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Roquefort Cheese
This cheese is peculiar from the fact that it is made of ewe's milk, though some manufacturers are now using the milk of the cow. Naturally therefore it possesses a peculiar pungency and flavor, though in other particulars it somewhat resembles other veined cheeses. Upon the continent Roquefort takes precedence of many other makes, whether foreign or native; but in this country it is not so generally liked. It should not be cut until it is well advanced in the process of decay, and then its excellence can not be gainsayed. The mould is procured by the introduction of mouldy breadcrumbs, and by pricking to admit the air.
Sage or Green Cheese This is a variety of cream cheese made by adding sage leaves and greening to the milk. The following is a very good recipe: Pound the tops of fresh young sage leaves with an equal quantity of spinach leaves, and squeeze out the juice. Add this to the extract of rennet, and stir into the milk a sufficient quantity to suit the taste. When the curd comes, break, salt it, fill the vat high with it, press for a few hours, and then turn the cheese every day.
The Roquefort paragraph is descriptive, but the sage cheese that follows is a working recipe — and it is a raw-milk pressed cheese with no quantities, no temperatures and no aging conditions given. Use a current cheesemaking recipe instead; the notes below explain the vocabulary and the specific gaps.
- Why this cannot be followedThe milk is never heated, the salt is unmeasured, and the press time is "a few hours" with no weight specified. A pressed cheese made from raw milk and held at unstated temperature for an unstated number of days is exactly the condition in which Listeria monocytogenes, E. coli O157:H7 and Salmonella establish themselves; the acidity and moisture controls that make aged raw-milk cheese safe are all absent here.
- "Well advanced in the process of decay"Oscar appears to mean a Roquefort ripened well past young; the text does not say what stage. In a period cheese room that was a judgment call made daily; it is not a standard anyone would write down now, and it is not the same thing as safe ripening.
- Extract of rennetA commercially prepared rennet extract, dosed by eye. Modern rennet, animal or microbial, is standardised in strength and dosed by measure per gallon, so a nineteenth-century "sufficient quantity" tells you nothing usable.
- The vatHere a hooped cheese mould lined with cloth, not a bulk milk vat. "Fill the vat high" acknowledges that the curd loses volume under pressure.
- GreeningA green colouring — usually spinach juice, sometimes a commercial vegetable green — added because the sage alone gives flavour but little colour. The marbled effect on old sage cheeses came from holding back part of the curd uncoloured.
- Ewe's milk and the cowTrue Roquefort is still sheep's milk by law of appellation, so the cow's-milk versions Oscar notes are no longer sold under the name. What reaches American shelves as Roquefort is the sheep's-milk original; cow's-milk blues include Bleu d'Auvergne, Gorgonzola and Stilton.
- Mouldy breadcrumbsThe traditional method of introducing Penicillium roqueforti: rye loaves were deliberately spoiled, dried and powdered into the curd. Commercial dairies now use pure freeze-dried cultures, which is why blue cheese is consistent in a way it was not in 1896.
Roquefort is generally traced to the limestone caves of Combalou at Roquefort-sur-Soulzon in the Rouergue, where cool draughts through natural fissures gave conditions the blue mould favoured; French kings granted the villagers protective privileges over the name long before appellation law existed, and it was one of the first cheeses to receive an appellation d'origine in the twentieth century. Oscar's note that Americans did not much care for it is honest reporting of the 1890s market ot, one may guess, a household taste. Sage cheese belongs to an older and quite separate English tradition, carried into New England dairies, where herbs were worked into curd both for flavour and as a mark of the season: sage cheese was a spring and autumn cheese. That both appear on one page may say something about how this book was assembled, though the manner of its compilation is not certain.