SC - Cheesemaking question

[rcmann4 at earthlink.net]

And it came to pass on 5 Mar 01, , that Philip & Susan Troy wrote:

> > I know they used cheese presses to shape and firm the
> > cheese, but did they cook the curds?  Or is that a modern
> > innovation?
> 
> From what I've been able to determine, it's modern. Admittedly, what I'm
> saying is, "I don't know that the cooking of curds was done in period,"
> rather than, "I know that it was not done in period." 

Thank you.  I found one web page in which someone redacted 
Platina's cheesemaking instructions.  His recipe included cooking 
the curds, even though Platina says nothing about it -- only to 
smoke the cheese after it is pressed and dried.  So I wondered if 
he was basing his actions on modern practice, or on other period 
texts that I have not read.

> What I do know is
> that of the actual cheese recipes I've seen in Dowe, Markham, Plat, and
> Digby (the last three all early post-period), 

I can see I have some book-buying to do  I have Digby, but not the 
other three.  And I've never heard of Dowe.  I also want to ILL the 
relevant section of Columella.  Herrera quotes him, so I gather he 
was still considered An Authority in the 16th centruy.

> along with various
> curd-based dishes in the medieval corpus and various net-based cheese
> process descriptions of things like gruyere (allegedly period) appear to
> be uncooked. This might be coincidence, and I may simply have missed all
> the cooked curd recipes, but I suspect not.
> 
> Adamantius

Thank you.  Since it seems like I will be at home tomorrow, I feel 
another experiment coming on.  I have also discovered, to my 
delight, that my local health food store sells non-homogenized goat 
milk.  Now, if I could only figure out why it's impossible to find 
savory in the herb section of the supermarket...


Lady Brighid ni Chiarain
Settmour Swamp, East (NJ)
mka Robin Carroll-Mann
now at a new address: rcmann4 at earthlink.net