SC - Cheddar

[Philip & Susan Troy]

James and/or Nancy Gilly wrote:
> 
> It's been said several times on this list that cheddar cheese is not period,
> because the cheddaring process wasn't invented until (I think) the 1700s.
> What precisely is cheddaring?
> 
> Alasdair mac Iain

Hmmm. This is a tough one.

The problem is that the process that cheddaring actually is, is
different, and apparently older than, the processes that are sometimes
_called_ cheddaring. Confused yet?

All right. Cheddaring _is_  a process, which may or may not (with
emphasis on the "not") have been developed in Cheddar, Somersetshire,
England, of taking coagulated milk, allowing the mass to settle under
the whey, with the aid of heat, cutting the firmed mass into blocks, and
stacking them up on each other, allowing gravity to compress them for
anywhere from a few minutes to two hours. This alters the casein
filament structure, resulting in a change of the mass from a stack of
blocks of "jellied" milk, to a stack of horizontal layers of long
fibers, which can be shredded like mozzarella or "string" cheese. That
is cheddaring. The stack is then ground in a mill into small grains
called curds. Yes, I know we had curds, technically, quite a while ago,
but what the hey...anyway, these curds are then made into cheese using
various arcane techniques that I won't go into now.

Another process that is sometimes, erroneously, referred to as
cheddaring, is the production of Cheddar cheese using curds collected
from a commune of different small dairy farms, which results in a very
consistent and rather abundant (in Cheddar terms) product, without the
variations from year to year that are commonly associated with wine
production, but which are also part of the whole cheese thing. That
process is believed to have originated in late 18th-, early 19th-century
America.

Also, cheddar is an early English example of a "cooked" cheese, where
the coagulated milk, or the separated or cut curds are slowly warmed in
their whey, to firm them up. The cheese recipes in, say, Kenelm Digby,
don't include this process. Digby, by the way, refers to Cheshire, which
is somewhat similar to Cheddar, and which also usually calls for the
cooking process mentioned above. The question remains whether the
Cheshire Digby refers to bears much resemblance to modern Cheshire, and
whether it was cooked. As for Cheddar, cheese have been made there for
_quite_ a long time, but it isn't clear how much pre-nineteenth century
Cheddar cheese resembled the cheeses made in Cheddar (and several other
places) today.

It's a pretty safe bet that the deep yellow or orange cheddar found in
the USA isn't very close to a period cheese that might have been made in
Cheddar. There might be a coincidental similarity in flavor, but the
color and the texture would be quite different.

Adamantius
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
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