Cheese history: everything you wanted to know

Summary

History Extra Podcast: "Cheese History: Everything You Wanted to Know"

Release Date: May 24, 2025
Host: Isabel King
Guest: Ned Palmer, Cheesemonger and Author of "A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles"

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Introduction

In the "Cheese History: Everything You Wanted to Know" episode of the History Extra Podcast, host Isabel King delves deep into the rich and varied history of cheese with renowned cheesemonger and author Ned Palmer. The conversation spans from the origins of cheese-making to its profound impact on society, touching upon cultural, economic, and technological aspects that have shaped this beloved dairy product.

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Defining Cheese

[02:37] Ned Palmer:
"Cheese is a delicious solid made from liquid milk... fermented with bacterial starter cultures, coagulated with rennet, and has salt added."

Ned Palmer begins by offering a comprehensive definition of cheese, highlighting its basic components and the essential processes involved in its creation. He emphasizes that cheese-making lacks a strict legal definition but is fundamentally a fermented, coagulated milk product derived from ruminant animals.

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Origins and Early History of Cheese

[03:37] Ned Palmer:
"I think the very first cheese actually had rennet as part of it... maybe discovered in the stomach of a ruminant animal, probably a goat."

Exploring the ancient origins of cheese, Palmer suggests that cheese-making likely began in the stomachs of domesticated ruminants. The use of rennet, an enzyme found in these animals, was crucial in coagulating milk, thereby initiating the cheese-making process. He references Hittite texts from around 2000-3000 BCE as the earliest written evidence of cheese, indicating its significance as a durable food source for traveling and military purposes.

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Roman Influence on British Cheese Making

[06:31] Ned Palmer:
"The Romans brought proto-industrial cheese-making technology to Britain, introducing tools like bronze vats and cheese cutting knives."

Contrary to previous beliefs that the Romans introduced cheese-making to Britain, Palmer clarifies that evidence of cheese production in Britain dates back to around 4000 BCE. However, Roman occupation did play a pivotal role in scaling up cheese production, introducing more advanced tools and standardizing methods, which facilitated the mass production of cheese to supply their legions.

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Women's Role in Cheese Making

[09:26] Ned Palmer:
"Cheese-making was predominantly a craft passed down through women, with mothers teaching daughters the skills instinctively."

Palmer underscores the vital role women played in the tradition of cheese-making. In small, peasant households, the knowledge and techniques were often transmitted orally and practically from one generation to the next, maintaining the craft as a familial and community-centric activity.

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Monastic Cheese Making

[10:55] Ned Palmer:
"Monasteries developed large-scale, standardized cheese production to meet economic demands, supplying cheeses like Wensleydale."

Monastic communities significantly influenced cheese production by establishing large-scale operations. These institutions required consistent and substantial quantities of cheese to sustain their communities and fulfill economic obligations, such as paying tithes. This led to the adoption of standardized recipes and methods, diverging from the more artisanal practices of peasant women.

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Protected Regional Cheese Names

[13:15] Ned Palmer:
"While countries like the Netherlands and France protect their regional cheeses through PDOs, Britain's approach has been less stringent, allowing cheeses like Cheddar to be produced globally."

Addressing the protection of regional cheese names, Palmer notes that unlike France and the Netherlands, Britain has been more lenient, resulting in widespread production of cheeses like Cheddar beyond their geographic origins. Although there is a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) for Cheddar within the EU, its enforcement has been broad, allowing international variations to flourish.

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Global Spread of Cheese Making

[17:20] Ned Palmer:
"Cheese-making originated in the Fertile Crescent and spread across Europe through trade and migration, rather than arising independently in different regions."

Palmer traces the diffusion of cheese-making from its birthplace in the Fertile Crescent, spreading through Europe via trade routes and the movement of agricultural practices. He highlights that unlike certain technologies, cheese-making did not independently emerge in disparate parts of the world but was rather disseminated through cultural and economic exchanges.

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The Ploughman’s Lunch

[19:10] Ned Palmer:
"The term 'Ploughman’s lunch' likely originated as a promotional term in the 1970s to encourage cheese consumption, though historically, hearty cheeses like Cheddar were staples for workers."

Discussing the iconic Ploughman's lunch, Palmer suggests it was a marketing invention aimed at boosting cheese sales. However, he connects it to historical eating habits where robust cheeses served as essential sustenance for laborers like ploughmen, canal boat drivers, and sailors, embodying both convenience and nutritional value.

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Cheese and Wine Pairing

[20:40] Ned Palmer:
"Cheese and wine pairing likely dates back to Roman times, with elites enjoying cheeses like Falernian with premium wines as part of their dining rituals."

The tradition of pairing cheese with wine is posited to have Roman origins, where high-status individuals indulged in fine cheeses alongside esteemed wines. Palmer speculates that this practice evolved over centuries, becoming more systematized in modern times, particularly noticeable in culinary circles from the 1930s onward.

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Discovery of Mold in Cheese

[22:44] Ned Palmer:
"Moldy cheeses were likely discovered by accident when cheeses were exposed to specific humidity and temperature conditions, leading to the intentional cultivation of molds in cheeses like Roquefort."

Palmer explores the serendipitous discovery of mold-enhanced cheeses, attributing it to accidental exposure that turned into a deliberate practice. Legendary tales, such as that of Roquefort, illustrate how desirable characteristics like flavor and texture could emerge from unintended mold growth, transforming these incidents into celebrated cheese varieties.

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Impact of Historical Events on Cheese Making

[26:29] Ned Palmer:
"Wars have significantly influenced cheese production, from the Romans’ mass-producing Pecorino for their armies to WWII's impact on cheese regulations and technology like cling film for preservation."

Historical upheavals, particularly wars, have played crucial roles in shaping cheese-making practices. Palmer notes how wartime needs accelerated technological advancements in cheese preservation and altered production scales. For instance, World War II led to regulations restricting cheese types and promoted innovations like cling film to prevent moisture loss, thereby preserving cheese quality amid scarcity.

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Wensleydale and Wallace & Gromit

[32:01] Ned Palmer:
"The animated duo Wallace and Gromit significantly boosted Wensleydale's popularity by featuring the cheese in their stories, transforming it into a beloved global export."

The cultural phenomenon of Wallace and Gromit played a pivotal role in revitalizing Wensleydale cheese's market presence. By associating the cheese with beloved characters, the creators inadvertently championed Wensleydale, leading to increased demand and recognition worldwide. The town of Hawes honors this legacy with statues celebrating the characters that helped save their local cheese industry.

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The Societal Impact of Cheese

[34:43] Ned Palmer:
"Cheese has been integral to societal development from the agricultural revolution to modern economies, influencing religion, trade, and cultural practices."

Concluding the discussion, Palmer emphasizes cheese’s profound influence on societal structures and cultural evolution. From supporting early agricultural communities to playing roles in religious rituals and international trade, cheese has been a staple that not only nourished but also united and defined civilizations. Its multifaceted presence in history underscores its significance beyond mere sustenance, reflecting broader societal values and advancements.

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Conclusion

Ned Palmer's insightful exploration into the history of cheese reveals its indispensable role in shaping human societies. From ancient innovations and Roman industrial practices to cultural renaissances influenced by popular media, cheese has been both a practical necessity and a cultural icon. This episode highlights how a seemingly simple food item can embody complex historical narratives and societal transformations.

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For more fascinating historical insights and stories, subscribe to the History Extra Podcast and explore the depths of the past with leading experts.

Transcript

[Isabel King]

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[Ned Palmer]

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[Isabel King]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. Nothing beats a well loaded cheese board. But while so many of us enjoy a stinky Stilton and ripe Brie or chuck a reliable old cheddar into our basket at the supermarket each week, what do we actually know about the history of the cheese that we eat? Spanning thousands of years and many continents, cheese's history is a fascinating and surprising one. For this Everything youg Want to Know episode, Isabel King put your questions to cheesemonger and author Ned Palmer. So Ned, I want to start with a really basic question of what is cheese? How would we define it?

[Ned Palmer]

Excellent. Starting off with the good questions and this might be quite a long answer, I suspect that there isn't an official legal description of cheese. So for me, cheese is a delicious solid Made from liquid milk. Milk that has come from a ruminant animal, like a cow, sheep or a goat or some other milk giving animals a solid that is derived by fermenting the milk with bacterial starter cultures and getting rid of the water, coagulating that curd with rennet, which is an enzyme that coagulates milk into solid and adding salt. So it's made with milk from animals, it's fermented with bacterial cultures, it's coagulated with rennet and it has salt added fast cheese.

[Isabel King]

That's a good summary. It actually leads me straight onto a question that we had from social media, which is, what do we know about who, where and when the properties of rennet were first discovered?

[Ned Palmer]

That's a lovely question. We can't go back in time, much as I would like to, and, you know, if we had a time machine, I could go back and discover. I'd go to early cheese making. That would be amazing. There's a sort of inference and it comes from Hittite texts. In these texts, they mention aged soldiers cheese. They're not talking about cheese for old soldiers. We infer they're talking about a cheese for soldiers that has been aged. Because cheese is a great ration. It's a great ration for anyone who's traveling because you've concentrated all your nutrients, got rid of the heavy water. So the implication is that they must have been using rennet by that point to get a cheese that's hard enough to age. In a sense, what one imagines is that the first cheese is very simple and was just milk that had been fermented with this bacteria and probably by accident. So it's just naturally soured. You know that you see the milk in your fridge when it's gone sour, you see the separation between those thick curds and the liquid. So it's doing that, somebody drains it off and they have a form of very simple cheese. I do wonder about that. And this is the origin story of cheese that I wasn't allowed to put in the book because my editor said it was too grim. So hold onto your socks. I think that the first cheese was discovered in the stomach of a ruminant animal, probably a goat, because I'm fairly sure that goats were the first ruminants that we domesticated, the first cheese making animals. And a young ruminant makes cheese in its stomach. And that is how it gets the nutrition from milk. It's getting rid of the liquid phase of the milk, so it can just have that solid and in its stomach it has those bacteria that would convert lactose to lactic acid. And it has the rennet that coagulates milk, because that's where we get what we call animal rennet from, is from the stomach of ruminants. So I feel as if the very first cheese actually had rennet as part of it, the whole deal. And there would have been a time when people began to figure out, gosh, it's coming from the stomach, because humans are clever. So while that bit of writing, that Hittite cuneiform writing from 2 or 3000 BCE is the first written inference, I do think it's been around longer then in, say the first century ce, you get Roman agricultural writing where they mention rennet explicitly and they tell you how much to use because they were doing kind of standardized cheese making. So definitely by then we know that they're using it and we know how much to use.

[Isabel King]

So we know that, of course, the Romans had a massive impact on Britain in general. How did they influence cheese making?

[Ned Palmer]

Aha. What have the Romans done for our cheese? Well, until comparatively recently, people thought the Romans had actually taught us how to make cheese. And I was glad to discover that this is not the case and that the first evidence for cheese making is around 4,000 BCE, when agriculture begins in Britain, or at least when we have the evidence for it. And rather amusingly for me, I think the first evidence is found around Stonehenge and is associated with the phase of building Stonehenge that we recognize because they'd already done some versions of it. So again, this is around three and a half thousand bce and it comes in the form of little bits of pottery that have traces of fat on them from which we assume that they were making cheese. So we already knew how to make cheese. What I think they brought us was a kind of proto industrial cheese making. I suspect that they brought technology that the women cheese makers of Britain didn't have already. So the Romans fed it to their soldiers. It was part of their ration, hence aged soldiers cheese. They got an ounce a day of sheep's cheese. Quite hard sheep cheese, like pecorino, Same thing. Every legion had about 5,000 men in a legion. That's 5,000 ounces of cheese. That's a lot of cheese. You've got to make it. I don't think they shipped hundreds of cheese makers over with their legion. I think that they brought the kit and they brought a few people and taught the locals how to make cheese for them. And I love thinking of these women coming to these dairies and Maybe they'd be making cheese in kind of clay pots, maybe keeping it near a fire, maybe just letting it set sort of naturally. And suddenly they're confronted with lovely bronze vats and cheese cutting knives to cut curds, get rid of more moisture and would have been tremendously exciting for them. So I think that they may well have introduced cheese making at scale like that, which also means consistent cheese making. You need recipes, you need algorithms to make something of that. You know, if you're making kilos, hundreds of kilos of cheese a day, and I think you see traces of it in the first sor of bits of records of those sort of early Anglo Saxon kings, you find that one of the kings says, and whenever I visit, you've got to provide me with six cheeses. So that makes me think, well, he knows how big the cheeses are if he's numbering them like that. Which seems to me a relic of that Roman industrial cheese making. So basically, I think they taught us how to make cheese. Good, consistent, more technological cheese in bulk.

[Isabel King]

You mentioned that it was women making these cheeses. Was that something that would have been passed down the family line like a mother teaching her daughter how to make cheese?

[Ned Palmer]

Absolutely, I'm sure it was. And it's a lovely thing to think about. I should qualify this in that I think that I think it was fundamentally the women in the sort of smaller peasant style industries. So, you know, if you have a small holding and you have a few small animals, the Romans developed this kind of, you know, industrial cheese making. But I don't think there was necessarily that gender separation. And the other thing that was different was monastic cheese making, which was more standardized again. And there they had recipes because they had the Roman textbooks. But I think for these small peasant cheesemakers, I'm absolutely sure it was Mum teaching how to do it as her mum had. You didn't need to write it down. I think they learned in a very instinctive way and it was a real craft, the 18th century when it became something more of a commodity. The sort of improvers, as they were called, the Enlightenment book farmers they were known as, because they weren't farmers. They booked from books, sort of didn't like this and they wanted to standardize it and they wanted to take it away from this semi mystical thing of the secretive craft of women handing down recipes. So there's a kind of a move away from that, which possibly a shame.

[Isabel King]

You just mentioned the monastic tradition of making cheese. When and why did monasteries begin turning to cheese making to support their religious Orders.

[Ned Palmer]

There's two sorts of industry here for me. So there is what we recognize in a way as monastic cheesemaking. What I just spoke about is something much more kind of industrial, more standardized, where you have large herds or flocks of sheep and lots of people involved and a bit of separation of labor. You've got people looking off the animals, you've got people doing the milking and then people doing their cheese making. I think just before then when these religious communities were much smaller. And I'm thinking about Ireland, which I kind of know a bit more about, but you have these tiny places like they were trying to be self sufficient. It was a virtue to be self sufficient. But then that's just kind of like peasant cheese making. So the different thing is that larger scale production where the monasteries, they were farms, they were manors, they were industries in themselves and they were making money. They had to pay rent to their parent houses. You might have a monastery in say Wensleydale which was making the cheese that would turn into Wensleydale. And they were sending cartloads of that cheese to their parent house in France as a sort of tax or a tithe. So they needed to be quite large scale. And they had the possibility because they had money, they had lots of land. They were given big grants of land by rich. Aristotle wanted to go to heaven. So they had huge flocks also. They were in Britain. This was the. In the medieval period. It was the time when wool was an enormous commodity, made fortunes and you had these sheep producing wool who also made milk. So I almost think it was a circular thing. They had the capability to produce huge amounts and then they had a need to use that to pay their rents up the scale.

[Isabel King]

You just talked about Wensydale and of course that's a cheese name that most people will be familiar with and is named after a place. And it brings to mind a question that we had in from Carol Elva Greenwell, who asked if any regional cheese names are protected, specified with why can cheddar be created anywhere in the world, but something like an edam can only be made in. In Holland.

[Ned Palmer]

Yeah, good point, Carol. I think there's a big picture thing that the British don't seem to have valued their foods, say as much as perhaps the Dutch with edam or gouda or the French with rockfor and brie. And that is a whole other question. And you know, if anyone wants to give me some cash, I would just love to do a PhD on why. So we've not been great at protecting the names of our foodstuffs. Cheddar is a really interesting point for two reasons. One is that it's a method as well as a place. So there is a step in making cheddar. When you stack these big blocks of curd, they look a bit like breeze blocks. Say you stack them on the vat, on the sides of the vat to compress them and get that dense texture. And that is called cheddaring. To cheddar, the curds, obviously it came from the cheese, but then there are other cheeses which are cheddar'd. But you could say, in a sense, if I go to live in Massachusetts in the 17th century and bring my cheese making technology with me, I'd call it cheddar. Not really caring too much about things like provenance. So thereby hangs another tale in that the British went out all over the world and they went to places where the lamb's good for cheese making, which is the east coast of America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, who all have been making cheddar for 100 years, even a couple of hundred years. So it becomes a bit late and I think it's almost unfair. So there was a thing in the States with some European cheese makers trying to protect the names of their cheeses. I think one of them might have been Gruyere. And there were some American makers who's like, my family's made this for 100 years. It seems a bit unfair to take the name away. So there's a couple of reasons for that. We do have a PDO for cheddar that's protected domain of origin. It's registered with the EU and it means that you can't call it, but I think that it's sort of oddly broad. They haven't, in the same sense, protected it because I think that that ship had already sailed.

[Isabel King]

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[Ned Palmer]

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[Ned Palmer]

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[Isabel King]

On a related note, did cheese appear at similar times globally? Was its spread related to trade or did it seem to pop up independently?

[Ned Palmer]

So the evidence seems to say that cheese making appeared in the Fertile Crescent. So that is an area of land that has parts of modern Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Palestine. And that's where the first evidence again, the little shards of pottery with fat residue on them and some other really cool stuff about age and gender distribution of bones. So if you have a dairy herd, you have lots of female cows, you don't really need the chaps, so off they pop. You keep one around, one lucky fella. They're older because you know you can milk cows or goats for a while. So if you suddenly see that bone distribution change to being lots of female animals much older, then you would infer that they're making cheese. And that evidence appears around I think it's around 7,000 BCE. This changes all the time. My first book is now Wrong from cool stuff that I've read because we found out new stuff. It does seem to appear there and then it moves and it moves. So as humans in that part of the world developed agriculture, they started to have a population explosion because they can feed more people. So people need to travel. And then you seem to see the evidence of cheesemaking spread out over the Adriatic, eastern Mediterranean, eventually to France, along the north coast of Africa. But as far as we can tell, it's not convergent. It's not like the Chinese developed cheese at the same time. No one on the American continent did. And I've tried to find out why. And there's quite serious thought gone into it in an excellent paper that finishes with the words perhaps they just didn't Think of it.

[Isabel King]

How about a ploughman's? Why is it called a ploughman's?

[Ned Palmer]

It seems to have been a marketing ploy by, I think, the British Dairy board in the 70s to get people to eat more cheese, which is a great thing to do, that idea of having bread, pickle and cheese and calling it ploughman's lunch. But then if we think about it as well, we think, well, of course it was because cheese was a staple and a posh food. And I think a lot of the big hard cheeses of Britain were cheeses like cheddar and Double Gloucester were staple foods to feed the workers. And so a lovely hunk of rough bread and a big hunk of lovely cheddar and a jug of cider would have absolutely been the ploughman's lunch. I mean, it would have been the forester's lunch and the canal boat driver's lunch and the sailor's lunch as well. But why not call it the Ploughman? So I don't mind that one, I think, yeah, it's just giving a name to something that probably was a thing.

[Isabel King]

You talk about how cheese was both a staple and a luxury, depending on the cheese and where you were. And it leads me on quite nicely to a recent discovery that has been unveiled by the University of Leeds. They very recently transcribed a 16th century pamphlet which outlines how the Tudors felt about cheese. And it seemed that people cared a lot about what they ate and when to eat. Cheese was a big thing that they were worried about. When was the best time to eat cheese? Which leads me on to a question from Tegan, which is, when did we start pairing cheese with wine as a pudding?

[Ned Palmer]

I'm sure that we've been eating cheese and drinking lovely wine together for a really long time. And I know that the Romans prized cheese highly and they had some really fancy cheeses in the markets in Rome or the other big cities. And one of them is probably the ancestor of cheeses like Gruyere and Comte and it came from the Alps and so they prized it enough to ship it all the way there, from there to Rome. They had smoked cheeses, which I used to hate and now I have to love because Romans like them. So, you know, the cheese was a premier food for them as well as a staple. And they had premier wines. It's a wine called Falernian, which was a really aged and I think very powerful wine. So you're a well off Roman, basically a metropolitan elite foodie. And after dinner you have really nice Cheese and wine. I kind of imagine them having them together. I think about port and Stilton when I think, as an accident of history, that port and Stilton both became really popular around the same time. Stilton, because we suddenly figured out how to build decent roads again after however many hundreds of years it had been since the Romans left and you could get cheese from places like Stilton. And it appeared on Bosch dining tables in London. And port was kind of invented because we were at war with the French and we couldn't get nice French wines. We had to get Portuguese wine, and it wasn't really nice. So people tried to sort of up it a bit by adding brandy and inadvertently created port. So I'm kind of sure that people had port and Stilton on their dinner table together. As to when people first really seriously started to talk about having them together and picking wines to go with cheeses, I've only really found stuff from the 30s and more from France than here.

[Isabel King]

You've mentioned multiple times kind of accidents of history when it comes to different cheese making. And that leads me onto a question from Emma McBeath, who asks who on earth discovered that mold in cheese was a good thing?

[Ned Palmer]

Yeah, that's a lovely question, Emma. Thank you. So there's a theory about when the mould ripened cheeses were developed or discovered. I think discovered is always the way for these new varieties. And this is that you have that simple form of cheese making I described, and it comes from the Fertile Crescent and it spreads up into Europe, it spreads up into France, and people are making simple soft cheeses, like something like Philadelphia, but more firm, so it's got a sort of shape to it. And in the cooler, moist climate of northern Europe, these cheeses start developing mold on them. And the frugal peasant woman who's making cheeses, along with doing a bunch of other stuff on the farm, looks at them, tries them, and thinks, that's quite nice, actually. There's funny stuff growing on it. How do I make that come about? So she kind of figures out there's a way to get the temperature and humidity just about right. And then you have to kind of pat them and rub them to develop the rind. And so that might have happened in the really early medieval period, maybe even earlier, actually. So, not that we could trace them, an individual, but I can imagine hungry, inquisitive and quite clever peasant women cheese makers kind of figuring out that this stuff's quite nice. It just happens by accident. There is the famous story of how blue cheese came about. Which is that there's a young peasant boy, he's got his lunch of bread and simple fresh cheese, and he's looking after his flock of sheep when he sees some bandits coming over the horizon. And so he does a runner. But he carefully hides his bread and cheese under a rock. So he comes back after a while and his bread has gone mouldy and the mould has got onto the cheese. And being a frugal, the starving peasant enjoys it and it's nice. And therefore blue cheese was born. Every culture that makes blue cheese tells this. But where they make Rockfort, they have these caves. You can only make rock for in these caves. And their story is that he opened his shop and his dairy outside the cave. So I feel like the ground zero for this myth is Roquefort in France.

[Isabel King]

So a lot of people really do love cheese. There is quite a famous historical anecdote that Samuel Pepys saved cheese from the Great Fire of London. Can you clear that up, whether that is true or not?

[Ned Palmer]

Well, he did. He wrote it in his diary. So, I mean, it's as true as anything gets. And it was a Parmesan. So Parmesan was really highly valued. I think it starts appearing in the 12th, 13th century. It starts being exported quite soon. Henry VIII got given a whole Parmesan for his Christmas present once. And so he made the guy the Bishop of London. So that's, you know, well, getting someone some nice cheese will do for you. So he'd be buried a whole poem. He never tells you about digging it up. And this makes me really sad and makes me want to do an experiment where we bury a Parmesan. And this is a difficult bit. And then we set fire to a city above it, because you'd need to get that temperature up to some number, a thousand degrees, to actually see what would happen. But I would really, really love to know what happened to his Parmesan.

[Isabel King]

So that is obviously an example of a cheese being quite impacted by an event. So I have a bit more of a general question for you, which is how has cheese making been affected by major historical events across the centuries?

[Ned Palmer]

I was talking to a couple of very lovely Belgian cheese makers and one of them just thought throughout the blue said, it's kind of embarrassing how much cheese is to do with war. War tends to speed up technology, I guess. And so you have the Romans making tons and tons and tons of pecorino style cheese. Interestingly, cling film, which is both a boon and a curse to cheese, was developed, I believe at first as a coating for American fighter planes and I think then as something to coat their jungle boots with. But it. It's really great for cheese. So when you cut open a cheddar, it looks lovely and it starts to dry immediately. And in the 1930s, people wrote about this, they had to keep cutting off the face of their cheddar because it doesn't look nice. Starts to dry and crack, and then you're losing a lot of weight of cheese. And so if you can cover it in cling film and do a beautiful wrapping job, then you're saving all that cheese. So you could argue that World War II was really great for wrapping artisanal cheese, and that was a good thing. World War II is a bad thing in many ways. One of the bad things was that the British government banned all the soft and blue cheese, so they banned Stilton. If there were a lot more small soft cheeses in Britain, then they got finally wiped out, I think, by the war. Wensleydale, which we should talk about a lot because it's such a cool story, was originally a soft, quite soft, creamy cheese. And they could go blue. And that was really highly polarised. So the clubs between the war, some of the gentlemen's clubs preferred Blue Wednesday, Delta Stilton, which came as a bit of a surprise to me, but the makers had to change the recipe in the war to make hard cheese, otherwise the government would have stopped them making it. So that had quite an effect on cheese making and I guess you could just say, in a more broad sense, the growth of sort of modern commerce. So Cheshire, that became hugely successful cheese in the 17th century, and they were quite small and they were disc shaped. And the London Cheese Monkeys, immensely powerful cartel, realized they were losing money from this cheese is drying out moisture loss. So they decided to make the farmers take that loss and just told them to keep it on the farm until they were ready to pick it up. So the farmers changed the shape and size of their cheese and made them much bigger. And they made them cylinders rather than wheels, so they would lose less moisture. And they had to use kind of modern technology, making cast iron cheese presses, more technical ways of making cheese in order to do that. And so the sort of pressure of early modern capitalism changed the size and shape of a cheese. It's intimately intertwined and, of course, microbiology. So people didn't know that there are bacterial cultures souring their milk and fermenting their sugars. They just knew that milk went like that. They kind of knew that if you saved some whey from the previous day and added it. That would improve that process. But they didn't know what was going on. Louis Pasteur and a German scientist called Robert Koch figured out microbiology. So great. That made it much clearer what the process was. It made it easier to make consistent cheese. So that's a few things you mentioned.

[Isabel King]

There about the big effects of World War II on cheese and you said about them banning soft cheeses. Were other cheeses rationed during the war for people at home?

[Ned Palmer]

Yeah, it was a grim time. I mean, I see this through a very narrow lens. Early in the war, I think it's 1940, the cheese ration was an ounce a week. That's 28 grams. That's nothing. It's one of the pieces of cheese that I would give you if you came to a cheese tasting. And they limited the number of cheeses that people could make. Basically you could only make large hard cheeses. And then whatever was available is what you're going to get. When you go to your local shop this week, it might be double Gloucester. In that week, it might be Jeddah. If you worked in forestry or if you're a canal boat driver, or if you're Jewish, a Muslim or vegetarian, you got a pound a week. Because for the guys who worked outside, they thought, well, they can't get to a canteen so they can have cheese sandwiches. And obviously if you have dietary restrictions and, you know, it seemed any fair, so I would immediately convert to Judaism and learn to drive a canal boat. And then out of £2 a week, I'd be okay. It became very limited. There's a story about something called government cheddar that the people who were there remember. But as far as I understand, they were still making quite a few different chooses. It wasn't all turned into one thing called government cheddar. A lot of people remember that, but I think they were, you know, quite some children, but it was quite low quality. And I think also they were getting shipments of cheese from America that was called Government Jeddah and that was coming into the homes and people would have, you know, thought, okay, that's all there is then. The other thing that makes me wonder is about the cheese black market, because I don't really think that all those people absolutely stopped and there might have been some secretive deals going on with clandestine Stilton.

[Isabel King]

You've mentioned Wensleydale a lot during this interview. And I think a lot of people, when they think of Wensleydale, will probably think of Wallace and Gromit. Is it true that they had an impact on the sales of Wensleydale and how it was made.

[Ned Palmer]

They absolutely did. And it's a lovely story. But first I want to quickly mention someone that anyone south of Watford Gap hasn't heard of, but up in the north, where I am at the moment, people really have this bit of heroes, a man called Kit Calvert. So Wednesdaydale was saved three times. The first time was during the Depression when milk prices tanked and it just economically didn't make sense to make cheese. Kit Calvert as a Dalesman is from around Wednesdaydale and he just didn't want to see that cultural treasure leaving. And he managed to batter this bunch of businessmen into buying the creamery, chipping in money and keeping it going. And it just a really heroic effort. And then the war came along and the government said, we're going to ban cheese making in Wensleydale and we're going to sell the milk to dairies in Lancashire, which, Wednesday being the cheese of Yorkshire, would have restarted the Rules of the Roses and would have been bad for everyone. And Kit again managed to save it, but he had to almost destroy the cheese in order to save it. He had to get the cheese makers to change over to making hard, quite acidic, long keeping cheese that fits with the government's requirements. A lot of the cheesemakers who were women making cheese on small farms just didn't want to make it like that. They hated it, having some young bloke come along from the Ministry and tell them their cheese wasn't good enough and they just stopped. But he managed to save cheese making in the Dales. And then in the 90s, Wednesdaydale wasn't selling all that well. It's quite mild. A lot of people like really strong cheese. But Nick Aardman decided to make Wednesdaydale Wallace and Gromit's favorite cheese. And he'd never even tasted it. It was only because he thought that it's a funny sounding word. So Wednesdaydale became their favorite cheese. The films took off and Wednesdaydale became, I think, at least for a while, our biggest export in dairy, at least to the rest of the world. And if you go visit Hawes, the town of Hawes with the famous Wensdale Creamery, there's statues of Wallace and Gromit everywhere because they're very grateful to the lovely two cartoon characters who saved their cheese.

[Isabel King]

So throughout this podcast, we've talked about how closely intertwined cheese is with life, its highs and lows, and the fact that it was both a luxury and a staple in people's diets throughout history. So to Kind of wrap up on this conversation. How would you say that cheese has shaped society over the years?

[Ned Palmer]

Unsurprisingly, I think a lot. And it's not just my idea. There is a wonderful book called Cheese and Culture written by a guy called Paul Kindstedt, where he absolutely intertwines the development of so called Western, so called civilization with cheese. Which is funny because it begins in what we refer to as the east, but it's there all the way through. So it's there at the beginning of farming, the bit when humans shift from being hunter gatherers, nomadic, to being a settled people. And that some archaeologists, I think would believe that the move towards settling down with animals, domesticating them, was because we realized we can make cheese and that's a good staple food. Beer is another strong contender for that. But cheese and beer are good together. It was heavily involved with the Sumerian religion in the formation of the first city or some of the first cities. So one of them was Uruk in what's now Iraq. It was so intertwined in their religion that every year the king reenacted a moment when he becomes a shepherd who makes cheese and he marries Inanna, the Queen of heaven, because she decided to marry the shepherd who would make her cheese and cream and milk. So they made a lot of cheese as part of these rituals. They had this huge sort of almost industrial cheese making outfit. There is also an argument that Inanna is a kind of ancestor of Aphrodite and then of Mary, the mother of God. So you could argue that that is absolutely intertwined. There's a bit in the Bible where conception is likened to the early stages of cheese making. And there's lots of bits and bobs of cheese that turn up in the Bible. So it's really been part of that developing culture. There was a flourishing cheese trade in the Mediterranean and we know it's quite fancy stuff because shipping was quite expensive. So you find shipping bills where the ship's full of cheese. Okay, that's, you know, it's quite a high value product. And it fueled the Roman army and their enormous expansion and all of that, you know, legacy that is still with us. So it's absolutely central. Historians are mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. It doesn't get as much of a showing and I think it might in certain periods have had at least a considerable part of our economy. It's a beautiful thing. You know, I talked about it in very kind of pragmatic ways. It's delicious and it's an expression of our place and our culture and our history.

[Isabel King]

That was the Cheesemonger Ned Palmer. Ned is the author of A Cheesemonger's History of the British Isles, which was published in 2019. He was speaking to Isabel King. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.