SC - Cheese recipes

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Kerridwen wrote:
> 
> Greetings!
> 
> I am looking for a starting place for recipes for period cheeses.  I am
> willing to do the research but would appreciate a nudge in the right
> direction.

Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think you'll find very many recipes for
making cheeses in sources considered classically period, unless they're
non-English sources I haven't seen translated yet, which is possible.
There are a few recipes for things like chinches, junket, and lait larde
which are for various curd foods or "whitmeats" in the 14th-15th-century
English repertoire (ex. The Forme of Cury, etc.). One of the problems
you'll encounter is that cheeses either tended to be made on small farms
by presumably illiterate farmers, or at monasteries whose records became
sparse after their dissolution in the 15th century or so. Detailed
descriptions of the cheesemaking process just don't seem to proliferate.

What you WILL find are a few Roman recipes, both, I believe, in Cato the
Elder's book on Agriculture, which would be approximately 3rd century
B.C., and Columella's De Re Rustica, which is a similar book from around
the second century C.E.. You might also try Pliny the Elder's Historia
Naturalis, wherein are descriptions of the process for making things
like Vestine Cheese, if I remember correctly. The dates I mention are a
bit iffy, since I'm working from memory here.

Also, you'll find some late and post-period sources in English. They
include Bartholomew Dowe's "Dairy Book for Good Housewives" (1588)
Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book (~1604),  Sir Hugh Plat's "Delightes
for Ladies" (1609), Gervase Markham's "The English Housewife" (~1615),
and "The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelm Digby, Knight,
Opened" (~1669). Fettiplace only gives recipes for fresh soft cheeses,
while the others go further into the process of making aged cheeses.

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.

Good sources for information on ancient-vs.-modern cheese are C. Anne
Wilson's "Food and Drink in Britain", and, Heaven help me for saying so,
the Larousse Gastronomique, which, as I have frequently said, is pretty
much reliable only where French foods are concerned.      
 
> Not quite cooks related, but does anyone have a source for period soap
> recipes?

I know there's a soap recipe in Thomas Dawson's "The Second Part of 'The
Good Huswifes Jewell' "... 

G. Tacitus Adamantius