History of Cheese
If you don't have a refrigerator, there's no way to keep milk from
going bad within a few hours, especially if you live in a hot climate
like Africa or Western
Asia. Even WITH a refrigerator milk goes bad in about a week. But
ancient cows and sheep
and goats only gave milk part of the year, right after they had had
their babies in the spring. By mid-summer their milk had all dried up.
How could people manage to preserve this milk to be able to eat it in
the fall and winter as well?
They made it into cheese. The easiest kind of cheese to make is yogurt, which was very common in the ancient Mediterranean diet and in India (and still is today). If you leave milk out on the kitchen counter on a warm day, it will soon get all lumpy and turn into yogurt. This is because bacteria get into the milk from the air and eat it. Some of these kinds of bacteria are bad for you, or make the milk taste bad. But if you get the right kind of bacteria in your milk, it turns into good yogurt. The bacteria eat the lactose in the milk (a kind of sugar), break down the lactose for energy inside the cell, and then poop out what is left over: lactic acid. The lactic acid changes the part of the milk that the bacteria don't eat: the protein. Normally protein molecules are curled up in balls, but the lactic acid makes the proteins unfold, and then they get tangled up with each other, making one solid lump.
Yogurt tastes good, and it will keep for a few days without being refrigerated, but it still won't keep all winter. Once people realized how to make yogurt, they began experimenting with other types of bacteria, and found that you can use different bacteria to make aged cheeses. Some of these cheeses can be kept without being refrigerated for four or five years or even more. Swiss cheese is an example of an aged cheese that you might have eaten. Or cheddar cheese. Most aged cheese is made using rennet, a piece of the stomach lining of a cow. Because of this, in India (where cows were sacred to Hindus) people mostly ate yogurt, rather than aged cheese.
You make cheese by adding a little bit of rennet to some milk, and then straining out most of the liquid, so it gets all solid (the milk you buy at the store will work fine! You can buy rennet pretty easily). It's pretty hard to make aged cheese, but if you are interested it is not very hard to make yogurt or ricotta cheese.
To find out more about cheese and cheese-making, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Cheese (Foods We Eat), by Linda Illsley (1991). What cheese is, explained for kids.
Making Great Cheese At Home: 30 Simple Recipes From Cheddar to Chevre, by Barbara Ciletti (2001).
Food in Antiquity: A Survey of the Diet of Early Peoples, by Don and Patricia Brothwell (1998). Pretty specialized, but the book tells you where foods came from, and how they got to other places, and what people ate in antiquity. Not just Europe, either!
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