A history of cheese: An ingredient that was used in recipes in ‘the oldest cookbook in the world’

Cheese is more than a simple food; it is also a culinary ingredient, and has been so at least since its appearance in “the oldest cookbook in the world”, the Akkadian cuneiform tablet (now at Yale University), whose recipe for stewed kid incorporates cheese as a flavouring. In ancient Greek cuisine, likewise, cheese was used in savoury dishes – as shown by an early Athenian comedy in which a fictional nouvelle cook of about 300 BC announces, with a nod to current culinary gurus, that cheese has become an old-fashioned flavouring:

“These men have wiped out the old hackneyed seasonings from the books, and made the pestle and mortar disappear from our midst; I mean cumin, vinegar, silphium, cheese, coriander, the seasonings that Kronos used.” A little earlier Archestratos, the gastronomic poet of Greek Sicily, while dismissing cheese as an ingredient with delicate fish, recommended it for coarse-fleshed fish:

“When Orion is setting in the sky and the mother of the grape-clusters sheds her ringlets, then take a baked sarg well sprinkled with cheese, good-sized, hot, slashed with sour vinegar because it is naturally coarse. Remember this, and treat everything in the nature of tough fish similarly.” When not bowing to culinary fashion, the...

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