There’s an old Arab folk tale that cheese came from a merchant packing the milk under a pile of goods on a pack animal, and only remembering it after the end of a long journey!
I think about this often. You have to figure, that first cheese wouldn’t have been a refined block with a selected bacteria culture. The easiest thing to make is cottage cheese - chunks of partially fermented lactose and fat suspended in what is still mostly milk, but… it wouldn’t have been done in an intentional, sterile way… so you’d probably have something like bleu cheese with some mold in it but still wet and runny and just kind of loosely chunky (imagine you let an open container of cottage cheese sit out until it starts going bad).
So who was the first person that was desperate enough to try eating that… and how did they convince the next person to eat it?
It wasn’t easy to make water vessels. Animal stomachs were commonly used. A baby mammal stomach would make cottage cheese if you store milk in it at room temperature, and since they didn’t have refrigeration, not a difficult accident to discover.
Whoever discovered cheese:
There’s an old Arab folk tale that cheese came from a merchant packing the milk under a pile of goods on a pack animal, and only remembering it after the end of a long journey!
If it was packed in a skin made from a calf’s stomach this could work
Sheep stomach is how the tale goes, if memory serves!
It’s because he didn’t know this piece of wisdom
I think about this often. You have to figure, that first cheese wouldn’t have been a refined block with a selected bacteria culture. The easiest thing to make is cottage cheese - chunks of partially fermented lactose and fat suspended in what is still mostly milk, but… it wouldn’t have been done in an intentional, sterile way… so you’d probably have something like bleu cheese with some mold in it but still wet and runny and just kind of loosely chunky (imagine you let an open container of cottage cheese sit out until it starts going bad).
So who was the first person that was desperate enough to try eating that… and how did they convince the next person to eat it?
It wasn’t easy to make water vessels. Animal stomachs were commonly used. A baby mammal stomach would make cottage cheese if you store milk in it at room temperature, and since they didn’t have refrigeration, not a difficult accident to discover.