More Archaeology--The Endurance of Cheese

Several recent articles, including this one referenced on A Stitch in Time (thanks again, Katrin!) discusses an archaeological find from Egypt that establishes the antiquity, and to some extent, the  importance of cheese as a human food.  

The recent re-discovery of an Egyptian tomb originally found in the 1880s includes a 3,200-year-old cheese, about the size of a small car tire (as best as I can tell from the pictures).  It was found in the tomb of a high-ranking official of the Pharoah, and had been in a large pottery jar that got broken somehow.  Analysis of the fats found in the pottery confirm that the mass was cheese, even though chemical changes in the "cheese" have made it as hard as stone.  The paper written by the researchers of their study of the cheese remains can be found here.

The significance of this find is that people who are lactose intolerant can still consume cheese.  The gene that permits Europeans and some other people to digest lactose has been determined to be 2,500 years old, while this cheese is much older.

The find also demonstrates both the ingenuity of humankind in expanding the number of available foodstuffs, and the perils of that journey.  The tomb find also showed traces of a bacterium which causes a disease called brucellosis, which can be contracted by eating foods made from unpasteurized milk.  

Somewhere where there's ... cheese!

A recent archaeological discovery in Denmark is believed to confirm that cheese was being made there in the Bronze Age. 

This article from ScienceNordic.com discusses the discovery of a 3,000-year-old ceramic pot in central Jutland that was found to contain "a white-yellow crust" that the archaeologists had not seen before. Lab analysis tentatively identified bovine fat in the substance. From this, the archaeologists theorize that the crust is the remains of cow's milk that was being heated to make cheese, but had been overheated and burned, sticking to the pot. They also suggest that this kitchen accident is the reason the pot was discarded intact (and it remains intact even today)--so the guilty party would not be blamed for ruining an otherwise perfectly good pot. 

This incident reminds me of the burnt pretzel discovery that confirmed the making of pretzels in 18th century Bavaria. It goes to show that archaeology can often learn more about the material culture of the past from its trash than from items that were lovingly preserved.

Swiss Cheese--older than we thought?

A new article from Science Daily reminds us that cheese making in ancient times was not limited to the Romans.

The article, which may be read here, describes a study of Iron Age pottery finds from six locations in the Swiss Alps. The study, conducted by a group of archaeologists spearheaded by the University of York and Newcastle University, concludes that the pots bear chemical residues which indicate that milk was heated in them.  The heating of milk, of course, is a necessary step for the making of most cheeses.   The pots date from the first millennium BCE.  A PLOS ONE article that gives technical information about the study may be read here. It notes that in the Swiss lowlands, similar evidence for cheese making dates back to the Neolithic, i.e. around the fourth millennium BCE.  

We cannot tell whether the cheese made tasted anything like Emmenthaler or Gruyere, two cheeses that are commonly thought of today when one considers Swiss cheese making, but the study results do demonstrate that the Swiss have engaged in cheese making for a long time. 

The Final Moretum Experiment

Garlic grater (note the label "Ail", French for garlic)

In my refrigerator, I still have the Pecorino Romano I'd bought this past summer when I was busily experimenting with different recipes for making moretum, an ancient Roman cheese spread described by Virgil.  So I decided to do a final, more open-ended moretum experiment.

I used about a quarter pound (about 113 g) of my half-pound sized chunk of cheese for this recipe. I chopped the cheese into bits, as I had done for the Oro Antico I used in my last experiment.  I was surprised at how easy the task was.  I had expected the cheese to be rock-hard but it was still fairly soft, even after being in my refrigerator's meat drawer for over six months. Pounding, however, still worked better than grinding for turning the cheese bits into a paste.

Next, I added above 4 or 5 large cloves of garlic--more than a third of a bulb.  To prepare them for mixing, I used the tool shown above:  a small ceramic plate, which had been scored in the center (the green part) with criss-crossing lines before firing, to roughen the surface.  Rubbing peeled cloves on the rough section turns garlic into a paste very quickly.  

After that, I chopped up two ribs of celery and added them to the mix.  Some grinding was necessary to mix in the celery and it was hard to blend it into the paste.  I realized afterward I should have used the garlic plate on the celery as well, to help turn it into a paste before mixing it with the cheese. However, the grated garlic worked pretty well to help the other ingredients cohere into a spreadable paste.  In fact, I achieved a moister and smoother paste than I'd managed with my last batch. I needed significantly less olive oil to complete the transformation of my ingredients into cheese spread.

And that's all I used.  I didn't have parsley in the house and thus didn't add any (though Symilius, the cheese-eating "hero" of Virgil's poem, added celery instead of parsley, as Stella Anderson noted here). Nor did I add salt, since the Pecorino had plenty.

Having combined the ingredients, I thought I was done until I looked at Virgil's poem again and saw that Symilius also adds a "little of his scanty vinegar" to his moretum.  Both Stella and the author of Pass the Garum had included a tiny amount of vinegar in their redactions, which for some reason I had forgotten.  So I tried adding a bit of balsamic vinegar to my moretum, on the theory that such a vinegar might have been added to provide a bit of sweetness, giving the mixture the sweet-and-sour flavor so enjoyed by the Romans. Not so.  Even though I accidentally got more than a few drops of vinegar in my cheese mix, I could taste no discernible difference after I had added it.

Finally, Symilius also used ground coriander seeds in his moretum. I had ground coriander seed available, so I added some to my batch after it had been in the refrigerator for about a day, but half a teaspoon plus a generous sprinkle of powdered seed did nothing to change the taste; it remained very garlicky and too sharp.  Adding fresh green herbs like parsley might have taken the edge off of the sharpness, but I didn't have any handy this time.

My final thoughts:

• A certain amount of "pounding" with the mortar, not grinding, is necessary to make moretum, because harder cheeses were used, and using harder cheese seems to give better taste results.
• Grating the garlic helps to make the resulting paste smoother.  Perhaps grating the celery would have a beneficial effect on the texture also, but I did not think of trying that when I made this last batch.  
• Grating the garlic also releases more garlic juice, making the resulting cheese more garlicky than might otherwise be the case for a similar quantity of garlic.  
• Modern cheeses must contain more salt than Roman cheeses did, because I found no need for the additional salt Symilius is said to have added in the poem.
• It's difficult to tell what purpose adding vinegar was supposed to serve without knowing the characteristics of the vinegar used. I couldn't detect any noticeable difference in my moretum after adding balsamic vinegar.  Possibly wine vinegar would give a more noticeable result.
• It would be fun to make moretum using the historical Roman "viniagre" Alan Coxon makes. However, I'm not up for paying nearly 10 British pounds (plus shipping) just for the privilege of adding a few drops of his vinegar to a batch of moretum every now and then.
• I should keep an eye out to see whether the remains of any garlic grater plates such as the one I used have been found at Roman archaeological sites (though I wouldn't expect a farmer like Symilius to have or use one).  It seems to me that such a device would be very useful for making moretum, and would have been easy to make with technology available to the Romans.
• It may be worthwhile to use celery root, rather than celery ribs, in moretum.  The tough fibers of celery ribs make it hard to completely mix them into the pounded cheese; that problem might not exist if the root were used instead.
• Moretum recipes work better with very hard cheese; this moretum was much more garlicky than the batch I made with cheese that had gone very hard, confirming my suspicion that one of the purposes of moretum was to make palatable a cheese that had passed its prime.

If anyone has additional thoughts about moretum or about the process I used, please don't hesitate to comment!

EDIT:  (2/15/2016) Corrected some syntax errors and clarified my final thoughts about my moretum experiments a bit.

My Second (?) Moretum Experiment

Second moretum experiment--results

This afternoon, while taking a break from scanning the Internet for plausible job openings, I made another batch of moretum, based on my friend Stella Anderson's redaction of Virgil's recipe.

I started out with a chunk of a cheese called Oro Antico, which claimed to be a Pecorino Toscano (which, like Pecorino Romano, is a sheep's milk cheese) that had been aged for 6 months.  I ended up using a piece of the chunk that was about the size of the palm of my hand and roughly an inch thick.  

The cheese was quite tough and dry after sitting in my refrigerator for nearly 2 weeks, so I chopped it up into 1/2 cm-sized bits before I made a serious effort to pound it.  And I do mean "pound".  Virgil is right about Symilus "pounding" his cheese.  The normal twisting, grinding motion I normally employ in using a mortar and pestle did nothing to the cheese bits--the mortar simply skidded off without discernible effect.  However, holding the mortar vertical and bringing it straight down onto the cheese bits with controlled force worked very well. By this method I eventually managed to turn my chunk of cheese into a quantity of coarse, slightly fluffy damp powder, into which I ground an equal volume of diced celery.  With the celery, conventional grinding was necessary to work it into the mass of powdered cheese.  

After I got the cheese and celery somewhat combined, I began adding olive oil to the mixture.  A small "dribble" did nothing, but about an ounce or so of oil turned the powder into a  spreadable, if coarse, paste.  Then I ground in an 1/8th of a teaspoon of ground coriander seeds, about a tablespoon of chopped parsley, and 3  small cloves of garlic.   I would have tried adding rue if I had had any on hand.

The result of my labors was indeed tasty.  It still tasted like Pecorino Toscano, but was moister and had a pleasant tang from the herbs.  It didn't have much garlic taste, which leads me to conclude that the older and harder your cheese is, the more garlic can be added to the recipe without the garlic flavor becoming overwhelming.  I shudder to think how tough Symilus's cheese must have been if he needed four heads of garlic to make it palatable!

From this second moretum experiment, I conclude that the recipe in Virgil's poem assumes that a hard cheese like a Pecorino was used; such a cheese requires "pounding" instead of grinding in the mortar and can tolerate the addition of much more garlic than a soft cheese.  Celery is also a critical addition, because in addition to having a pleasant flavor it makes the resulting cheese-and-olive-oil paste moister and easier to spread.  I suspect that the use of any herbs or vegetables other than celery would depend upon maker's taste and the herbs available to him or her.  For example, Symilus didn't use basil in his moretum, but basil would probably be quite tasty in this recipe instead of (or perhaps even in addition to) the parsley. 

Many thanks to Stella and the author of opus anglicanum for motivating me to rethink my original assumptions and arrive at a more plausibly historical moretum recipe.

EDIT:  (7/3/2015)  My moretum got pretty hard sitting in the refrigerator (not a problem Virgil's farmer would have had), so I ended up adding almost another ounce of olive oil, mixing it in with a (non-period style) fork.  This worked pretty well to retain spreadability while not changing the taste.  I also added some salt (totally unnecessary; I'd forgotten that the Pecorino is already salted) and black pepper (which worked well). 

EDIT:  (1/31/2016) Added a question mark to the title, because I realized that this was really my third moretum experiment.

Another Moretum Experiment

I was pretty satisfied with the moretum [i.e.,  the name for an ancient Roman type of cheese spread] I had made until I read my friend Stella Anderson's moretum recipe on her blog, Historical Living with Hvitr.  Stella's blog post makes three points about the redaction of the recipe found in Virgil's poem by the author of Pass the Garum ("PTG") that has made me reconsider my original views about moretum in general and Virgil's recipe in particular.

First, Stella noted that, whether or not garlic heads were smaller in those days, the amount of garlic used by the farmer in Virgil's poem was "insane".  She points out that Virgil intended to convey the idea that the amount of garlic was excessive by stating that the garlic made the farmer's eyes water as he pounded it.  (In contrast, my eyes didn't water at all as I put my single clove into my moretum recipe.)

Second, it turns out that apius, the Latin word actually used in Virgil's poem, means "celery" not "parsley", making it unclear why the translation used by  PTG refers to parsley in the first place.

Third, and most importantly, the poem itself explicitly describes the cheese used in the farmer's moretum as a hard cheese.  I'm not sure how I missed that detail.  I can't read Latin, but the translation used by PTG describes the cheese in question as follows:  "...a cheese transfixed/ By rope of broom through mid-circumference/ Was hanging there, an ancient bundle, too,/ Of dill together tied."  Or, in Stella's words, "...Symilius' cheese is obviously some type of hard cheese.  He keeps it hanging from his roof by a string tied through a hole in the middle of the cheese."

These facts convince me that, however tasty a soft-cheese spread might be with the additions proposed by Virgil, Stella and my friend at Opus Anglicanum (who made up some moretum with her own redaction of the recipe given in Virgil) are right; a hard cheese was meant to be used in the recipe, and may well have been generally preferred for moretum in ancient Rome.  The cheese was pounded in a mortar with olive oil to make it spreadable, and the added vegetables and herbs likely provide a useful level of moisture to the mix as well as a more pleasing flavor. Although Virgil likely exaggerated the amount of garlic used to make the farmer look more like a country bumpkin, a significant amount of garlic might be necessary for achieving a pleasing flavor balance in a salted cheese that was even drier than normal because it had been hanging for a long time.  

So I went looking for some Pecorino Romano, a type of sheep's milk cheese which was already being made in Roman times.  On my first effort, I failed to locate Pecorino Romano in my local supermarket, but did find and purchased some Pecorino Toscano.  I selected an aged version of Pecorino Toscano, hoping to duplicate the effect of Symilius's ancient cheese.  Later, I found Pecorino Romano, and purchased it as well.

Now, I have two possible hard cheeses to experiment with.  I think I'll start with the Pecorino Toscano, because I have a smaller piece of that and because Stella has already vetted Pecorino Romano as a base for moretum.   Pecorino Toscano is somewhat softer in texture and less sharp in flavor than Pecorino Romano, so it is a good choice for my next batch, which I'm going to make using Stella's redaction of the moretum recipe from the poem as a starting point.   The result will be described in this blog.

EDIT:  (7/1/2015) Fact correction; Stella's recipe used Pecorino Romano, not Pecorino Toscano.  I have corrected the text accordingly.

My Moretum Experiment

My first batch of moretum!

The moretum, served on half of a pretzel roll

Ever since I read Pass the Garum's recipe for how to make moretum, an ancient Roman style cheese spread, I've been eager to try it out for myself.  This afternoon turned out to be a good time to do so.  Photographs of the fruits of my labors appear with this post. 

By and large I followed the Pass the Garum recipe, but differences in taste and the supplies I had available resulted in a few exceptions, as follows:

1.   Garlic.  I used a full clove of garlic, though a small one.

2.  Cheese.  Pass the Garum suggested using a "cheese spread", which seemed too much like cheating--isn't the point of the recipe to make a cheese spread?  On the other hand, the recipe seems to require a soft cheese, rather than a hard one.  I would have used what we now call "farmer's cheese"  except the ones I could find were a bit expensive.  So I compromised by using a soft goat cheese, which I could conveniently buy in small quantity (about 4 tablespoons worth, or two batches according to the recipe).

3.   Olive Oil.  Unfortunately, I did not realize until after I had started that I was almost out of olive oil.  I could only manage to get about 2/3 of a tablespoon of oil out of the bottle, so I made it do.

4.  Coriander seeds.  I had ground coriander seed to hand, so I used it.  Because I figured the raw seeds would grind up to a much smaller pile of spice than ready-ground powdered spice, I used only a teaspoon. 

5.   Mortar.   I originally had a mortar and pestle set, but my pestle (the bowl part) broke long ago.  So I used an ordinary ceramic bowl instead.  The bowl was flatter on the bottom than a true pestle, which made it more difficult to use, but I was eventually able to get the celery, garlic and other spices to form a rough paste, to which I added the cheese, oil, and vinegar.

The goat cheese blended very nicely with the oil and vinegar into a mixture with a nicely spreadable consistency.  My only regret was that I didn't mash the celery longer, since the odd lumps of celery marred the texture of the finished product slightly.  It helps to dice the celery finely before adding it to the mortar for mashing.  I diced my celery into half-inch thick chunks, but in retrospect, I should have diced it into even smaller pieces, each perhaps as thin as an eighth of an inch.   

I found that the moretum is garlicky, all right, but the primary taste note in the batch I made was sourness.  (My use of goat cheese may have had something to do with that.)  Since I happen to enjoy sour flavors, I was very  pleased with the result, and didn't feel impelled to add black pepper (though I may add some the next time I eat more of it).  What I likely will do when I make my next batch is add more parsley, which I think goes a long way toward balancing out the garlic bitterness (and possibly even the effect on one's breath). I suspect the moretum would have tasted even better on a coarse, crusty, whole-grain bread than on a pretzel roll, but since I was making this only for me to eat (my husband detests cheese)  I was looking for a small roll to eat it on, and the pretzel rolls were the most appealing rolls of the right size that my supermarket had this afternoon. 

I would be delighted to hear about any readers' experiments with similar recipes, or to answer questions about my little experiment, in the comments.

The Cheese/Hat Connection

From The Guardian comes an interesting article about how the type of hat you wear influences your perception of the taste of cheese. 

Recently, rapper Drake was quoted as reporting that he found cheese tasted differently when he wore it while wearing a broad-brimmed Panama hat:  "“It made my meal feel more exotic. Cheddar was looking more like a provolone or a rare brie.”

Inspired, a Guardian reporter eagerly took up his cheeseboard and taste tested various cheeses (including a Gouda and a Manchego) while wearing novel hats: a "bobble" hat (that's a knitted hat with a pompon on top, to us Americans); a "New Era" cap, a vaguely military-ish hat designed by Katie Eary, and others. 

Readers interested in fine cheese and novel hats should check out the Guardian article, while the rest of us check out the date on this post. 

Neolithic Cheese

New physical evidence shows that cheese was made much earlier than was previously believed.

According to this BBC article (which I found thanks to David Beard's Archaeology in Europe blog), archaeologists in Poland have found fragments of ceramic pots containing holes. Of course, a ceramic pot with holes in the bottom could have been used for straining fermented curds generated in cheese-making. But even though such a pot may look like a modern cheese-strainer, it could also have been used for other purposes. Why assume that the fragments are evidence of a pot that was used for the making of cheese? 

The answer is that the archaeologists performed tests that found residues of milk and milk fat on the fragments--clear evidence that the pot had been used for processing milk products. The type of cheese that would have been made is the kind of soft cheese often called "farmer"s cheese" today. The fragments themselves are estimated to be about 7,500 years old.

More details about the archaeologists' conclusions may be found in their article for Nature magazine, which can be downloaded in full (sadly, for a fee) here. For those like me who are unwilling to purchase the Nature article for whatever reason, an informal news article about the find that goes into a bit more detail than the BBC article may be found on the Nature Magazine website, here. 

As these articles observe, the ability to preserve milk for food purposes in the form of cheese was of inestimable value before the invention of technologies that permit easy refrigeration of food stuffs. Still, it gives one pause to reflect upon how far we have--or have not?--come from that Neolithic cheese strainer to being able to purchase a plastic tub of cheese from a local supermarket.

EDIT: (12/21/2012) Corrected text above to reflect additional information obtained from a closer reading of the above-cited articles and an AP article about the find (spotted by my friend, John Desmond).  The fragments are supposedly from 34 different pots; it's not clear how that was determined.  More interestingly, the AP article claims that experts believe that cheese was being made in what is now Turkey up to 2,000 years later, but have yet to find definitive evidence of same.

EDIT: (1/13/2013) I've found another on-line article about the find here. This article states that Peter Bogucki has believed since the mid-1980s that the perforated pottery of Poland was used in cheesemaking, and he even published an article to that effect in 1984, but he could not obtain general acceptance for the theory because of his lack of hard evidence that the pottery was used for that purpose. Now he has his evidence, and his vindication.