Seven thousand years of cheese
Nobody knows who made the first cheese, but a favourite legend tells of a traveller who carried milk in a bag made from an animal's stomach and found it had turned into curds. The idea is sound: the stomachs of young calves contain rennet, a mix of enzymes that makes milk curdle, and it has been used to make cheese for thousands of years. Many cheeses now use rennet made by microbes instead.
In 2012, scientists tested pottery sieves from farming villages in Poland about 7,000 years old and found traces of milk fat on them, the earliest known evidence of cheesemaking. The oldest cheese itself, around 3,600 years old, was found on mummies buried in the desert of north-west China.
Holes, mould and a cheese not made in its village
The holes in EMMENTAL and other SWISS cheese, called eyes, are bubbles of carbon dioxide made by bacteria as the cheese ripens. In 2015 Swiss researchers found another cause: tiny specks of hay in the milk give the bubbles somewhere to start. As milking became cleaner, holes grew fewer.
Blue cheeses such as STILTON, GORGONZOLA and ROQUEFORT have a mould mixed in, and the cheeses are pierced with long needles to let air reach it, so blue veins grow along the holes. Our caves page covers where Roquefort ripens. Stilton, by law, may be made only in Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, and never in the village of Stilton itself, in Cambridgeshire. The village was where coach travellers on the Great North Road bought it and spread its name.
Named after places
Many cheeses carry the name of where they come from, and some names are protected by law. Since 2002, cheese sold as FETA in the European Union must come from Greece. MANCHEGO is made from the milk of sheep in La Mancha in Spain, and PECORINO simply means sheep's cheese in Italian. GOUDA and EDAM are named after Dutch towns, and Edam's red wax coat helped it travel. CHEDDAR comes from a village in Somerset, where caves in Cheddar Gorge are still used to mature it, and COLBY from a town in Wisconsin. A soft BRIE, like CAMEMBERT from Normandy, is said to have been voted king of cheeses by diplomats in Vienna in 1815.
Squeaky and never melting
HALLOUMI from Cyprus squeaks against your teeth, because its long strands of protein rub on the enamel, and it hardly melts, so it can be grilled or fried in slices. Indian PANEER does not melt either. It is made by curdling hot milk with lemon juice or vinegar, with no rennet at all, and pressing the curds into a block.
Stretched, cooked twice and hung in ropes
MOZZARELLA is stretched and folded in hot water until it turns smooth and elastic, and its name comes from the Italian for to cut off, because each ball is torn from the mass. RICOTTA means cooked again, since it is made by reheating the whey left over from other cheeses. MASCARPONE is thick and creamy, COTTAGE cheese is loose curds, PROVOLONE is often hung up to age in ropes, and GRUYERE is a hard Swiss cheese that melts beautifully into fondue.