Recipes

    The Wider World

    Everything in this wing so far has been Europe and its descendants. That’s not an accident of my interests — it’s the shape of nearly every cheese history you’ll read, and it produces a tidy story: cheese was born around the Mediterranean, perfected in Europe, and carried everywhere else by Europeans.

    That story is wrong in an interesting way, and this page exists to say so. It also contains the correction I most enjoyed making, because the finding that broke it also broke something I’d already written.

    🔴 The oldest cheese in the world is in China

    In September 2024, a team led by the palaeogeneticist Qiaomei Fu published in Cell the sequenced DNA of cheese recovered from Bronze Age graves at Xiaohe, in the Tarim Basin of Xinjiang, northwest China. Cheese found scattered on the heads and necks of naturally mummified bodies, in three separate graves, dated 3,300 to 3,600 years old.

    It is the oldest cheese in the archaeological record.

    Two pages ago I told you the Egyptian jar from the tomb of Ptahmes — about 3,200 years old — was the oldest solid cheese ever recovered, because that’s what was reported when it was published in 2018. The Xiaohe cheese is older, and I’ve corrected that page rather than quietly editing it, because the way I got it wrong is worth knowing: I repeated a “world’s oldest” headline without checking whether anything had displaced it in the six years since. That is exactly the failure mode this whole section is supposed to guard against.

    And what they found in it is better than the record itself. The samples carried Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens and Pichia kudriavzevii — a bacterium and a yeast that are both standard inhabitants of modern kefir grains. There was goat and cattle DNA in it too. So this isn’t merely old cheese; it is recognisably kefir cheese, made by a living culture whose descendants are in jars in kitchens today, including some in this country. The work also traced a route by which kefir culture spread from Xinjiang into inland East Asia.

    Sit with the implication. The received story says East Asia has no cheese tradition. The oldest cheese anyone has ever dug up was found in China, it was made with a technique still in use, and it was important enough to be buried with the dead.

    So why does everyone think East Asia has no cheese?

    Because there’s a real fact underneath the wrong conclusion.

    Lactase non-persistence is genuinely much more common across East Asia than in northern Europe — most adults don’t comfortably digest a glass of fresh milk. That part is true. The error is going from there to “therefore no dairy,” and it’s the same error the origins page takes apart: fermenting and draining milk removes most of the lactose. Non-persistence is an argument for cheese and yoghurt and kefir, not against them. It’s precisely why the Xiaohe cheese makes sense.

    What’s actually true is narrower and more about agriculture and cuisine than biology: settled rice-and-vegetable farming in China proper didn’t keep large dairy herds, and a cuisine built on the wok and on soy-based proteins had less use for dairy fat. But wherever there were herds — the steppe, the mountains, the west — there was dairy, and there still is:

    • Rushan in Yunnan, made by the Bai — milk curdled and stretched into thin sheets, dried on frames. “Milk fan.” A pasta-filata cheese, essentially, in a province supposedly without cheese.
    • Rubing, also Yunnan, a firm fresh cheese usually fried in slices.
    • Nai lao, a set milk curd of Beijing, with Mongol ancestry.
    • Byaslag and aaruul across Mongolia, dried on the roof of a ger.
    • Chhurpi in the Himalaya, which has a reasonable claim to being the hardest cheese on earth.

    “East Asia has no cheese” turns out to mean “the cuisines I’m familiar with don’t feature cheese prominently.” Which is a statement about the speaker.

    India: three origin stories, and nobody can settle it

    India is the most interesting unresolved case in this whole wing, and I’m going to lay out the argument rather than pick a winner, because the honest position is that it isn’t settled.

    The case for ancient: the food historian K. T. Achaya held that milk curdling was well established in the Indus Valley Civilisation (2500–1500 BC), using sour leaves, barks and berries. Vedic literature refers to plant coagulants — bark of the palash tree, jujube fruit. The Lokopakara, a tenth-century text, gives recipes for coagulated buffalo-milk cheeses set with roots of the amaranth plant.

    Stop on that for a moment, because it’s a thread running right through this section. Columella listed thistle flower and fig sap in first-century Rome. Fulani herders in West Africa use Calotropis leaves. And Indian texts describe palash bark, jujube and amaranth root. Plant coagulants were worked out independently, repeatedly, everywhere people had milk. Calf rennet is one solution among several, and it is not the universal one — it’s the one the European tradition standardised.

    The case against continuity: the same account holds that deliberately curdling milk became taboo after around 1800 BC, when cattle-revering Aryan culture spread — souring milk on purpose was seen as spoiling something sacred. If that’s right, the technique existed and was then culturally suppressed, which is a very different history from a continuous tradition.

    The case for Persian import: the National Dairy Research Institute’s position is that paneer came in with Afghan and Iranian travellers, and was refined under the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals. The etymology is the strongest evidence here and it’s hard to argue with: “paneer” is “peynir”, the Turkish and Persian word for cheese.

    The case for Portuguese import: a third account credits the Portuguese with bringing acid-curdling to Bengal in the 17th century — they had their own tradition of fresh queijos frescos — and holds that Indian acid-set cheeses, paneer and especially chhena, began there. The historian Chitrita Banerji has suggested their arrival helped break the older taboo.

    That last one has a consequence worth spelling out. Chhena is the basis of the great Bengali sweets — rasgulla, sandesh. If the Portuguese account is right, then a European fresh-cheese technique arriving in a Bengali port is upstream of an entire beloved confectionery tradition. I’d want that better sourced before believing it firmly, but it’s a genuinely startling possibility, and it’s the sort of claim this dive should mark as unsettled and worth chasing rather than assert.

    West Africa: cheese set with milkweed

    Wagashi — wagashi gassirè in Benin — is made by Fulani pastoralists across Benin, Nigeria, Ghana, Togo and neighbouring countries, and it is a real, old, living cheese tradition that almost never appears in a general cheese book.

    Whole cow’s milk is coagulated using an extract of Calotropis procera — a milkweed — whose active enzyme, calotropain, is a cysteine protease that sets milk hot, at around 65–70 °C. That’s a different mechanism from both the acid and the calf-rennet routes on the family tree: a plant protease working at a temperature that would ruin most rennet-set curds.

    The origin is also economic rather than mystical, which I like: Fulani women traded butter and soured milk, and that trade could not absorb the surplus when the herds were producing well. Wagashi is the answer to a glut — the same problem the Kuyavia sieves, the monastery cellars and Jesse Williams’ factory were all solving, arrived at independently on the Sahel.

    What this page is actually arguing

    There is a persistent idea of a “cheese belt” — a band across Europe and the Near East where cheese belongs, with the rest of the world as either recipients or exceptions.

    The evidence doesn’t support it. The oldest cheese we have is Chinese. Plant coagulants were discovered independently in Rome, in India and in West Africa. The Himalaya, the Sahel, the steppe and the Andes all have cheeses that owe nothing to a French monastery. What’s actually true is much simpler and much less flattering to the standard telling:

    Wherever people kept milk animals, they worked out how to keep the milk. The techniques recur because the problem recurs. Europe’s distinction isn’t that it invented cheese; it’s that it wrote the most down, aged it longest, and exported both the cheeses and the histories.

    The rest of the world’s cheeses are not a footnote to the European story. A good many of them are older than it.

    Up next: the raw-milk wars — Pasteur, the FDA’s 60-day rule, and a fight that is still going on. Being written now.

    Sources

    Comments (0)

    1. Loading…

    Comments are held for moderation — nothing appears until approved.