Cheese
Cheese is a dairy product made by coaxing the milk protein casein to clump together. Squeeze the curds, drain the watery whey, press the result, and you have something that outlives the milk it came from. Over a thousand types exist across the world. They split sheep from goat, soft from hard, fresh from aged, by choices a maker makes in the first few hours. How does sour milk in a calf's stomach become a thousand-year tradition? Why did a Frenchman complain about governing a country with 246 kinds of it? And why has cheese become one of the most shoplifted items in supermarkets worldwide? The answers run from the Taklamakan Desert to a dairy farm in Rome, New York.
Around 8000 BCE, when sheep were first domesticated, the raw materials for cheese existed but the recipe did not. The leading theory is that nobody invented cheese on purpose. Animal skins and inflated internal organs had long served as containers for food. Milk stored in a vessel made from an animal's stomach would meet the rennet still inside it, and split into curd and whey on its own. A legend, told with variations, credits an Arab trader who stored milk this way and found it transformed.
The oldest hard proof sits in the ground at Kuyavia, in what is now Poland, dating to 5500 BCE, where strainers were found coated in milk-fat molecules. On the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, Mediterranean cheesemaking traces back to 5200 BCE. Egyptian tomb murals show cheese around 2000 BCE, and a 2018 scientific paper described cheese from roughly 1200 BCE found in ancient Egyptian tombs.
The strangest survivor was not found in Europe at all. On mummies in the Xiaohe Cemetery, in the Taklamakan Desert of Xinjiang, China, researchers recovered the earliest preserved cheese ever discovered, dating back as early as 1615 BCE. The word itself carries a clue to the process. Cheese comes from the Latin caseus, traced to a proto-Indo-European root meaning to ferment, to become sour.
Homer's Odyssey, from the 8th century BCE, gives literature one of its first cheesemakers, and he is a monster. The Cyclops keeps cheese-racks loaded with cheeses, milks his ewes and goats in turn, then curdles half the milk and sets it aside in wicker strainers. Greek mythology elsewhere credited Aristaeus with discovering cheese altogether.
Columella's De Re Rustica, written around 65 CE, reads almost like a manual: rennet coagulation, pressing of the curd, salting, and aging, all laid out in sequence. Pliny the Elder treated cheese as serious business. His Natural History of 77 CE gives a whole chapter to the variety Romans enjoyed. He judged the best cheeses to come from villages near Nimes, though they spoiled fast and had to be eaten fresh.
Pliny's catalogue runs wide. He named Caseus Helveticus, a hard cheese made by the Helvetii. He noted a Ligurian cheese made mostly from sheep's milk, and reported that some nearby cheeses weighed as much as a thousand pounds each. Goats' milk cheese was a new taste in Rome, its old medicinal flavor improved by smoking. Of foreign cheeses, Pliny favored those of Bithynia in Asia Minor.
Around the year 1000, Anglo-Saxons in England named a village by the River Thames Ceswican, meaning cheese farm. In 1022, records note that Vlach shepherds from Thessaly and the Pindus mountains supplied cheese to Constantinople. Many famous names arrived surprisingly late: Cheddar around 1500, Parmesan in 1597, Gouda in 1697, and Camembert in 1791.
In 1546, The Proverbs of John Heywood recorded the claim that the moon is made of green cheese. The green may have meant new or unaged rather than the color. The joke proved durable enough that NASA used the myth for an April Fools' Day spoof announcement in 2006.
For most of this stretch, cheese stayed regional. Until European culture spread it, cheese was nearly unknown across east Asian cultures and the pre-Columbian Americas, with only limited use in sub-Mediterranean Africa. It thrived in Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Tibet, and the places those cultures touched. European imperialism, then Euro-American food, carried it the rest of the way around the world.
Switzerland opened the first factory for industrial cheese production in 1815, but the real breakthrough came in the United States. Jesse Williams, a dairy farmer from Rome, New York, started making cheese assembly-line style in 1851, drawing milk from neighboring farms. That made cheddar-like cheese one of the first US industrial foods, and within decades hundreds of commercial dairy associations had sprung up.
The 1860s brought mass-produced rennet. By the turn of the century, scientists were growing pure microbial cultures. Before that, the bacteria came from the surrounding air or from recycling whey out of an earlier batch. Pure cultures meant a maker could repeat the same cheese reliably, batch after batch.
During the World War II era, factory-made cheese overtook the traditional craft, and factories have supplied most of America's and Europe's cheese ever since. The scale today is enormous. In 2022, world production from whole cow milk reached 22.6 million tonnes, with the United States making 28 percent of it, ahead of Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands.
Separating milk into solid curds and liquid whey is the one required step in every cheese. Usually the milk is acidified and rennet is added. Most cheeses lean on starter bacteria from the Lactococcus, Lactobacillus, or Streptococcus genera, which turn milk sugars into lactic acid and shape the flavor of aged cheeses. A few skip bacteria and curdle with acid alone, such as vinegar in paneer and queso fresco.
Swiss cheeses owe their look to one specific microbe. Propionibacterium freudenreichii produces propionic acid and carbon dioxide gas during aging, and those bubbles become the holes, or eyes, of Emmental. After the gel sets, the curd is usually cut into cubes so water can drain, and some hard cheeses are heated to between 35 and 55 degrees Celsius to force out more whey.
Technique writes the rest of the personality. Mozzarella and Provolone are stretched and kneaded in hot water into a fibrous body. Cheddar is piled and milled to push moisture away and soften the cut edges. Edam and Gouda are washed in warm water to lower acidity and taste milder. Then comes ripening, called affinage from the French, lasting from a few days to several years as casein and milkfat break down into amino acids, amines, and fatty acids. That aging stage is where Brie, Camembert, Roquefort, Stilton, Gorgonzola and Limburger become themselves.
Charles de Gaulle once asked how anyone could govern a country with 246 kinds of cheese. The British Cheese Board once claimed Britain had about 700 distinct local cheeses, while France and Italy have perhaps 400 each. A French proverb promises a different French cheese for every day of the year. Counts of total varieties run from around 500 by the International Dairy Federation to more than 1,000 by Sandine and Elliker.
Classifying that sprawl resists any single rule. The most traditional method sorts by moisture content, then by fat content and ripening method. Pieter Walstra proposed a scheme built on starter cultures and moisture, and Walter and Hargrove suggested grouping by production method into 18 types.
Serving brings its own etiquette. The British eat cheese after dessert with sweet wines like port, while in France it comes before dessert with robust red wine. A cheeseboard usually holds four to six cheeses with accompaniments such as crackers, grapes, nuts, celery or chutney. To show off its output, Wisconsin once built a cheeseboard 70 feet long, in a state whose legislature recognizes the cheesehead hat as a state symbol.
McGee writes that an aversion to the odor of decay steers us away from food poisoning, so an animal food giving off whiffs of shoes and soil and the stable takes some getting used to. Pungent and mold-ripened cheeses like Limburger, Stilton and Roquefort earn their acquired-taste reputation because their molds produce odor molecules close to those of rotten food. The disgust runs deep enough that the 17th century produced at least two learned treatises titled de aversatione casei, on the aversion to cheese, by Martin Shook and Thomas Sagittarius.
The health warnings are more concrete. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says soft raw-milk cheeses can carry listeriosis, brucellosis, salmonellosis and tuberculosis. Since 1944, US law has required all raw-milk cheeses to be aged at least 60 days, with the rule extended to imports in 1951. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control warns pregnant women off soft-ripened and blue-veined cheeses because listeria can cause miscarriage or harm a fetus.
The last worry is the gentlest. A folk belief holds that cheese near bedtime brings nightmares, an idea popularized when Ebenezer Scrooge blamed his vision of Jacob Marley on cheese in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. The theory has been disproven repeatedly. Yet studies by the British Cheese Board suggest night cheese may still stir vivid dreams through its saturated fat, even as other research finds it makes people dream less.
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Common questions
What is cheese made of and how is it produced?
Cheese is a dairy product made by coagulating the milk protein casein, leaving a food composed of milk proteins and fat. Producers acidify milk and add rennet or bacterial enzymes to form solid curds, then separate the curds from the liquid whey and press them into finished cheese.
Where and when did cheesemaking originate?
The origins of cheese predate recorded history, with no conclusive evidence of a single birthplace among Europe, Central Asia or the Middle East. The earliest proposed dates reach back to around 8000 BCE, and the earliest archaeological evidence comes from Kuyavia, Poland, around 5500 BCE.
What is the oldest preserved cheese ever discovered?
The earliest preserved cheese ever discovered was found on mummies in the Xiaohe Cemetery in the Taklamakan Desert of Xinjiang, China, dating back as early as 1615 BCE.
How did industrial cheese production begin?
The first factory for industrial cheese production opened in Switzerland in 1815, but large-scale success came in the United States. Jesse Williams, a dairy farmer from Rome, New York, began making cheese assembly-line style in 1851 using milk from neighboring farms.
How many types of cheese are there?
Over a thousand types of cheese exist worldwide. Estimates of recognized varieties range from around 500 by the International Dairy Federation to more than 1,000 by Sandine and Elliker, and Charles de Gaulle once referred to 246 kinds of French cheese.
Is raw-milk cheese safe to eat?
Food safety agencies warn that soft raw-milk cheeses can cause serious infections including listeriosis, brucellosis, salmonellosis and tuberculosis. Since 1944, US law has required all raw-milk cheeses to be aged at least 60 days, and the Centers for Disease Control advises pregnant women to avoid soft-ripened and blue-veined cheeses.