Pastoral Cheesemaking — One of the earliest stories of milk preservation
By, Namrata Sundaresan
Cheese and other fermented dairy foods have played a crucial role in the development of civilizations across the Old World. Archaeological evidence suggests that cheese was discovered around 8000 BCE in the Fertile Crescent, the region of Southwest Asia that includes portions of present-day Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, where humans first began domesticating livestock starting with sheep and goats.
So how was the first batch of cheese made and who made it?
Cheese may have been discovered accidentally by the practice of storing milk in containers made from the stomachs of animals. Stories have been told about a shepherd boy who carried milk in a container like this. Grazing his flock of sheep he settled down to drink some milk which had been transformed into a clear liquid with solid floating on top. Rennet, the enzyme used to make cheese, is naturally present in the stomachs of ruminants. The leak-proof stomachs and other bladder-like organs of animals were often put to use to store and transport milk and other liquids. Without refrigeration, warm summer heat in combination with residual rennet in the stomach lining would have naturally curdled the milk to produce the earliest forms of cheese.
Cheesemaking thus became the form of milk preservation, nutrient-dense food that could last months and carried as groups of settlements migrated.
People from the earliest cheesemaking cultures migrated through the Balkans and the southern Mediterranean and on into Northern Europe and went west into Egypt and later from North Africa to France’s Loire Valley.
These nomadic cheesemaking traditions also went east into India. The Vedas include references to making acid-coagulated cheeses as well as using plants to help coagulate milk into cheese — some of the earliest uses of plant rennet we have on record. While acid coagulated yoghurt and fresh cheeses like paneer flourished in India, the maturation of cheese as hard cheese never gained popularity probably due to the emphasis on food purity in the Vedas that may have prevented the use of rennet, sourced from animals.
A study published in 2020 presents what could be the earliest evidence of cheese-making in South Asia. The study, led by Kalyan Sekhar Chakraborty, a researcher at the University of Toronto Mississauga, is based on archaeological finds from the Kotada Bhadli settlement, located in modern day-Gujarat’s Kutch district, which was an agro-pastoral settlement in the Indus Valley civilisation, occupied between 2300 and 1950 BCE.
Over the years, especially in India, cheese is synonymous with processed cubes, slices made on an industrial scale. The last decade has seen a wave of handmade artisan food products gaining much-needed visibility. Cheese has been one of them. Small batch producers across the country are now vying for shelf space with processed and imported cheese with their locally made and handcrafted cheeses. Modern urban cheesemakers though have their own challenge in their quest for a clean source of milk. Pastoral communities on the other hand have a challenge of bountiful supply and no tangible form of milk preservation or value-added products.
The solution and the bridge between the two perhaps are in Pastoral Cheesemaking, a traditional form of preservation, value-added product in the modern context for the urban consumer.
Sources:
- Cheese & Culture: A History of Cheese and its Place in Western Civilization by Paul S. Kindstedt
- The Oxford Companion to Cheese by Catherine Donnelly https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72963-y.pdf
Namrata Sundaresan, Cofounder at Käse Cheese. Namrata has a background in business consulting, specializing in international trade & investment. She travels to learn various traditional forms of cheesemaking and comes back to her Cheese studio to adapt it to local resources. Käse works with a variety of locally sourced ethical milk around the country and makes over 30 kinds of cheese.
