Seriously. Are people making new “kinds” of cheese? I don’t mean cheese like Jack with peppers and spices added to make “Monteray” Jack. I mean, really, cheeses that aren’t Brie, Cheddar, Swiss; anything that I can get at a Shopright. I mean any cheese made from milk other than a cow or a goat. I understand that if an animal’s milk has lactose and calcium we could potentially curdle it to make cheese, so where’s my rat cheese, or dog cheese, or hell! Where’s my gorilla cheese dammit?!!
One of the issues, El is getting ahold of enough milk to make the cheese. Suppose I thought cat’s milk would make a good cheese. I’d have to have a whole herd of lactating cats just to try it out. Can you imagine what it’d be like to try to produce it in commercial quantities?
As for gorilla milk – you’re on your own.
“Cheddar?”
“We don’t get much call for that around here, Sir.”
Second, my guess is that the milk of those animals would not be appropriate for a few reasons:
–To make good cheese, the milk has to have a certain fat content. I believe that human milk is much lower in fat than cow/sheep/goat milk, so I would wager that dog or gorilla milk would also be lower.
–Making cheese takes a tremendous amount of milk. The animals used have been bred for centuries to produce much more milk than they need to feed their own young. Getting enough milk from dogs or whatever would make the cost of the cheese prohibitive.
–The flavor of milk is affected by the diet of the animals. Vegetarian gorillas might produce milk that is okay, but milk from carnivores would probably not taste all that great. We don’t eat meat from many carnivores either, except for fish.
What would be more likely would be a cow’s milk cheese made with different molds, yeasts, etc. This hasn’t happened, I suspect, because we no longer eat “accidental” cheese and therefore amateur flavoring agents do not get a chance to make the big time.
If men had wings,
and bore black feathers,
few of them would be clever enough to be crows.
I wouldn’t expend too much energy seeking out obscure mamals and sqeezing theri tits: better to genetically produce new strans of bacteria to digest and excrete the substance we know as cheese, or, as James Joyce called it “the corpse of milk.” BTW; when I once worked on a dairy farm, I witnessed a cow give birth. Right afterward she needed to be milked seperately from the herd, because she gave off a congealant, yellowish milk rich in cologen, which the farmer simply poured into the shit trench in the barn. I exclaimed “don’t dump that! Sell it to the yuppies!”
Uhh actually, Monterey (not Monteray) Jack is normally made without adding peppers and spices (I actually consider adding anything like that to cheese a heresy). It was invented around the Monterey Region in the 1800’s (some say it’s actually a variant of one of the Mexican cheeses). I’ve actually seen the place where the cheese was supposedly supposed to have been first made ;).
I myself am an incorrigible conlang slut. I love oral lex.
Slithy, I think you mean colostrum. The milk is usually held out for the first 2 or 3 milkings. The newborn calf gets this milk and usually the excess is dumped. There are some producers that specialize in producing this as a health supplement.
GNC and other “health and fitness” stores do sell colostrum. Here is what Robert Cohen has to say about it. (Makes sense to me) http://www.notmilk.com/deb/053099.html
I had considered the problem of a lack of available quantities of milk from, lets say, a rat or a dog. This, I think, could work to our advantage by creating a market for “micro-cheeseries.” Think about it. It worked in the early 90’s with beer; why can’t it work with cheese?
We could even go so far as to say that it’s “healthier” than regular cheese by falsifying our research reports (hey, they do it often enough at MIT, why can’t we?).
Plus, we could always genetically engineer the animals so as to produce the most amount of milk for their body size. Use your imaginations, people!
Okay, I’ll play along. Microbreweries were successful (partly) because their beer tastes better than mass produced stuff and it also has the cachet of being a local product. I doubt even the most lovingly produced cat cheese would amount to much. Besides there are already “micro-cheeseries” in the US producing plenty of gourmet stuff to keep the foodies busy.
I would like to see your ideas for marketing mutant rat cheese to people with too much disposable income, though.
Some cheeses have vanished forever. For many years, you could buy Leiderkrantz. It doesn’t exist any more, and it’s impossible to determine exactly what bacteria created it.
“What we have here is failure to communicate.” – Strother Martin, anticipating the Internet.
Alright, I did a little wandering and came across http://www.cheese.com
I was shocked to find over 600 different kinds of cheeses in their database. Not only that, but these cheeses came from not only cows and goats, but from yaks, buffalo, horses, and (get this) camels! Plus, they used combinations of milk; ewe plus horse, ewe plus camel, etc. It was very informative. They even had directions on how to make cheese. This place is a goldmine! Granted, there has yet to be a signature rat cheese (like Brie de Meaux), but armed with the knowledge in this site, there may be a Brie de Newark.