[Sca-cooks] Slugs as rennet

[Cindy M. Renfrow]

Hello!  We're off tomorrow for our last jaunt in Europe before heading back
to the States.  I'll be back in about a week.

Just thought I'd leave you with this interesting note from a nice lady at
the Wensleydale Creamery in England. We went there last summer & hubby
claimed to have seen a sign saying they used to use slugs as rennet. But he
lost all our pictures of the cheese museum & had no proof of his assertion,
so of course I didn't believe him. It's been a running joke ever since.
Well, seems he was partially correct. According to the lady, the
Wensleydale Creamery didn't use slugs, but some farmer's wives may have:


" Thank you for your enquiry about slugs being used as rennet.
>> The farmer's wife of the 17th and 18th centuries had to make her cheese
>> under much more difficult conditions than our modern dairymaid has to
>> face.  She had no thermometer to record the right temperature of her milk.
>> The heat of the milk had to be judged by placing the hand in the vat or
>> better still the elbow, or by tasting before she dare add the rennet.
>> Even rennet was not obtained with the ease it is today.  A couple of
>> centuries ago rennet as we know it, had not been thought of.  In those
>> days when the farmer killed a young calf, the stomach was taken out,
>> washed, salted, cured and hung on a nail in the kitchen rafters to dry.
>> The young calf's stomach contained the properties found in our modern
>> liquid rennet.
>>
>> When the farmer's wife required rennet to coagulate the milk she would cut
>> off a small piece of the dried stomach, boil it in a pan on the kitchen
>> fire, and strain off the liquid to cool.  This liquid would serve for the
>> next few days' cheese making, and when it was used up she repeated the
>> process.  The dried calf's stomach was known as "keslop" but the
>> cheesemaker of two centuries ago had no means of finding out the strength
>> of her home made rennet.  Sometimes she ran short of "keslop" and thereby
>> short of rennet.  When this happened the household had to resort to
>> hunting the black snail in some nearby swamp.  A black snail submerged in
>> a bowl of milk causes the same reaction as rennet and eventually cheese
>> curd will begin to form."



Regards,
Cindy