Monthly Archives: December 2011

I grew up on a dairy and milked cows growing up.  Unfortunately, I was also allergic to milk.  Even now the smell, taste and even look of milk disgusts me.  I never have butter on my bread and I was sixteen before I had my first piece of cheese.  Despite that, the two greatest mysteries to me is where butter and cheese originated.  This might sound silly at first, but who came up with the idea to take cream, shake it or churn it for 20 to 30 minutes, and add salt?  The thing is, they did this 10,000 years ago, and the first written reference to butter is on a 4,500 year old sandstone tablet.  Hunter-gatherers unable to write were making butter.  Here are some more facts about butter from the Dairy Goodness site:

Butter’s origins go back about 10,000 years to the time when our ancestors first began domesticating animals. Today, butter in its many flavourful forms is the world’s most popular fat. As a versatile spread, a delicious enhancer for so many foods, and the essential ingredient for baking, butter’s simple goodness has no equal…

• The first reference to butter in our written history was found on a 4,500-year-old limestone tablet illustrating how butter was made.
• It is generally believed the word butter originates from the bou-tyron, Greek for “cow cheese”, however it may have come from the language of cattle-herding Scythians.
• Butter was used as food by ancient tribes of Asiatic India, as well as for burning in primitive lamps and smeared on skin to protect from the cold.
• In early times, unlike today, butter was so costly it was used in religious ceremonies. It still is today in India and Tibet.
• In ancient Rome, butter was valued cosmetically. Not only was it used as a cream to make skin smooth, but Greeks and Romans massaged it into their hair to make it shine.
• Much esteemed for its perceived healing properties, butter was also used in poultices to fight skin infections and burns. The ancient Egyptians even valued it as a cure for eye problems.
• During the T’ang Dynasty in China, clarified butter represented the ultimate development of the Buddha spirit.
• The ancient Irish, Scots, Norsemen and Finns loved and valued butter so much they were buried with barrels of it.
• Christian missionaries travelling in central Siberia in 1253 mentioned a traditional fermented drink, kumyss, which was served with generous lumps of butter floating in it.
• In Northern Europe, in centuries past, butter was credited with helping to prevent kidney and bladder stones as well as eye maladies. (This was probably thanks to butter’s vitamin A content.)
• Sailors in Elizabethan times were guaranteed 1/4 lb of butter a day in their rations, and it was an old English custom to present newlyweds with a pot of this creamy delight as a wish for fertility and prosperity.

Now for cheese, which is even harder to understand.  To make cheese, you take milk and add rennet.  For those that don’t know what rennet is, it is a stomach enzyme in mammals, usually taken from cows.  So, once again, who said for the first time, “Let’s take a bunch of milk and put it a big container.  Then, let’s take stomach juices from the inside of a cow and stick that in there.  When it starts to clump up, let’s take the clumps and press them together.  Then let those clumps sit there until they mold.  Then let’s eat it!”  I just don’t understand how that happened.  Again, cheese predates recorded history.  No one knows who made it first, but it started getting made all over the place.  Here is a brief origin from Wikipedia:

Cheese is an ancient food whose origins predate recorded history. There is no conclusive evidence indicating where cheesemaking originated, either in Europe, Central Asia or the Middle East, but the practice had spread within Europe prior to Roman times and, according to Pliny the Elder, had become a sophisticated enterprise by the time the Roman Empire came into being.^[3]

Proposed dates for the origin of cheesemaking range from around 8000 BCE (when sheep were first domesticated) to around 3000 BCE. The first cheese may have been made by people in the Middle East or by nomadic Turkic tribes in Central Asia. Since animal skins and inflated internal organs have, since ancient times, provided storage vessels for a range of foodstuffs, it is probable that the process of cheese making was discovered accidentally by storing milk in a container made from the stomach of an animal, resulting in the milk being turned to curd and whey by the rennet from the stomach. There is a legend with variations about the discovery of cheese by an Arab trader who used this method of storing milk.^[4][5]

Cheesemaking may have begun independently of this by the pressing and salting of curdled milk to preserve it. Observation that the effect of making milk in an animal stomach gave more solid and better-textured curds, may have led to the deliberate addition of rennet.

The earliest archeological evidence of cheesemaking has been found in Egyptian tomb murals, dating to about 2000 BCE.^[6] The earliest cheeses were likely to have been 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. With less salt and acidity, the cheese became a suitable environment for useful microbes and molds, giving aged cheeses their respective flavors.

So, now that you know more, I ask you – where did butter and cheese come from?  Other inventions are easy to trace, but butter and cheese seem to have always been with us.  Alcohol is also a long standing mystery.  That, I theorize was discovered when someone ate old grape juice or rotting grain and got buzzed.  Once someone gets a buzz, they figure out why, be it mushrooms, hemp, or licking a frog.  But butter and cheese?  The world may never know.  I personally believe it may be either divine inspiration and guidance, or alien visitation.