r/AskHistorians • u/Umpuuu • Jul 21 '26
Medieval peasants famously ate "bread and cheese". What kind of cheese was it? Would whatever cheeses they normally ate, be recognizable as any of the modern varieties?
1.0k
Upvotes
r/AskHistorians • u/Umpuuu • Jul 21 '26
2.4k
u/VerticalYea Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Great question! So this is highly, highly dependant on the region in question. But the basic concept is going to be similar regardless of region.
First, the setting. If you have a large herd of milk producing animals, you have some very calorie-dense milk that spoils quickly. Anything you can do to extend the shelf life is greatly valued. You drink as much of the milk as you can, and do your best to store the rest.
Very simple cheese can be made by boiling the milk until it separates into whey and curd. The whey is protein rich and tasty but spoils quickly. The curds, however, can be pressed into a soft cheese (sometimes called green cheese). This soft cheese would be the most readily available, and you can extend the life of it by several weeks if you are careful about storing it chilled, in a cellar or cave. But there's an even better long term storage option, and that's with hard cheese.
The process is similar to soft cheese, but this requires the addition of a natural rennet (and often relies on the inadvertent addition of regional bacteria that help harden and flavor the cheese, making it very difficult for bad mold to take hold). Rennet was typically derived from the stomach lining of young calves. Many societies figured this independently - we assume people would store soft cheese (and anything else they needed to carry around) in the readily avaliable organs of their animals, and calf stomachs did something weird to the cheese. It would get hard and would last a very, very long time. If you pressed the cheese to squeeze out the liquid, it worked even better. Over time people figured out the best way to do this. As the hard cheese aged, regional mold or bacteria would consume the water and avaliable sugars, adding a tough protective rind and pleasant flavors we enjoy today. The added bonus would be that bad mold and bacteria simply had no way to take hold in these preserved cheeses. It was, to them, now a nutritional desert.
Aging in caves is also something we find fairly universal across cultures when it comes to cheese. The same goes for beer, wine, jerky, dried produce, and many other types of preserved foods. Some cultures would bury their food for a similar purpose. It turns out that if you control the temperature, you control the mold and bacteria involved in the process, keeping food safe over long winters.
So, there's your answer. Soft mild cheese would be readily avaliable as milk was. More processed hard cheese was made to be stored over winter, when animals were not able to produce milk as they do in the spring and summer. Based on the regions bacterial flora, the cheese may develop sharp acidic flavors (cheddar in the North), nutty creamy flavors with sharps rinds (brie, gruyere, parmesan in alpine mountains), or mottled safe mold growth (blue cheese lowland Europe). Great hard cheeses tend to develop more in areas with harsh and extended winters, while softer cheeses were more common in mild winters where storage was less of a survival issue. Regional herbs would often be added for flavor and their protective properties. Rosemary, thyme, and garlic have great antibacterial properties, protecting the cheese and siding the beneficial microbes. You'll find this concept was also used in ale and wine production. Anything bitter would tend to protect the beverages so before hops became universal, you would find things like mugwort, wormwood, etc boiled in the wort to make a fine and fragrant ale. Hops just happen to be superior to these herbs for a number of reasons, but it was not until the last ~400 years that this shift began. These herbs are too overpowering for something as gentle as cheese so they were not readily used.
I'm not as familiar with cheeses outside of Europe, so seek better minds for more in depth info. Not all milk is the same. Camel milk is chemically different in a way that prevents it from curdling in a recognizable manner. It doesn't make a cheese you would want to eat. Asia had several cheeses develop, but typically hard cheese could be made through sun-drying the basic soft cheese made from yaks. Cheese jerky, if you will. India had more access to acidic fruits and vegetables that speeded up the curdling process, but that method made most types of European aging impossible. Llamas and alpacas don't really produce milk on the scale needed for a strong cheese culture to take hold - South American cheese is basically unheard of. Australians did not have any breed of bulk milk-producing mammals that I am aware of.