Recipes

The Ancient World

The last page ended with residue in clay — evidence that somebody made cheese, inferred from fat molecules soaked into pottery. This page is where that changes. Here cheese stops being something we deduce and starts being something people wrote down, buried with their dead, and eventually explained how to make.

And the very first thing the record hands us is a warning.

The oldest cheese anyone has ever found

In 2013 and 2014, a Cairo University team excavating at Saqqara — the necropolis of ancient Memphis — was working in the tomb of Ptahmes, who had been Mayor of Memphis and a senior official under Seti I and Ramesses II, so roughly 1290–1213 BC. Among the broken jars they found one holding a solidified whitish mass, with canvas fabric that had either covered the jar or been packed in with whatever was inside.

It was cheese. About 3,200 years old — the oldest solid cheese ever recovered.

The proteomic analysis was published in Analytical Chemistry in 2018, and it found more than cheese proteins. The sample also carried peptides from Brucella melitensis — the bacterium that causes brucellosis, a serious disease that passes from animals to people almost entirely through unpasteurised dairy.

Sit with that for a second, because of where the last page left off. The current best explanation for why lactase persistence swept Europe is not that milk was abundant — it’s that milk was dangerous under the wrong conditions, and that famine and pathogen load did the selecting. That argument is built from statistics and models. And then here, in the oldest lump of cheese we have ever pulled out of the ground, is the pathogen. Not a proxy, not an inference. The actual organism, in the actual cheese, in a wealthy official’s tomb.

It is the single best argument I know of for why the raw-milk conversation deserves to be had seriously rather than tribally — and I say that as somebody whose first cheese was made from raw milk and who would do it again. There’s a whole page on that fight later. For now: the oldest cheese we have is also the oldest direct evidence of a dairy-borne disease, and those are the same object.

(Older dairy has been found — notably a kefir-like cheese on mummies in the Taklamakan desert dated to around 1615 BC — but the Ptahmes jar is the oldest recovered lump of what anyone would call solid cheese.)

Mesopotamia: cheese as accounting

Cheese enters written history the way most things do: because somebody had to keep track of it.

Cuneiform records from Mesopotamia list cheeses — quantities, types, temple allocations. It is not romantic. There are no recipes and no tasting notes. What it tells us is more useful than either: that by the third millennium BC cheese was an established commodity with named varieties, worth enough to inventory, and moving through institutions. You do not write down what does not matter.

That is the whole economic argument of the previous page appearing in the documentary record. Milk you cannot store, tax, or ship. Cheese you can do all three to.

Greece: the first scene

Greek writers give us something the tablets don’t — cheese happening in front of you.

The best of it is in the Odyssey. When Odysseus and his men creep into the cave of the Cyclops, what they find is not a monster’s lair but a dairy: baskets of cheese, pens sorted by age of animal, vessels of whey. Later Polyphemus comes home, milks his flock, and curdles half the milk, setting the curds in wicker baskets. It is a working description of a shepherd’s cheese operation — in a poem about a giant who eats people.

Two things in that passage still matter. Wicker baskets — the drainer again, the same tool as the Kuyavia sieve and the same tool as the moulds in my basement. And half the milk curdled, half kept to drink, which is exactly what you’d do if you had more milk than you could drink before it spoiled.

The Greeks also left us the beginnings of cheese having opinions attached to it — regional reputations, cheese in athletes’ diets, grated goat cheese stirred into wine in the Iliad, and a credit to the demigod Aristaeus for the invention, which is the kind of origin story the last page was about.

Rome: somebody finally writes down the method

Here is the payoff, and it is my favourite document in the history of the craft.

Columella, a Roman writer on agriculture who died around AD 70, devoted part of Book VII of his De Re Rustica to making cheese — and it is a real procedure. Not a mention, not an inventory: a method, with reasoning, of the sort I could hand to somebody today.

He covers curdling the milk, working and pressing the curd, salting it, drying it, and how to handle it for keeping. He is specific about pressing weights and about not letting it dry too fast. If you have read a modern beginner’s cheesemaking book, the structure will feel eerily familiar, because it is the same structure.

But the line that stopped me is about the coagulant. Columella says the milk should be curdled with rennet from a lamb or a kid — and then adds that it can also be coagulated with the flower of the wild thistle, or safflower seed, or the liquid that flows from a fig tree.

That is a first-century Roman agricultural writer casually listing three plant coagulants alongside animal rennet.

I want to be clear about why that matters, because it undoes a modern assumption — including one I held. “Vegetable rennet” reads like a health-food-store development, something invented so vegetarians could eat Parmesan. It isn’t. Plant coagulation is at least two thousand years old and was documented as ordinary practice, and the reason is agricultural rather than ethical: a thistle grows in the field for free, whereas rennet requires you to have killed a young animal recently.

And it never stopped. Serra da Estrela in Portugal and Torta del Casar in Spain are still made with cardoon thistle today — not as a novelty, as the definition of those cheeses, protected in law. The thistle contains enzymes called cardosins that do roughly what chymosin does, and they give those cheeses a particular soft, spoonable, faintly bitter character you cannot get from calf rennet. Columella’s throwaway alternative is a PDO now. Those cheeses get their own page in the world tour, and they’ve earned it.

Rome also gives us the words. Latin caseus became cheese, Käse, queso, queijo, and the Italian cacio. But there was also the phrase caseus formaticus — cheese made in a form, a mould — and formaticus is where French fromage and Italian formaggio come from. So half of Europe named the food after the substance and half named it after the basket you drained it in. The tool was important enough to become the word.

What the ancient record actually establishes

Pull it together and the shape is clear.

By the time anybody is writing, cheese is not new, not marginal, and not simple. It is a traded commodity with named varieties, a shepherd’s daily work, a thing worth burying with a mayor, and — crucially — a craft whose core method was already settled. Coagulate, drain, press, salt, dry, keep. Columella would recognise everything I do. He’d want to know what my thermometer was for, and he would be genuinely staggered by refrigeration, but the sequence of operations hasn’t moved.

What changes after this is not the method. It is the control — over temperature, over which microbes get to grow, over time — and that story runs through monasteries, alpine co-operatives, and eventually a factory in New York.

Up next: monasteries and the Middle Ages, where cheeses start getting named after the places that made them — and one of them gets a royal charter. Being written now.

Sources

Comments (0)

  1. Loading…

Comments are held for moderation — nothing appears until approved.