Cheese & Culture (2013)
Paul S. Kindstedt
An incredible book about Cheese, and much more than Cheese.
Do you ever wonder about why the world is how it is ? As in, the big questions ?
Obviously, reading about sociology, philosophy, political sciences, economics, going out there and speaking to people helps a lot for that. I mean that’s kind of why we are travelling, aren't we ?
But let me rephrase, do you ever wonder about why the World is as it is - as in, all the questions.
Why is Swiss cheese the way it is, and why is is it different from Camembert or Roquefort ? Do you ever wonder about that ? Because I do, a lot !
There must be a reason for things to be different, no ? And why is that that some countries even have a cheese culture & some others don’t ?
Then I stumbled upon this book while doing some research…….. for….. another project………
This book was written by American cheese-lover Paul S. Kindstedt, and is exploring both the history of early cheesemaking & the discovery of the very process permitting it, as well as explaining through many examples how & why cheese have differed region to region throughout history, particularly discussing its links to European civilization, and finally diving into the effects of industrialisation on cheese making. What a program.
SO yeah, I just found this book captivating and I’d like to recommend it, as well as talk about a few points of particular interest about it. That’s.. ahem, kind of the point of a book club.
OKAY, so the first mind-blowing thing about cheese-making is, that it is so consubstantial to agriculture it’s amazing. In the Neolithic, roughly around 8500 BC - 8000 BC (or in about year 0 on the holocene calendar which is the one I prefer using since Gregorian calendars don’t make any sense for most of the World including in the West but whatever it’s a different subject I guess) certain groups of humans, mostly based in Mesopotamia & the Levant really got to cultivate certain cereals - basically certain types of grass - to feed their population, as opposed to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that predominated before that & in other regions. Intensifying the culture of these types of grass influenced the grazing areas of wild animals - goats & sheep came more into the valleys when they used to stay up in the mountains - and made them available for humans to domesticate, first for their meat, and with time, when they started producing more milk than necessary for their offsprings, for their milk.
But milk was NOT consumed as such at the beginning. As a matter of fact, humans do not naturally digest lactose past a certain age. This surplus milk had to be transformed to be consumed by these populations.
And here comes coagulation of milk, which breaks down the proteins contained in it and makes it able to be digested by adults. Coagulation of milk is a synonym for… CHEESE !
At first, the process was only consisting of coagulating the milk with the acid-heating coagulation process. Then there was the discovery of rennet, an enzyme located in calves' stomachs used to break proteins down, which can be used to control coagulation to a greater degree. Apparently, fig sap also works in the same way and was also used by early civilizations in cheese-making (!!).
All of this put together, it means that the first cheeses probably looked and tasted like Çökelek, a type of cheese still made and consumed today in Turkey & Azerbaijan.
Actually, it is the discovery of cheese-making that actually favored the genetic mutation making it possible for some humans to digest lactose. Incredible stuff.
Another big question answered in this fantastic book is, why are cheese so different from one place to another ?
Well, Kindstedt explains that it is all linked to relatively few factors, as there are only a limited number of techniques involved in cheese-making, but that these factors are greatly influenced by the economic systems & climate/environmental constraints surrounding the cheese-makers.
Case & point : Gruyère is a hard paste cheese with holes, roquefort is a relatively soft one with mold - but why is that ? They both come from the same animal’s milk, after all, right ?
Well, the grazing areas in Switzerland at the time Gruyère was first produced happened to be quite large, the herds the shepherds had quite extensive as well. Cheese makers basically a lot of milk to make quite fast, so they increased the size of the cheese, which would also help for transportation & commerce.
The thing is, these cheese-makers faced a new problem while making larger cheeses, since drying becomes bigger of an issue as rotting can occur in the inner-parts of the cheese. Cheese-makers in the area therefore came to innovate with a revolutionary technique : heating it up !
« Either way, mountain milk typically contained relatively low populations of lactic acid bacteria, which in turn resulted in characteristically slow acidification during cheese making. The large volume of milk produced each day meant that the cheeses needed to be relatively large to facilitate their transport down the mountain. They also had to be durable and long-lived. Furthermore, the remoteness of the mountain sites meant that there was strong incentive to use salt sparingly because salt had to be packed up from the lowlands. » « The above conditions posed a dilemma for the alpine cheesemaker. Slow acidification, large cheese size, and sparing use of salt made it exceptionally difficult to produce cheeses that were low enough in moisture to be durable and long lasting. Specifically, slow acidification reduced curd shrinkage and whey expulsion during cheese making; large cheese size reduced evaporative moisture loss from the surface during storage; and sparing use of salt reduced whey expulsion during salting. Consequently, alpine cheesemakers had to go to great lengths to produce cheeses of sufficient dryness, which inspired a number of technical innovations.
For example, elaborate cutting techniques and devices (knives or harps) were developed to produce very small curd particles with maximum surface area to promote whey expulsion. Also, elevated cooking temperatures, sometimes as high as 49 to 54°C, were applied to further encourage curd shrinkage and whey expulsion, using copper kettles that were suspended directly over a fire pit. The cooked curds were transferred to wheel-shaped (as opposed to cylindrical) forms to increase the surface- area-to-volume ratio of the final cheese and thus promote evaporative moisture loss during storage; and presses were devised to squeeze out whey and produce a very tight surface that facilitated the development of a resilient protective rind. »
This technique, resulting of a innovation to solve a problem created by the environmental constraints of the region, effectively conditioned the aspect, taste & consistency of a whole genre of cheese, which will partly define the nature of economic & cultural exchange of a whole area, partly shaping national identity of the people living it said area ! Isn't it crazy ??
In contrast, Camembert was invented during Medieval times by Benedictine monks (the ones that work a lot - usually making beer or cheese), in what were called manors, with only about 2 or 3 cows available to them. The technique to avoid making cheese everyday with very little milk adapted itself to combining milks from different days’ harvest. This way, 3 cows could give milk equivalent to a bigger herd, as long as the milk from the first days didn’t turn bad.
Now, storing milk for days before the invention of fridges had a side effect : the acidity in the milk changes. It’s biology, apparently, so don’t expect me to describe how it works. But in turn, the Ph in the milk has an effect on the consistency and drying aspects of the cheese once the milk coagulated !
That’s why most French semi-soft paste cheese like Camembert are made like this ! Isn't that amazing ?
Effects of the environment on cheese-making techniques is probably best described by the very famous blue-cheese. Kindstedt describes how storing cheese in the Cliff-caves of Roquefort, at a very steady yet low temperature helped controlled rotting which is necessary for the making of blue cheese, and tadaaah ! Deliciousness occurred.
« The area around the village of Roquefort is honeycombed with natural caves formed from horizontal and vertical geological faults in the surrounding mountain cliffs. The caves act as a near-constant temperature (6 to 10°C) and humidity (95 to 98 % relative humidity) environment, and are endowed with natural ventilation by vertical fissures or fleurines that provide air exchange with the outside. It turns out that the environmental conditions present in the caves are ideal for the growth of various molds, including the blue mold Penicillium roqueforti. »
This is great.
It also explains that cheese making techniques differed in other areas of the World according to cultures. For example, in the Indian subcontinent, where the Cow is revered as a god, the use of rennet (taken from calves' stomachs) for coagulation was discouraged. Instead, vegetable based acidic coagulation (like vinegar or lemon juice) was more popular, which in turn had a different effect on the type of cheese that would result out of this process. Incredible.
Towards the end of the book, Kindstedt describes the evolutions the industry of cheese-making underwent through, as well as the different perspectives on cultural / economical institutional protections (like the regulation of use of names & protected regional exclusivities as DOP...) in modern discourse & law-making.
It is still quite interesting to get an overview of the debates occurring in the cheese-world, but slightly less fascinating than the earlier chapters according to hmmmm me.
All in all, a surprisingly fascinating read, that teaches you a lot about cheese, but also (and mostly) about the long history of humans, about the effects of diverse environments on the long-term culture of people, about how interconnected human civilizations are, and how deliciousness is actually linked to the very nature of the universe.
10/10 would recommend