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Parmesan Cheese, British
Put a piece of rennet into some fresh milk, about 76 deg. in temperature. Let it stand an hour or two, then put it over a gentle fire, and let it heat very gradually until the curd separates. Throw in half a cupful of cold water to assist the separation, lift out the curd, drain the liquid entirely from it, and press in the usual way. Rub it every day for twenty-one days with a little salt, and be careful that it dries gradually.
This is a whole cheese-making process compressed into six sentences, and what it leaves out is precisely what makes cheese safe. It is worth reading as a record of how a farm dairy worked; it is not a set of instructions that can be followed today.
- No milk treatment is specifiedThe milk is set at 76F, well below any pasteurising temperature, and it is never brought higher than the point at which the curd breaks. Raw milk can carry Listeria, Salmonella, shigatoxigenic E. coli and Campylobacter, none of which are killed anywhere in this process.
- Twenty-one days is short for a raw-milk cheeseLong ripening of hard raw-milk cheese works because low moisture, salt and falling pH progressively suppress pathogens over months. Three weeks of surface salting is not that; regulators in the US and elsewhere use sixty days as a minimum for raw-milk cheese, and even that is contested for soft, high-moisture styles.
- No quantities anywhereThere is no volume of milk, no dose of rennet, no weight of salt, and no acidity check. Salt concentration in the paste is one of the main controls on what grows in a ripening cheese, and "a little salt" rubbed on the outside gives no way to know what you have.
- Rennet is not what it wasThe rennet here is presumably a piece of prepared calf's stomach of unknown strength, a variable the recipe does not address. Modern rennet, animal or microbial, is standardised and dosed by drops per litre, which is one reason contemporary recipes can state timings with any confidence.
- "Press in the usual way" is doing enormous workPressing pressure and duration determine the final moisture, which in turn determines what the cheese will do over three weeks. The phrase assumes a reader who already has a press and knows the routine.
- Ripening conditions are unstated"Be careful that it dries gradually" is the whole of the storage instruction. A ripening room needs a controlled temperature in the low fifties Fahrenheit and high humidity; a warm kitchen gives you fast surface moulds and a soft, wet interior.
- If you want to make hard cheeseUse a current recipe from a dairy or cheesemaking source that gives milk treatment, rennet dose, target pH, salt percentage and ripening conditions as numbers.
The title is frank: this is British Parmesan, a domestic imitation of Parmigiano-Reggiano rather than the thing itself, and the real article was already a famous imported luxury in Victorian Britain, grated over macaroni and soups and sold by Italian warehousemen at prices that invited substitution. Genuine Parmigiano is made from partly skimmed cow's milk, the curd cooked to around 55C, moulded in large wheels and brined and aged for a year or more under rules that long predate modern legal protection; a three-week salt rub in an English dairy produces something else entirely. Recipes of this kind belong to a nineteenth-century genre of home approximations of continental foods, alongside imitation Gruyere and mock turtle soup, and they tell you less about Italy than about the state of the British larder, where a farmhouse still made its own cheese and the imported wheel was a treat to be economised on. The instructions read as a reminder rather than a lesson, addressed to someone who already knew what a curd looked like when it broke and what "the usual way" of pressing meant in her own dairy.