How was cheese making accomplished in the middle ages? How many pounds of cheese could one family produce a day, a week, a month? Surely someone among the enlightened doper masses can help me out on this one.
This question arises from a spirited debate I am having at work. A friend argues that most modern day cheese could not be made in the dark ages. He also argues that cheese was more of a luxury than a necessity, and that only relatively small amounts were created at a time. Sounds like bunk to me, but I don’t know how I would go about disproving his hypothesis.
The Romans had mad cheesemaking skillz and apparently exported it by AD 300 – the Emperor Diocletian apparently had proclamations regarding the prices of exported cheese.
I’m confused as to what part of the cheesemaking process your friend thinks is so dependent on modern industry. I might argue that it is milk, not cheese, that is a modern luxury.
>> He also argues that cheese was more of a luxury than a necessity
More like the other way around. Milk did not keep for long so most of it was used for cheese and/or butter. Drinking milk was more unsual. eating cheese was not unsual at all as you can find out by reading stories of the time.
Laura Ingalls Wilder gives a fairly detailed description of the cheese-making process in Little House in the Big Woods. (I would assume that not much changed between the Middle Ages and the mid-nineteenth century; at least, nothing she describes seems particularly technologically sophisticated.)