Food History

Today you get a picture of my lunch. Kate and I shared a cheese from Milawa. It was a fine goat’s cheese, called Affine (does it count as a pun if you say similar things in two different languages?).

This is one of the cheeses I bought when Sharyn whisked me away from my retreat on Monday afternoon. We went to the Milawa Cheese Factory>, where I tasted over twenty cheeses. Not a bad one among them and the best were as good as anything I’ve tasted anywhere.

The factory isn’t that old (established 1988 according to the website) but they do use traditional methods, and it definitely shows. Please note that I said ‘traditional,’ not ‘old.’ Some of their cheeses are made using older methods (their gorgeous goat curd and their cheddar style for instance) but they have a distinct love of cheeses that use mould (styles like Brie and Stilton), which is more modern.

This is where things can get confusing. To an historian, the eighteenth century is modern. The seventeenth century is Early Modern. And only a few of the cheeses I tasted were made by methods which could be traced back earlier with any certainty. So what a cheesemaker will call ancient, an historian will probably call Early Modern or even modern. It’s really the difference between human memory and the written record – the operate using different time structures.

How we define a cheese doesn’t make a scrap of difference to the flavour. How we handle a cheese does. It was really illuminating tasting the same cheeses I have had elsewhere, well-handled. Milawa cheeses have always been good when I’ve tasted them elsewhere, but each one was considerably better when I tasted it at the source.

This has always been the case. In fact, before modern refrigeration, it was even more the case. What we buy now in jars, the lovely soft curd cheese that is one of my all-time favourites, was probably served in baskets (called jonquettes) in the Middle Ages. They would have been at their best when the whey had just drained off, I suspect. This was the cheese I made as a child. And this is where I admit the impossible. I have now met two Australian curd cheeses that make my childhood cheese taste puerile. Both of them are from goat’s milk and both come from Victoria. One of them I tasted on Monday. it is - alas - not the cheese Kate photographed for us. It’s a cheese that’s vulnerable to handling, and I was going home the next day. The memory of it is still on my palate, however.

I love it when simple flavours and pure tastes bring my history to life.