Butter, which is a well-preserved milk fat, was made by shaking cream in a goatskin. In the Middle East, butter was never spread on bread, though there was a tradition of dipping bread in butter. Instead, butter was used for making holiday dishes throughout the year. To this end, the butter was salted, because only salted butter lasts. Unsalted butter was a luxury usually only available after refrigeration was invented. And even then, until recently, many stores, including those in America, were unwilling to stock unsalted butter because it would not sell fast enough to prevent spoilage.
The frieze of the ancient dairy of Ur shows men rocking a clay urn to make butter. And the Hittites used butter because they could produce it for half the cost of olive oil, which was probably considered to be a higher-quality product. Adding to the low reputation of butter, it was probably often consumed in an already slightly rancid condition.
When the butter was churned, whether in an urn or a goatskin, the remaining liquid was what we now call buttermilk. It was probably a rich buttermilk, because separation techniques were crude; the buttermilk often contained small lumps of butter. When buttermilk was abundant, it was fed to farm animals. It was also a popular drink among peasants. Buttermilk made an appearance in the cities only when country people moved in.
The high regard in which the ancient Assyrians held their livestock and the milks they produced is apparent in customs that continued until a generation or two ago. A supplicant gave the church a fattened sheep, and gave to charity the milk of a first milking, and the butter and cheese produced by that milking. A “first milking” refers to the first milk produced by a cow after she gives birth, usually in the spring.
The part of the world where dairying began did not favor cows. Cows are not a hot-weather animal. They enjoy cooler climates that produce rich green grasslands. This in itself is testimony to how much the early peoples must have preferred the mild milk of cows to the milk of other animals, because in early times, and still today, dairy cows were raised in climates where they did not belong. Birthing takes place in the spring, so animals lactate in the spring and summer, the worst possible time in the hot climate of the Middle East. A freshly drawn bucket of milk starts growing dangerous bacteria within minutes—especially when buckets are not particularly clean, as was probably often the case in early times.
Everywhere in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean, people tackled this problem by turning milk into milk products as soon as possible. The most common product they made was yogurt, though until modern times, no one used this word. The Persians, among the earliest yogurt enthusiasts, called it mast, and the food is so central to Persian culture that it frequently comes up in popular idioms. There is an expression for mind your own business, Boro mastetobezan, that translates into “Go beat your own yogurt.” Or, if something is really scary, people may say mast-roo sefid shod, meaning “The yogurt turned white.” Yogurt is sometimes a drink, sometimes eaten with a spoon, and sometimes poured over or cooked into meat dishes as a sauce or stew base.
Yogurt drinks were, and are, popular worldwide, and they have different names in different countries: doogh in Iran, where salt and mint are added, lassi in India, where it may be sugared and salted, and laban in the Arab world.
In old Persian, doogh meant milk. But as a drink, it was probably always soured, and eventually the word came to mean “yogurt liquefied with water.” In modern times, doogh is made with carbonated water. In the twentieth century, the Persians started bottling doogh with the spring water from Cheshmeh-Ab-e Ali, Ali’s Spring. Ali was the Prophet Muhammad’s seventh-century son-in-law, and he supposedly commanded this water to spring forth from the barren foothills of the mountains outside Tehran.
In Persia, doogh was also sun-dried. The resulting product, called kahshk, was then ground into a powder, moistened with water, and rolled into balls. Kahshk is still used as a kind of seasoning. The balls are dissolved in soups or stews to give the tangy, sour flavor of yogurt without the texture.
3
CHEESY CIVILIZATION
There are a great many apocryphal stories of how milk first came into contact with the butchered innards of an animal, specifically the stomach lining, where the milk quickly curdles. The most ubiquitous stories are of nomads traveling with milk stored in bladders made of animal stomach and then, arriving at their destination, finding that the milk had turned solid. The agent from the animal’s stomach that curdles the milk is known as rennet. The proteins in milk cannot fuse because they are negatively charged, the way the two negative ends of a magnet repel each other. An enzyme in rennet takes away the negative charge and the proteins start to fuse into curds.
To make cheese, the curds were placed in wooden molds with holes and pressed for days until 85 percent of the liquid—a cloudy, highly nutritious water called whey—was squeezed out of the curds. The rennet leaves with the whey. Whey was, and still is, often fed to farm animals. Many human foods were, and are, made from it as well. The ancient Persians used whey to whip and cook into a food they called qaraqorut.
The solid cheese that remains after the whey is removed can then be preserved through brining to produce a cheese like the Greek feta, which is one of the oldest cheeses in the world. Later, many other, more sophisticated variations of cheese were developed in Europe, where damp, cool cellars were available for aging.
The fact that dairy farmers eventually settled on milking cows, goats, and sheep rather than other animals shows the importance of cheesemaking to the early dairy farms. It was generally agreed that those animals produced the best cheesemaking milks, though the argument about which of the three was best has never been settled.
It is not clear when cheesemaking began. Butter and yogurt were probably produced earlier because they are easier to make. Ancient people wrote of eating curds, but it is not always certain what they meant by that. There are numerous references in the Bible to something that might have been either butter or curds.
Curds is more likely, because Mediterranean people had little need for butter. They already had olive oil, which is less prone to spoilage, heats to much higher temperatures without burning, and was and is regarded as more healthful. Even now in North Africa, most of Greece, Mediterranean France, and Spain, and most—but certainly not all—of Italy, olive oil dominates and butter is rarely used. An omelet may be made with butter in Greece today, but until recently, even that was made with olive oil.
The Thracians, the people who lived to the north of Greece, ancestors of the Bulgarians and others, ate butter. Even farther north, the Germanic people were also avid butter eaters. Butter is easier to work with in cooler climates, and the Germans were said to have perfected salted butter.
Similarly to the Japanese Buddhists who called Westerners “butter stinkers,” Greeks contemptuously referred to the Thracians as “butter eaters.” And the word “butter” itself was not spoken kindly. The Greeks called it boutyros, cow curds. They were sheep and goat people, and they regarded those who kept cows and made butter as an alien lot. The Romans thought butter was a useful ointment for burns but didn’t regard it as a suitable food. As Pliny the Elder bluntly put it, butter is “the choicest food among barbarian tribes.”
The Mesopotamians and Hittites made cow, goat, and sheep’s milk cheese, as did the ancient Egyptians. The Greeks were also cheesemakers, and it is deduced from four-thousand-year-old cups with images of cows and goats on them that the ancient Cretans were milk drinkers and cheesemakers, too.
In Greek mythology, Aristaio, son of Apollo, invented cheese, which suggests that the Greeks thought cheesemaking important. The ancient Greeks also heated and slowly cooled cream to create a kind of thick, clotted cream that they mixed with honey and served with game birds. And, like the Persians, they made yogurt, to be eaten plain or with honey, and a kind of milk dessert pudding called khórion.
The Greeks used soured milk to produce other yogurtlike products as well. One, called oxygola, was said to be fairly hard in texture. Its
whey was drawn out and then salted and sealed in a jar. Another, melca, was made from liquid milk soured in jars of boiling vinegar and cured overnight in a warm place. The celebrated first-century A.D. cook Marcus Gavius Apicius gave this melca recipe; basically, it is another milk-and-honey concoction:
Mix melca either with honey and brine or with salt oil and chopped coriander.
The stories of rennet’s being discovered through the accidental commingling of meat innards and milk is further shaken by the fact that the ancient Greeks made rennet from fig sap. The sap was used to produce aged cheeses and hard cheeses, which were sold in marketplaces in Athens separate from the ones that sold “green” cheeses (soft, fresh cheeses).
The not infrequent references to cheesemaking in Homer present it as commonplace activity on farms. Homer, whose writings were compilations of already ancient oral histories, twice mentions a dish made of barley meal, honey, Pramnian wine (a strong, dark, high-quality wine), and grated goat’s-milk cheese. Cheese was also central to the Spartan diet. A rite of passage for a boy was to steal a cheese from a household without getting caught.
Mixtures of grain and dairy, usually resulting in some kind of porridge, were commonplace in both Greece and Rome. Greeks made milk-and-grain porridge on the street in pots of eight or more gallons.
Tracta, a forerunner of pasta, was flour and water fashioned into different shapes—balls, strings, sheets. They were often cooked in milk. Apicius offered this recipe in which tracta thickened milk to make a sauce for lamb:
Put a sextarius [about one pint] of milk and a little water in a new cooking pot and let it boil over a slow heat. Dry three balls of tracta, break them up, and drop the pieces into the milk. To stop it from burning, stir it with water. When it is cooked, pour it over lamb.
Apicius also suggested a chicken dish made with tracta-thickened milk:
Lift the chicken when it is cooked from the stock and put it into a new cooking pot with milk and a little sauce, honey, and a minimum of water. Place by a slow fire to warm, break up the tracta and add gradually. Stir constantly to prevent burning. Put the chicken into this.
This type of flour-thickened milk sauce would eventually become a mainstay of classical French cooking.
The ancient Romans also made and cooked with cheese. Marcus Porcius Cato, commonly referred to as Cato the Elder, who lived from 234 to 149 B.C.E., was a conservative Roman politician from an agricultural background who opposed what he saw as a growing tendency toward excessive luxury. His treatise on agriculture, De Agricultura, is the oldest surviving complete book of Latin prose. In it he offers a number of recipes. Here is his mustacei, a simple recipe for a soft fresh cheese made with lard and unfermented must, the juice of wine grapes:
Prepare mustacei thus: Moisten a modius [two gallons, a peck, or a half bushel] of fine flour with must. Add anise, cumin, two pounds of fat, 1 pound of cheese, and a grated bay twig. When you have shaped them, place bay leaves beneath and cook.
Cato’s most famous recipe is for placenta, a kind of cheesecake used in religious ritual.
Make placenta this way: two pounds bread-wheat flour to make the base; four pounds flour and two pounds emmer groats [husked grain flour to make layers; in Latin he uses the word tracta]. Turn the emmer into water; when it is really soft turn into a mixing bowl and drain well; then knead it with your hands and when it is well worked add the four pounds flour gradually and make into sheets. Arrange them in a basket to dry out.
When they are dry, rearrange them neatly. In making each sheet when you have kneaded them, press them with a cloth soaked in oil, wipe them round and dampen them.
When they are made, heat up your cooking fire and your crock. Then moisten the two pounds flour and knead it: from this you make a thin base.
Put in water 14 pounds sheep’s milk, not sour, quite fresh. Let it steep, changing the water three times. [Cheese was stored in brine and had to be soaked to be desalinated.] Take it out and squeeze it gradually dry with the hands. When all the cheese is properly dried out, in a clean mixing bowl knead it with the hands, breaking it down as much as possible. Then take a clean flour sieve and press the cheese through the sieve into the bowl. Then take four and a half pounds good honey and mix it well with the cheese.
Then put the base on a clean table that has a foot of space. With oiled bay leaves under it make the placenta.
First put a single sheet over the whole base, then one by one, with the mixture, add them spreading in such a way that you eventually use up all the cheese and honey and on the top put one more sheet by itself. Then draw up the edges of the base having previously stoked up the fire; then place the placenta to cook, cover it with the heated crock and put hot coals around and above it.
Be sure to cook it well and slowly. Open to check on it two or three times. This makes a one-gallon placenta.
In Rome, cheese was eaten by both the rich and the poor. A considerable variety of hard, soft, and smoked cheeses were produced in the city, and others were imported from around the empire.
The Romans were fond of smoking and made smoked meat, sausages, and other foods, including cheese. Smoked goat’s-milk cheese from Velabrum, the valley by the Forum that runs up to Capitoline Hill, one of the seven hills of Rome, was especially popular. The cheese was sometimes eaten warmed or grilled.
We do not know the exact nature of all of these cheeses, but we do know from the few recipes left behind that the ancient Romans made cheese much the way we still do. Columella, in his extensive first-century A.D. writings on agriculture, gave instructions for cheesemaking. First, he added a pennyweight of rennet to five quarts of milk. The milk was then gently warmed until it curdled, strained through a wicker basket, and pressed in a mold. Next, it was either salted or soaked in brine. This has remained a way to make cheese to this day.
Like the Greeks, the Romans made rennet from figs. They also made it from artichokes, and from the innards of sheep, goats, donkeys, and hares.
The Romans liked fresh cheeses as well as aged and smoked ones. Curds only a day old were salted and seasoned with local herbs such as thyme or crushed pine nuts. Sometimes the seasoning was added to the milk bucket before the cow was milked.
Cheeses were often given as gifts, and they were a standard breakfast food, along with olives, eggs, bread, honey, and sometimes leftovers from the night before. Cheese was also eaten for lunch and dinner, sometimes as an appetizer and often as a dessert, which was said to be bad for digestion.
Because fresh milk was available only on farms, it was consumed mostly by the farmers’ children and by peasants who lived nearby, often with salted or sweetened bread. This led to fresh milk’s being widely regarded as a food of low status. Drinking milk was something that only crude, uneducated rural people did and was rare among adults of all social classes.
The Romans, who often commented on the inferiority of other cultures, took excessive milk drinking as evidence of barbarism. Because milk spoiled quickly in the climate of southern Europe and kept far better in northern Europe, northerners used far more milk. This led southern classical cultures, which were contemptuous of northerners in any event, to take the greater consumption of dairy as evidence of their barbarian nature. During a visit to conquered Britain, Julius Caesar was appalled by how much milk and meat the northerners consumed. Strabo disparaged the Celts for excessive milk drinking and excessive eating in general. Tacitus, when illustrating the crude and tasteless diet of the Germans, singled out their fondness for “curdled milk.”
Anthimus, a sixth-century Greek living in exile in Ostragoth, cautioned that milk was more healthful when not drunk fresh:
If it is for people with dysentery, give goat’s milk prepared by heating round stones in the fire, and then putting these stones into the milk. When the milk boils, take out the stones. Add white well-leavened bread that has been finely sliced and cut up into pieces and cook slowly on the fire. Use an earthenware pot and not a bronze pan. When the milk has boiled and after the br
ead has become saturated, let the patients eat the pieces with a spoon. Milk is more beneficial served like this, because it is nourishing. If milk is drunk on its own, it passes in contrast straight through and scarcely remains in the body.
Anthimus believed that while fresh cheese was harmless, especially if dipped in honey, cured cheese caused kidney stones and was very unhealthful. He wrote, “Whoever eats baked or boiled cheese has no need of another poison.” He was neither the first nor the last to warn of cheese. Hippocrates, the fifth-century B.C.E. Greek who is considered the father of medicine, also warned about cheese:
Cheese does not harm all people alike, and there are some people who can eat as much of it as they like without the slightest adverse effects. Indeed it is wonderfully nourishing food for the people with whom it agrees. But others suffer dreadfully …
So began a twenty-five-hundred-year-long debate about the health merits of cheese. Many have given opinions. According to Aulus Cornelius Celsus, the first-century author of De Medicina, aged cheeses contained “bad juices that were harmful to the stomach.” Bartolomeo Sacchi, commonly known as Platina, a writer on food at the height of the fifteenth-century Florentine Renaissance, stated that fresh cheese was very healthful except for people who were phlegmatic, but “aged cheese” was “difficult to digest, of little nutriment, not good for stomach or belly, and produces bile, gout, pleurisy, sand grains, and stones.” However, he did add that a small amount of cheese after dinner benefited digestion.
A suspicion of cheese has never gone away. In the nineteenth century, Alexandre Dumas wrote, “It is the coarsest part of milk and the most compact, so obviously it produces a substantial food stuff, but one that is difficult to digest if eaten to excess.” Modern nutritionists also warn against eating cheese in excess because of its high fat and cholesterol content.
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