of cheeses that were available and popular, their provenance, the different grades, their worth, and who bought them. His records are an invaluable resource.

A few years later, a guy named Pantaleone da Confienza basically lived my best life by becoming a travel cheese writer. He roamed around Europe, eating cheese, asking questions, and compiling what he learned into his book Summa Lacticiniorum, which roughly translates to “a compendium of milk products.” It was the first known book to be written about a single ingredient. It quickly became popular among both cheese producers and cheese eaters, and was the definitive treatise on cheese for the next few hundred years. 

In our next episode, we finally get to the Renaissance...