Hodor wrote:
Why do we eat cows' teat squirtings in solid form? Cheese is amazing, but it's often covered in mould, smells like sweaty feet, and looks like a gigantic deposit of snot.
humans are weird
discuss
Why is it weird, that hungry people were interested to ressource their milk in a form, that allowed them to eat it, when they dont have other fresh ressources? In earlier days you simply had cows and goats and sheeps and if they had young ones, they produced every day a certain amount of milk. If you couldnt use anything, you would have been forced to throw it away, because of it getting bad. So its pretty unweird, that humans were interested in finding a way to keep that milk usable for months.
The harsher winter you haves, the more it was important for people to store food or animals that were edible for months and they found different ways to do so by drying, boil down, pickling in vinegar or oil, fermenting..., depending on the food. You didnt have green houses around that time, so beside special vegetables as cabbage you only had stored food and what your animals produced themselves, so it was important to keep that.
Additional around here it was custom to use the hayfields around the yards in spring and autumn for the animals, when the weather still was bad. In summer, when it got hotter and even the mountain meadows were green, the animals were sent there with some human company, while the now unused hayfields around the farms were used to store hay for the winter. But because of the animals being on the mountains, all the milk they would have been produced around that time, would have been wasted, because 2 cow "shepherds" never can drink the milk that 50 cows produce on a day. So it was traditional that the "sheperds" also were responsible for gathering the milk and making cheese from it meanwhile and brought the cheese back to the farms, when the "shepherds" returned in autumn with the animals. The known "Emmentaler" is as example a typical cheese that was created while herding the animals on the mountain meadows, and its no coincidence that the mountain paradise switzerland had become famous for its many forms of cheese. (That they got famous too with chocolate is quiet similar. So because of them having short summers they have lots of stockbreeding, which means much milk and so they simply thought themselves, what else beside cheese they could do with the milk, that would give the milk a high durability so you could sell it. So when some german invented milk chocolate, the Switzers were highly interested in it and enhanced it. )
24 Jun 2013, 6:12 am
