Cheese in Literature

They say it was invented by accident; a merchant from Arabia put his day's supply of milk into a pouch made of a sheep's stomach, hoisted himself upon his camel and clip-clopped over the desert. The beast's ambling movement, the rennet in the lining of the pouch and the hot sun did the rest. That evening the first drink of whey quenched the nomad's thirst and his hunger was satisfied by the curd — cheese was born.

Records show that it was a food over 5,000 years ago; certainly it was made and eaten in Biblical times. It is first mentioned in the first book of Samuel when Saul goes to do battle with the Philistines. David is told by his father Jesse to take sustenance to his brethren: "And carry these ten cheeses unto the captain of their thousand." Then again in Samuel, David is given food by Shobi and others, "And honey and butter and sheep and cheese of kine for David and for the people that were with him to eat".

In the first quotation it says "these ten cheeses of milk", in both instances the word is qualified in such a way that one wonders whether a cow's milk cheese was considered superior to that of any other or if some other food was also given the name of cheese.

Then Job says, "Thou has poured me out as milk, and curdled me as cheese".

Virgil is always mentioning cheeses. "Yet this night you might have rested here with me on this green leafage. We have ripe apples, mealy chestnuts and a wealth of pressed cheese." Again, "There are little cheeses too, dried in a basket of rushes."

But Virgil's longest reference is in his Moretum, a long poem devoted almost entirely to describing how a peasant makes a dish out of herbs, garlic and salt cheese: "Near his hearth a larder hung from the ceiling; gammons and slices of bacon dried and salted were wanting, but old cheeses, their rounded surface pierced midway with rushes, were suspended in baskets of close-woven fennel."

A fair number of references to cheese appear in The Deipnosophists, which can loosely be translated The Gastronomes. It is by Athenaeus of Naucratis, a town on the left side of the Nile. It was written around A.D. 200 and its interest today lies mainly in the references which are made to early Greek manners and especially — since the whole fifteen books are the record of conversation at a single banquet — of food and table manners.

Sicily was then the great place for cheese; it came from Tromileii in Achea. In a play called The Sicilian Philomer says, "I used to think that Sicily could make just this one speciality, its fine cheese".

There was also a cheese, which Zeus drank, called Opias, curdled with fig juice, probably of cream curd consistency.

Cheese was also used to put over meat before it went into the oven.

But like a beauteous paunch of gelded pig
Well boild and white, and basted with rich cheese

says Sopater.

Smoked cheese was eaten, so was green cheese (in colour that is), and a delicious kind of bread was seasoned with aniseed, cheese and oil.

Cheese was used in a remarkable dish called a Myma (which may well have resembled a haggis) in which any kind of meat cut up in small pieces, ham, onions, common peeled onions, coriander, raisins, silphium (a Mediterranean plant yielding gum resin much prized by the ancients), vinegar, dried thyme and toasted cheese were all mashed up in blood.

Cheese was especially an end dish; a delicacy belonging to the drinking bout and both Athenaeus and Petronius refer to epideipnides or last courses.

Lucius Apuleius (born A.D. 123) in his book The Golden Ass, mentions cheese also: "... while I did greedily put in my mouth a great morsel of barley fried with cheese, it stuck so fast, being soft and doughy, in the passage of my throat, that I was well nigh choked." He also tells us that Hypata, the principal city of Thessaly, was the place for "fresh cheeses of exceeding good taste and relish", so much so that merchants used to journey there to buy cheese and honey for resale.

Perhaps the most important proof of the importance of cheese — and this as far back as 300 B.C. — can be found in a reference to cooking utensils used in that epoch in a play by Anaxippus who was alive around that time. "Bring a soup ladle, a dozen skewers, a meat hook, mortar, small cheese scraper, skillet ..."

As for cheese cakes, these were all the rage. The island of Samos was famous for them. Athenaeus even gives recipes: "Take some cheese and pound it, put in a brazen sieve and strain it, then add honey and flour made from spring wheat and heat the whole together into one mass."

The nicest must have been tuniai, which were cheese cakes fried in oil on to which was poured honey. Mayris, a playwright of the Old Comedy era 500 B.c. in his Bacchus says: "Have you ne'er seen fresh tuniai hissing when you pour honey over them?"

The cheese cake was considered as the most suitable food to eat at a wedding feast. At Argos for example the bride was in the habit of bringing the bridegroom cheese cakes which were roasted and served — with honey — to the bridegroom' s friends.

There was also a cheese cake called glycinas much in fashion among Cretans, made with sweet wine and olive oil.

DERIVATION OF THE WORD

In Dutch the word is Kaas. In German, Kase. In Irish, Cais. In Welsh, Caws. In Portuguese, Queijo. In Spanish, Queso. And all are from the Latin Caseus, which even then also stood for a comic term of endearment.

In English it was Cese or Cyse before A.D. 100. Then in the twelfth century it was Cease or Coese and in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries became schese, chease, cheise, chies and ches.

"An cyse an buteran ic do," says Aelfric before A.D. 1000. William Langland in his Piers Plowman talks of "A weye of Essex chese" in 1377.

In the Lambet Homilies of u75 "penni per mon wule tilden his musetoch he bindeth uppon pa swike chese". "Swike" by the way is treacherous.

By about the fourteenth century different types of cheeses were beginning to be recognised: Piers Plowman talks of "Twa grene cheeses" referring not to the...