SC - Re: sca-cooks V1 #135

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Aoife wrote back at me, who'd previously pontificated:
> >
> >People researching this topic seem to have an innate desire to discover
> >that their favorite modern cheese is found in period. Almost without
> >exception, this doesn't appear to be the case. There are quite a few
> >cases where period cheeses from, and named for, a given region, bear
> >little resemblance to modern cheeses from the same area, with the same
> >name.
> >>
> 
> What we do know, however, is that similar cheeses do appear in period (sorry
> to confuse). Anecdotal evidence suggests that strong cheese, mild cheese,
> gooey cheese, dry cheese, poor quality cheese, high quality cheese, curds,
> and Whig houses (where they sold the whey much like a coffee bar of today.
> There's no accounting for tastes!) all were common. You probably will not
> find colored cheeses, but you can find fancy-shaped cheeses and "similated"
> cheese from almond milk.

Yuppo! Cheese is cheese, and each has some variant on the qualities
other cheeses have, so this isn't surprising. True that anecdotal
evidence indicates that there were cheeses coated with mold or a dry
rind, etc. My point was only that just because a recipe calls for Brie,
it doesn't necessarily follow that modern runny Brie with a white rind
is what is being referred to. I remember reading that Roquefort, for
example, is perfectly well-known in period France. The catch is that  it
had no blue veins, but, if I remember the statement correctly, had a
moldy white rind like the modern Brie or Camembert. It may be that some
local dairy person picked an opportune (or inopportune, depending on
your POV) moment to scald the wooden equipment, killing the "official"
Roquefort mold, leaving room for the little penicillium buggers we know
and love today to proliferate and become the new "official" mold.

> I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to teach a cheese-making
> class about three years ago in a kitchen that was a Jr. High teaching
> kitchen....had the mirrors over the stove, etc. I was delighted to see the
> reaction to the process of hardening the curds. The class actually gasped
> when the curd seperated from the whey and I stuck my spoon into a pot of
> what looked like milk and was actually a huge solid lump floating in a clear
> liquid! It still makes me chuckle, thinking about it. That's Alchemy at it's
> finest!

Hey, that wasn't at the KW Culinary Symposium in Stierbach, Atlantia,
was it? I love sites like that! Just goes to show that people just seem
to love doing things with mirrors over them ;  ) ! Actually, I agree
with the Alchemy corollary. I also found that the process has a
fascination for brewers, who are also used to putting things in big pots
and waiting a while for amazing chemical reactions to occur.

Adamantius, who had to have some rind to make that mirror joke...