SC - cheese questions

[Mark S. Harris]

Jadwiga Zajaczkowa asked: 
> Ladies and gents, this is _still_ bugging me: 
> Does anyone know if 'bread and cheese' does show up as what we would think
> of as travel or snack food in the middle ages?

I'm not sure on this.
 
> Also, if so, what kinds of readily available cheeses -- Besides Farmer
> Cheese-- are closest to period cheese?

Check this file in the FOOD section of my Florilegium:
cheese-msg       (144K)  7/27/00    Medieval cheese. Recipes.

I know I've put a number of messages in there where people say which
cheese varieties are period and what evidence they have to think this is
so.

> (I realize that any cheese made in America is essentially not period,
> especially any 'mass produced cheese' because the non-period cows are
> eating a non-period diet, and with cheese the breed of cow and the diet
> REALLY makes a difference...)

That may depend upon your difinition of 'mass produced cheese'. I wouls
expect a lot of them to still taste fairly close. There are a number
of cheeses that are still small scale productions, especially some of
the imported stuff. But I guess there will be some differences. But
would the difference between what we get now and then be greater or
less than the variation then from region to region?
 
> And lastly, I got the impression from C. Anne Wilson's book that people
> would have been eating soft cheese in late spring, summer and fall, and
> hard cheese in winter. Is this right?

This may depend on how long the hard cheese lasts. If it lasts past
a year, why wouldn't you have hard cheese in the spring left from the
previous year? Unless there wasn't that much and it was all eaten
by then.

Perhaps they were eating hard cheese in winter simply because the
soft cheese didn't last that long. While I like hard cheeses compared
to soft, medieval folks may have had a different opinion after eating
hard cheeses through the winter. Perhaps even if there were hard
cheeses still left in spring, they were so tired of them by then, that 
the soft cheese was preferred when it became available again.

- -- 
Lord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas           stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****