Recipes

    India & South Asia

    India is the largest milk producer on earth and has almost no aged-cheese tradition.

    That sentence looks like a paradox and it isn’t. It is the clearest demonstration in this whole wing that cheese is not what you do with milk — it is one of several things you can do with milk, and a culture that has better uses for it will not bother.

    Where all that milk goes instead

    Four destinations, none of them a wheel.

    Ghee. Clarified butter, shelf-stable without refrigeration in a hot climate, and central to both cooking and ritual. This is the single biggest answer.

    Dahi. Set yoghurt, made fresh daily, and the base of chaas, lassi, raita, kadhi and shrikhand. Souring is the preservation, and it happens in hours rather than months.

    Khoa (khoya). ⭐ Milk reduced by long open boiling until it is a solid, and then the base of half of Indian confectionery — barfi, gulab jamun, peda. There is no coagulation in it at all: it is milk concentrated by heat, exactly as Norwegian brunost is whey concentrated by heat. Two cultures with no contact reached the same idea, and neither result is a cheese by any structural definition on the what-is-cheese page.

    And acid-set fresh cheese, eaten within days — paneer and chhena, below.

    What’s absent is the thing every European tradition organised itself around: a rennet-set curd, pressed and kept for months. And the reasons are worth separating, because they’re usually collapsed into one.

    🔴 Why rennet is largely absent — two reasons, not one

    The religious one is real but narrower than people assume. Animal rennet comes from a slaughtered calf’s stomach, which is unacceptable in a vegetarian tradition and specifically fraught where the cow is sacred. That rules out the classic European coagulant.

    But it does not rule out cheese, and this is the point that gets missed: plant and acid coagulants were available and were used, as they were in Iberia, Yunnan and Sulawesi and the ancient Mediterranean. If rennet were the only obstacle, India would have a cardoon-equivalent tradition of aged cheeses. It doesn’t.

    The bigger reason is climate and use. Aged cheese is a preservation technology for a milk surplus you cannot drink. India’s answer to that surplus was ghee and khoa, both of which keep better than cheese in 40 °C heat and neither of which needs a cave. There is no cave. There was never going to be a cave.

    So the honest version is: India didn’t fail to invent aged cheese. It solved the problem cheese solves, twice over, by other means — and then used fresh acid-set curd for the things fresh curd is good at.

    Paneer and chhena — and a genuinely contested origin

    Paneer is acid-set and pressed: milk brought near the boil, split with lemon juice, vinegar or whey, drained in cloth and pressed into a block. It does not melt — see melting — which is exactly why it works in a curry: it holds its cubes through twenty minutes of simmering.

    Chhena is the same curd not pressed — soft, moist, crumbly — and it is the base of Bengali sweets: rasgulla, sandesh, rasmalai.

    Most Indian paneer, incidentally, is buffalo milk, not cow, which surprises people who assume paneer is a cow’s-milk cheese by default.

    The dispute

    You will read confidently that the Portuguese introduced chhena to Bengal in the sixteenth century — the argument being that deliberately splitting milk was taboo in earlier Hindu practice, so the technique must have come from outside.

    ⚠ This is genuinely contested and I am not going to settle it. Sources connected to Bandel cheese state flatly that paneer is a derivative of the Portuguese cheese made there; other scholarship points to acid-set curd appearing in South Asian texts long before the Portuguese arrived, and reads the taboo claim as overstated.

    What I’d say is that both halves of the popular story are doing work they can’t support: “the Portuguese invented Indian cheese” flatters the colonisers, and “acid-set curd was always taboo” flattens a very large and very old body of practice into one rule. If somebody tells you which way it went, ask what their source is.

    ⭐ Bandel — the colonial cheese that survived its colony

    Bandel cheese comes from Bandel in Hooghly district, Bengal, a Portuguese settlement, and it is one of the few genuinely aged and smoked cheeses South Asia makes.

    How it’s made: cow’s milk is curdled with an acidic agent, strained dry, kneaded, and moulded into thick cookie-sized discs. The discs are coated with salt and cured for at least two days, then smoked thoroughly over a traditional oven fired by dried cow-dung cakes.

    ⭐ Note the fuel, because it is the page’s best small detail. Dung cake is the ordinary domestic fuel of rural Bengal — abundant, free, and burning cool and slow. So the smoke on this cheese is the smoke of the kitchen it was made in, in exactly the way that Idiazabal’s smoke came from the shepherds’ huts and oscypek’s from the bacówka. Three continents, one pattern: the first smoked cheeses were not flavoured on purpose. They were stored where the fire was.

    It survives in a handful of shops in Kolkata’s New Market and is sold in two forms, plain and smoked. A cheese made by a vanished Portuguese community, kept alive by Bengali makers for four centuries.

    ⭐ Kalari — preservation without a cave, and an accidental mother culture

    Kalari (also kaladi) is from the Dogra people of Jammu, and its purpose is stated plainly in every account: it was created to preserve milk in solid form through hot summers, when fresh milk could not be kept.

    Two things about the method are properly interesting.

    It is back-slopped. Milk is warmed, and then mathar — the remains of previously split milk — is poured in to split it. The acidifier is the last batch. That is a mother culture in everything but name, arrived at without any of the vocabulary, and it is the same instinct as a sourdough starter or a kept brine.

    And it ripens on pine. The hand-formed tikkis are laid over pine leaves in a basket and left to dry and ripen in sunlight.

    Add pine leaves to the ledger this wing keeps extending — chestnut leaves at Banon, fir bark and sheepskin in the Carpathians, tufa pits in Romagna, clay pots in Georgia, spruce bands in the Jura, banana leaves in the Philippines. The vessel is an ingredient, and I have now found it on every inhabited continent I’ve written about.

    Kalari is eaten fried — it browns and firms rather than melting, like halloumi and paneer — most famously in kaladi kulcha.

    ⭐⭐ Operation Flood — the third answer to the smallholder problem

    This wing has now met three completely different institutional solutions to one problem: how do you make cheese, or anything else, when every producer has a few animals and none has enough milk?

    The Alps answered with the fruitière — pool the milk daily, make one enormous wheel, divide the proceeds. The co-operative had to be invented before the cheese could exist.

    Britain answered, eventually, with a buyer — Neal’s Yard Dairy from 1979, going out to find the surviving farmhouse makers and paying properly for their cheese.

    India answered at national scale. Operation Flood, launched in 1970 under Verghese Kurien and run in three phases, is the largest dairy development programme in the world, and it took India from dairy-deficient to the world’s largest milk producer. The mechanism was village co-operatives feeding into district unions and federations — Amul being the model — so that a farmer with two buffalo had a guaranteed buyer, a fair price and a route to market.

    ⭐ It is the alpine fruitière scaled to a subcontinent, and it is the reason the first sentence of this page is true: the milk exists in that quantity because somebody solved the collection problem, not because Indians suddenly acquired more animals.

    I find this more interesting than most cheese history, because it is the clearest evidence that what a country makes from milk is decided by institutions at least as much as by climate or religion. India got a world-beating dairy sector and still almost no aged cheese — because the institutions were built for collection and distribution of fresh milk, which is what the country wanted, and not for maturation, which it didn’t.

    The rest of the region

    Kalimpong cheese (West Bengal) — a hard, Swiss-influenced cheese from a Jesuit dairy in the Darjeeling hills. Another foreign transplant that put down roots.

    Chhurpi (Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan) — the hard dried yak/chauri/cow cheese, covered properly on the milk wing, where it turns out to be acid-set from the skimmed residue after butter — the same by-product logic as everything else in this section.

    Churpi’s soft form, and durkha — the fresh and semi-dried Himalayan curds behind it.

    Dahi, shrikhand, chaas, lassi — the yoghurt family, and if skyr counts as a cheese then strained shrikhand has at least as good a claim. I’d rather note that the boundary is a naming convention than pretend it’s sharp.

    Kadchgall (Kashmir) and churu (Arunachal) — the frontier cheeses, mostly unfamiliar even within India.

    Sri Lanka and Bangladesh run on buffalo curd (mee kiri, served in clay pots) and misti doi — again, soured and set rather than coagulated and aged.

    What to take to the bench

    ⭐ Kalari’s back-slopping is free and I should have thought of it. Using the whey or the split-milk residue from the last make as the acidifier for the next is exactly the mother-culture logic I already apply to brines, and I have been reaching for a fresh lemon or a bottle of vinegar every time instead. It costs nothing to try on the next paneer.

    Paneer is the easiest useful cheese there is, and worth making not as a project but as a habit — the same argument getting started makes for mozzarella.

    And khoa is a two-hour experiment with a heavy pan and patience, which — like brunost — needs no culture, no rennet and no cave. Two of the most interesting dairy foods in this wing turn out to be reduction, and my kit has never once been used for it.

    Next in this wing: East and Southeast Asia, where the claim that there is no cheese is wrong for a much more interesting reason than people think.

    Sources

    Comments (0)

    1. Loading…

    Comments are held for moderation — nothing appears until approved.