LL-L 'Delectables' 2006.07.17 (09) [E/LS]

Mon Jul 17 23:16:43 UTC 2006

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L O W L A N D S - L * 17 July 2006 * Volume 09
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From: 'Thomas Byro' <greenherring at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L 'Delectables' 2006.07.16 (03) [E/LS]

Ron, et all:

I think that you have to look into the economics of cheesemaking. The
area I grew up in was poor. The typical farm had one milk cow, a few
pigs and chickens. The cows were not very productive. I believe that
the typical cow produced around 3 1/2 liters of milk per day. We
heard that in that far-off land of fable, Amerika, there were cows
that produced as much as 35 liters a day but we flat-out refused to
believe such tall tales. So what do you do with the milk when you do
not have refrigeration and transportation was poor? You skim off the
cream and save it for a few days. It keeps well and the resultant
butter actually improves as a result of fermentation of the cream.
The milk does not keep so well and you consume it in things like milk
soup. It takes a lot more milk than 3 liters to make cheesemaking a
practical proposition. you could hitch your horses to your wagon and
deliver several liters of milk to the local dairy every day but the
effort hardly seems worthwhile in terms of economic reward. Places
like Denmark and the Netherlands had much better water-borne
transportation, making it feasible to gather milk from many farms and
developing a centralized cheesemaking industry. It was not that they
were more clever than we were, it was that their circumstances were
more favorable to the development of wonderful smelly cheeses.

Tom Byro

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From: 'Stellingwerfs Eigen' <info at stellingwerfs-eigen.nl>
Subject: LL-L 'Delectables'

Andrys wrote:
> We have Frisian clove cheese
> I don't know if there are any truly "indigenous" cheeses in Fryslan
though.

Ja, naost zokke 'Friese kruudnaegelkeze' hewwe de 'Fryske tsiis'. Bi'j disse
keze wodt de wrongel veur dat et in de vorm gaot eerst zoolten. Edammer en
Gooldse keze wodden naotied (nao et passen) in een pekelbad zoolten. Leidse
keze bi'jglieks wodt op (grof) zoolt daelelegd en alle daegen keerd. 'Friese
keze' is gewone grÃ¶skeze. GrÃ¶skeze komt van koenen die niks aanders as grÃ¶s
had hebben, gien krachtvoer. Jonge Friese keze smaekt wel wat naor
'HÃ¼tenkÃ¤se'. Van de laeste tied is bi'jglieks de 'Kollummer keze'.
Mit een vrundelike groet uut Stellingwarf,
Piet Bult

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From: Theo Homan <theohoman at yahoo.com>
Subject: LL-L 'Delectables' 2006.07.16 (05) [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Delectables
>
> Gabriele is right. The absence of traces of earlier
> non-Dutch cheese-making
> industry in Northern Germany is quite conspicuous
> and makes you wonder. There
> are all kinds of breads, cakes, deserts, preserved
> meats and fish, but no cheese.
> In local museums you find butter-making equipment
> but no cheese-making equipment.
>
> As I said earlier, there appears to have been a sort
> of Dutch cheese monopoly,

...clip...

Hello,

The 'golden age' of Holland has been paid by Germany
and their genuine love for cheese.

People always assumed that the [relatively] richness
of Holland in the time of Rembrandt a.s.o. was due to
seafare and trading, esp. to the colonies a.s.o.

But some historians always were in doubt about this.
[The slave-trading e.g. did not bring wealth, as the
profits of this trading were between 2 and 3 %].

A historian-economist [I don't remember the name now,
but someone mmust be able to come up with name and
title] published his results ab. 5 years ago. And the
richness of Holland in those times was due to the
export of cheese, especially to Germany.
Thanks, Germany, thank you again.

secundo: always was said that the people here -let's
say 1500 years ago- learned the making of cheese from
the Romans as the dutch word 'kaas' is a loan from
Latin [caseus].

I never believed a word of it.
But I guess that in those times the aboriginal cheese
was a hard kind of stuff, and the Romans wanted a
softer kind. So we started making this softer kind and
we called this new brand caseus > kaas.
I think that the older word for 'cheese' must have
been related to the present-day 'ost' in scandinavian.

saying cheese,
vr.gr.
Theo Homan

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Delectables

Thanks for digging farther, folks, especially Theo who delivered a couple of
important pieces of the puzzle.

First of all an apology to Wales.  I should have included that country when I
asked about Norman influences in Britain, since some great cheeses are made in Wales.

Andrys' mention of Frisian clove cheese reminds me of caraway cheese (LS
_KÃ¼mmelkees'_, G _KÃ¼mmelkÃ¤se_) some eat in Germany, and there's _HarzerkÃ¤se_ with
caraway.  Is that a North German or Slavonic thing (given North German and West
Slavonic use of caraway)?

Tom:

> Places
> like Denmark and the Netherlands had much better water-borne
> transportation, making it feasible to gather milk from many farms and
> developing a centralized cheesemaking industry.

This seems like an excellent point.

Theo:

> But I guess that in those times the aboriginal cheese
> was a hard kind of stuff, and the Romans wanted a
> softer kind. 

Yes, I imagine it to have been hard, dried chunks of curd as they are still eaten
in Central Asia, especially among nomadic people.  I ate those as a guest in
Kazakh and Mongolian yurts along with tea, and I must say that they weren't much
to write home about, most importantly perhaps because they seemed to lack salt
(which used to be a very expensive commodity).

> So we started making this softer kind and
> we called this new brand caseus > kaas.
> I think that the older word for 'cheese' must have
> been related to the present-day 'ost' in scandinavian.

Yes, I suspect that also.  In Old Norse it is _ostr_, thus the root being /ost-/.
 If it had survived in West Germanic I would have expected it to be *_just_,
*_joest_, *_youst_ and the like.  It is supposed to have been derived from the
Indo-European root *_iÌ¯eu-_ denoting 'to stir', 'to mix', the extension with _-s_
deriving a word for 'broth' (e.g., Sanskrit à¤¯à¥‚à¤ƒ _yÅ«hÌ£_, Latin _iÅ«s_, Sorbian
_jucha_, Czech _jÃcha_ 'broth'; cf. German _Jauche_ 'liquid muck').  So *_just_
means something like *"that which results from broth."  The Latin word _caseus_,
which has been known since before the 5th century, has by some been assumed to be
derived from *_cas-iÅ«s_.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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