Urine used to make cheese? UL?

[kittykat]

hi there. I heard a rumour that back in the early days, blue cheese was made by using urine in their process. Is this true and if so why was it so?

[Squink]

That’s a wonderful question kittykat!

A quick search doesn’t turn up anything on Blue cheese specifically, but apparently cheesemakers do (or did) sometimes use urine:

Today’s health and hygene fanatics might quail at a graphic account of ewe-milking in 1855, where “whatever drops from her falls into the milking pail…and the peculiar pungency of the cheese is partly owing to salts in the urine”.

Cheesemaking in Scotland

Liquid Gold starts with a humorous look at many ways urine has been used in the past: from cheesemaking in Germany to curing tobacco leaves in young women’s urine to make Cuban cigars, to pickling acorns in urine (“Chinook olives”) by native Americans.

LIQUID GOLD: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants