Cheese stuffed dates wrapped in bacon
On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Cheeses in art: Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels, Clara Peeters, c. Cheese is a cheese stuffed dates wrapped in bacon product produced in wide ranges of flavors, textures, and forms by coagulation of the milk protein casein.
Over a thousand types of cheese exist and are produced in various countries. For a few cheeses, the milk is curdled by adding acids such as vinegar or lemon juice. Cheese is valued for its portability, long shelf life, and high content of fat, protein, calcium, and phosphorus. Cheese is more compact and has a longer shelf life than milk, although how long a cheese will keep depends on the type of cheese. The word cheese itself is occasionally employed in a sense that means “molded” or “formed”.
Head cheese uses the word in this sense. Cheese is an ancient food whose origins predate recorded history. There is no conclusive evidence indicating where cheesemaking originated, whether in Europe, Central Asia or the Middle East. Earliest proposed dates for the origin of cheesemaking range from around 8000 BCE, when sheep were first domesticated. The earliest evidence of cheesemaking in the archaeological record dates back to 5500 BCE and is found in what is now Kuyavia, Poland, where strainers coated with milk-fat molecules have been found. Cheesemaking may have begun independently of this by the pressing and salting of curdled milk to preserve it.
Observation that the effect of making cheese in an animal stomach gave more solid and better-textured curds may have led to the deliberate addition of rennet. The earliest cheeses were likely quite sour and salty, similar in texture to rustic cottage cheese or feta, a crumbly, flavorful Greek cheese. Cheese produced in Europe, where climates are cooler than the Middle East, required less salt for preservation. Ancient Greek mythology credited Aristaeus with the discovery of cheese. We soon reached his cave, but he was out shepherding, so we went inside and took stock of all that we could see. When he had so done he sat down and milked his ewes and goats, all in due course, and then let each of them have her own young.
He curdled half the milk and set it aside in wicker strainers. According to Pliny the Elder, it had become a sophisticated enterprise by the time the Roman Empire came into being. As Romanized populations encountered unfamiliar newly settled neighbors, bringing their own cheese-making traditions, their own flocks and their own unrelated words for cheese, cheeses in Europe diversified further, with various locales developing their own distinctive traditions and products. France and Italy have perhaps 400 each. A French proverb holds there is a different French cheese for every day of the year, and Charles de Gaulle once asked “how can you govern a country in which there are 246 kinds of cheese?
In 1546, The Proverbs of John Heywood claimed “the moon is made of a green cheese. Greene may refer here not to the color, as many now think, but to being new or unaged. Until its modern spread along with European culture, cheese was nearly unheard of in east Asian cultures and in the pre-Columbian Americas and had only limited use in sub-Mediterranean Africa, mainly being widespread and popular only in Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and areas influenced by those cultures. The first factory for the industrial production of cheese opened in Switzerland in 1815, but large-scale production first found real success in the United States. The 1860s saw the beginnings of mass-produced rennet, and by the turn of the century scientists were producing pure microbial cultures. Factory-made cheese overtook traditional cheesemaking in the World War II era, and factories have been the source of most cheese in America and Europe ever since.
By 2012, cheese was one of the most shoplifted items from supermarkets worldwide. In 2014, world production of cheese from whole cow milk was 18. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.
