How Sharp Is Your History of Cheese Knowledge?

Casu marzu, a cheese from Sardinia, is intentionally infected with maggots. The cheese originated when impoverished people in the region were forced to eat rotten cheese. It evolved into a delicacy, and people began cutting holes into the cheese to allow flies to lay eggs in it.

Before 1815, cheese was generally made in private homes and in small batches by farmers. But that year, the first cheese factory opened, in Switzerland, beginning the era of mass-produced cheese. In 1874, scientists discovered how to mass-produce rennet, an enzyme used to curdle milk, enabling the industrial production of cheese.

Around 1865, during the Uruguayan War, Brazil and Uruguay engaged in a battle at sea, and the Uruguayan troops ran out of ammunition for their cannons. Instead of decommissioning the weapons, the commander, Captain Jonas Coe, stuffed the cannons with particularly hard Dutch cheese. One shot of cheese even broke the mast of a Brazilian ship.

French soldiers during World War I received a portion of Camembert and a small bottle of red wine as part of their daily rations. The soft, creamy cheese comes from the region of the same name in Normandy, and became popular after the French government began producing it for war rations. The cheese has since become a symbol of French culinary culture.

In 1836, President Andrew Jackson received a 1,400-pound block of cheese as a gift from dairy farmers in New York. The behemoth cheese block made its way to the White House, where Jackson displayed it for a year. Before he left office, he opened the White House doors for anyone to come in and take some cheese. A first-hand account recalls people hacking away at it until "the carpet was slippery with cheese." Only a small piece was saved for the President.

Some account holders at the Credito Emiliano bank in Reggio Emilia, Italy, can get a loan using just cheese as collateral. The town is in Emilia-Romagna, a region that is the only producer of true Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. The bank gives low-interest loans to cheesemakers. Each wheel of collateral cheese can be worth thousands of dollars.

A normal wheel of cheddar weighs about 60 to 75 pounds. But what kind of royal wedding gift would that be? In 1840, Queen Victoria of England was given a 1,000-pound wheel of cheddar cheese in honor of her marriage to Prince Albert. The elaborate gift was reportedly made from the milk of 750 cows.

In 48 BCE, soldiers of the Roman Empire were given a daily food ration that included 27 grams of cheese. That cheese was made from sheep’s milk, which was the most popular type of cheese in ancient Rome. It was even the treat of choice for the empire’s rulers, who typically had sheep’s milk cheese at banquets and dinners.

Cheddar cheese was named after the village of Cheddar in southwestern England in the 12th century. There is a gorge near town called Cheddar Gorge, with caves that are ideal for aging cheese. Local dairy farmers used excess milk to create this new type of cheese. Unlike many other place-based foods, however, cheddar cheese doesn’t have to exclusively come from that region.

In the 19th century, Brie de Meaux, a soft, white cheese named after the town of Meaux in the French region of Brie, was nicknamed "le roi des fromages," or the “king of cheeses,” by the Prince of Talleyrand, a French statesman and diplomat. In a moment of French pride at the 1814 Congress of Vienna, Talleyrand declared Brie “the king of cheeses and cheese of kings,” as the creamy snack was known to have been enjoyed by such famed rulers as Charlemagne and Louis the XVI.