[Sca-cooks] FW: spice and cheese question for my turnips recipe

[Terry Decker]

There's not much that I've found on Elizabethean cheese markets, but I would 
expect fontina not to be very common.  It is more likely you would see gouda 
or edam from the Low Countries, where there were a number of major cheese 
markets.  The trade relationship between England and the Low Countries was 
strong during the 15th and 16th Centuries due to the number of refugees who 
moved to England to escape the Spanish.  The only true Dutch cheese market 
of this type remaining is at Woerden.

If fontina did show up in England, I would expect it to be old cheese traded 
in Venice or Pisa, shipped directly to London or transferred through 
Portugal and traded to the English there to ship to London then wholesaled 
at the docks to local grocers .  By the 16th Cenbtury, England was getting 
most of its spices from Lisbon.  Pisa was a Genoese satellite, the overland 
Genoese cloth trade with Asia had shrunk, and Genoa had established 
factories in Spain and Portugal to rebuild its trade with Asia.   So the 
trade through Portugal would be a strong possibility.

I also don't count out Venice, since the English went where they could make 
a bargain.

You state that you can date fontina to the 13th Century.  Documentation, 
please.  I'm curious because most of the sources I've run across base this 
date on some very shaky evidence (shapes of cheese in illustrations and an 
unidentified document).  I've also seen the claim for a 12th Century origin, 
again with no real references that can be verified.  There is an entry on 
the area cheeses in the Summa Lacticinorum (1477).  I haven't located a 
copy, but an abbreviated quote from the reference makes me think that it a 
generalization and not a specific reference to fontina.  The first use of 
the name fontina is stated to be in 1717.  If we don't have an accurate 
description of the cheese and its properties prior to the 18th Century, then 
there is no way we can be assured that the cheese we call fontina is related 
to the cheese produced in the 12th or 13th Century or even manufactured in a 
similar manner.

Bear


> I'm going to use fontina, and I'm pretty happy with that choice because I
> can date it back to the 1200s in the mountains northwest of Venice (unless
> one of you more learned folks thinks I'm whacked).  Of course, how Arwen
> would have gotten an Italian cheese like fontina in 1576 Ipswich is a
> question I need to answer..... Can anyone point me to resources for the
> cheese trade in Elizabethan England?  Was there one?  I'm assuming at this
> point that they might have brought cheeses with them along with whole 
> spices
> on merchant ships from Italy?
>
>
> Dame Arwen Lioncourt OP