The oldest preserved cheese ever found was buried with mummies in China
Cheese probably began as an accident: milk stored in a bag made from an animal's stomach, where natural rennet split it into curds and whey. The oldest surviving lumps turned up on mummies in the Taklamakan Desert, dating to as early as 1615 BCE. Today there are over a thousand kinds.
Nobody knows where cheesemaking started, whether in Europe, Central Asia or the Middle East; proposed dates reach back to around 8000 BCE, when sheep were domesticated. The earliest hard evidence is milk-fat residue on pottery strainers from Kuyavia in Poland, about 5500 BCE, and the Mediterranean's oldest comes from the Dalmatian coast of Croatia around 5200 BCE. Egyptian tomb paintings show cheese around 2000 BCE, and actual cheese about 1200 BCE old has been found in Egyptian tombs.
The chemistry is simple in outline. Bacteria turn milk sugar into lactic acid, and rennet, or bacterial enzymes that act like it, makes the milk protein casein clump. The curds of protein and fat are pressed away from the liquid whey. Vegetarian rennet is mostly produced by a fungus, though some comes from thistles, and a few cheeses are set with vinegar or lemon juice. Flavour depends on the animal and its diet, pasteurisation, fat content, microbes, moulds, processing and ageing time.
Ancient writers took cheese seriously. Greek myth credited its discovery to Aristaeus, and Homer's Cyclops keeps racks of sheep and goat cheese in his cave. The Roman agronomist Columella, around 65 CE, set out rennet, pressing, salting and ageing. Pliny the Elder praised cheeses from villages near Nîmes, which had to be eaten fresh, mentioned a hard cheese made by the Helvetii, and noted that Gaulish goat cheese tasted medicinal until smoking improved it. He even reported cheeses near Liguria weighing up to a thousand pounds.
Cheese packs the fat, protein, calcium and phosphorus of milk into something compact and long-lasting, which let producers wait for good prices before selling. Hard types like Parmesan keep far longer than soft ones like Brie. Paper and twine have given way to vacuum packs and bags flushed with carbon dioxide and nitrogen. The word traces through Latin caseus, source of casein, to an ancient root meaning to ferment or turn sour.
Source: Cheese
