An enzyme extract from the fourth stomach, the abomasum, of an unweaned calf
Rennet; its active agent is chymosin, now mostly produced by genetically modified microbes.
General knowledge · Food & drink
Cheese
Made for at least 7,000 years; Roquefort France's first AOC, 1925
Food and drink — curd, rennet and the law of the place name
Milk separated into solid curd and liquid whey, then drained, salted and usually ripened. The separation is done by acid or, more often, by rennet, an enzyme extract from the fourth stomach of an unweaned calf whose active agent is chymosin. Blue veining comes from Penicillium roqueforti or P. glaucum, needled into the paste so that air can reach the moulds; the white rind of Brie and Camembert is P. camemberti. Many of the great names are legally tied to their places: Roquefort was France's first appellation d'origine in 1925, and Stilton may be made in three English counties but not in the village that named it.
How to spot them
- ▸Rennet from a calf's fourth stomach; the enzyme is chymosin
- ▸Blue veins need air, so the wheels are pierced with needles
- ▸The 1925 appellation that came before all the others
- ▸A cheese that cannot legally be made in its own village
- ▸A Somerset gorge, and a verb for stacking and turning the curd
Key facts
Ewes' milk ripened in the limestone caves of a village in the Aveyron; Charles VI granted its monopoly in 1411 (1925)
Roquefort — France's first appellation d'origine contrôlée, in 1925.
Legally restricted to Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, and therefore banned from the Cambridgeshire village it is named for (1996)
Stilton. The village on the Great North Road sold it at the Bell Inn but never made it.
Stacking, turning and milling the drained curd to expel whey — a verb named after a Somerset gorge
Cheddaring. Only West Country Farmhouse Cheddar is protected; the name itself is free.
A hard Italian wheel from Parma and Reggio Emilia, aged at least twelve months and stamped with pin-dots
Parmigiano Reggiano. Grana Padano is the broader, cheaper protected cousin.
A Sardinian sheep's milk speciality deliberately infested with the larvae of Piophila casei
Casu marzu — the 'rotten' cheese, illegal to sell under EU hygiene rules.
Penicillium camemberti gives the bloomy white coat; P. roqueforti the blue veins
The two moulds behind most of the famous soft and blue styles.
A Swiss alpine wheel whose holes are made by carbon dioxide from Propionibacterium
Emmental. The holes are properly called eyes.
Key ideas
- Cheese is preservation: turning perishable milk into a keeping food by removing water and adding salt and acid. Everything that follows — the rind, the veins, the crystals — is controlled decay held at a useful point.
- Hard aged cheeses develop crunchy white specks that are not salt but tyrosine, an amino acid crystallising out as the proteins break down.
Quick-fire facts
- •Rennet comes from the abomasum, the fourth stomach of a young ruminant; its active enzyme is chymosin, and most commercial rennet is now made by fermentation
- •Blue veining is produced by Penicillium roqueforti or P. glaucum, and the wheels are pierced so air can reach the mould
- •Roquefort became France's first appellation d'origine in 1925; Charles VI had granted the village a ripening monopoly in 1411
- •Stilton may be made only in Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, excluding the village of Stilton, which lies in Cambridgeshire
- •Cheddar takes its name from the Somerset gorge; 'cheddaring' is the process of stacking and turning the curd
- •Parmigiano Reggiano is made in Parma, Reggio Emilia and Modena with parts of Bologna and Mantua, and is aged a minimum of twelve months
- •Mozzarella di Bufala Campana is made from water buffalo milk and holds protected designation of origin status
- •The holes in Emmental are formed by carbon dioxide from propionic acid bacteria and are called eyes
- •Casu marzu, a Sardinian cheese containing live cheese-fly larvae, cannot legally be sold under EU food hygiene rules
- •Halloumi, from Cyprus, has an unusually high melting point because its curd is heated before shaping; it gained PDO status in 2021
Drill it — 9 cards
1 / 9new card
Sources
- Catherine Donnelly (ed.) — The Oxford Companion to Cheese
- Harold McGee — On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
- European Commission, Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development — Geographical indications and quality schemes explained