Andrew Dalby - Cheese: A Global History

Like a rock that will weather many storms, Parmesan presides over the cheeseboard. It was already famous around 1370 and it was already what it is today, a hard, aged cows-milk cheese when Giovanni Boccaccio in his Decameron, for the sake of a good story, invented a mountain made of grated parmigiano cheese, with people living on it who never did anything but make macaroni and ravioli and cook them in capon broth. How much earlier its history may go is unknown. A hundred years after Boccaccio, in 1475, Platinas gastronomic handbook De honesta voluptate et valetudine counted parmensis (its Latin name) as one of the two princely cheeses of Italy. His contemporaries were less certain what to call their favourite hard cheese. The Parmesan style was widespread in the Po valley; some liked the version made at Piacenza, others preferred Lodi, others again gave the credit to Milan. Finally Parma prevailed. By 1519 Parmesan cheese was a cultural clich in England, mentioned nonchalantly in a school Latin textbook: Ye shall eate parmeson chese! No wonder, because just a few years earlier Pope Julius II had made a present of a hundred Parmesan cheeses to Henry VIII. That was indeed a royal gift. In 1666, when Samuel Pepys and his neighbour saw the Fire of London approaching, they wiselydug a hole to conceal their most valuable possessions, and put our wine in it, and I my parmazan cheese as well as my wine. By that time hefty cylindrical Parmesan cheeses were a staple of international gastronomy, an ingredient in international cuisine. They still are. While many people only ever grate Parmesan, Italians know how good it is to eat in chunks so hard that it is almost crystalline, and with occasional real crystals of calcium lactate as amuse-dents.

In Italy Parmesan has relatives, like the more widespread Grana Padano, and respectable alternatives, notably the saltier and sharper Pecorino Romano. Outside Europe Parmigiano Reggiano (its modern appellation) has imitators, avoided by the observant eater because they can never rival Parmesans unique organoleptic trait, its faint and appetizing odour of babys vomit.

Reblochon comes from a territory with a long cheese history, the duchy of Savoy. With a foot on both sides of the high Alps and its capital at Chambry, fifteenth-century Savoy boasted not only a ducal cook who balanced the merits of Brie against those of local cheese for his banquets, but also a ducal physician and author of Summa Lacticiniorum, the first book in the world dedicated wholly to cheese, a book in which the best Italian and French kinds are coolly evaluated and are not overshadowed by the many types already produced in the valleys of Savoy.

Reblochon itself has little recorded history. It emerges from one of those many cheese legends: that the Alpine cowmen once had their taxes calculated on the number of pails of milk their herds produced; so it paid them to do a first milking when the landlord was about and a second milking after dark. True or false? Reblochon (from Savoyard reblocher, to give a second squeeze) is indeed the result of the late milking, low in volume, rich in cream. Produced in narrowvalleys and on high summer pastures on both sides of the high Alps, it began to make a name for itself in the 1870s, when Savoy had been divided between France and Italy, when the railways were bringing tourists to the mountains and mountain cheeses to Paris.

Yet there is a tantalizing prehistory for the foolhardy historian to attach to Reblochon. Nineteen hundred years agoin Tarentaise, the same Alpine district where Reblochon is now made, the tribe named Ceutrones had just been conquered by the Romans. They began to export their cheese to Rome. Named Vatusicus caseus, it was first noticed, around AD 70, by the encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder. Of all the cheeses available at Rome, Vatusicus was the only one praised by Galen in his survey of The Properties of Foods. It was not hard, or aged, or sharp, or indigestible: it was somehow a fresh cheese, even after its long journey to Rome, and necessarily a very expensive one. Might Reblochon, with its mild, milky, mountain-cowshed flavour sealed inside its firm rind, descend directly from the Vatusicus of the early Roman Empire? However that may be, Reblochon today is a full-cream, unpasteurized, soft cheese, exclusively from the milk of three local breeds. A ripe disc of Reblochon, matured for about three weeks, yields to a squeeze; the interior will sag but not run when cut, and will have the creamy, warm, intimate smell of the milk that the landlord never tasted.