When you talk with aficionados, it usually doesn’t take long for the conversation to veer away from curds, whey, and mold, and toward matters of life and death.
What happens when a storied recipe is lost? What happens when a revered method of cooking vanishes into the proverbial mists of history? You might not think of extinction as something that can be applied to things other than animals, but it turns out that certain varieties of cheese are something else that can be (accurately) referred to as risking extinction. A new article by Ruby Tandoh at The New Yorker explores a variety of cheeses that have made a huge impact on those who tasted them — and then, one day, ceased to exist.
https://www.insidehook.com/daily_bri...heeses-revived
When you talk with cheese aficionados, it doesn’t usually take long for the conversation to veer this way: away from curds, whey, and mold, and toward matters of life and death. With the zeal of nineteenth-century naturalists, they discuss great lineages and endangered species, painstakingly cataloguing those cheeses that are thriving and those that are lost to history. In his classic “The Great British Cheese Book,” from 1982, Major Patrick Rance—a monocled founding father of modern British cheese—intersperses his tales of surviving regional cheeses with obituaries for those that never made it so far, going as far as to describe their disappearance as extinction. Under “Extinct cheeses of the Midlands and East Anglia,” Rance pays his respects to a lost Newmarket cheese, “a 40lb marigold-coloured cheese,” pressed under cloth and rubbed with salt and cream, the recipe for which was unearthed in a 1774 housekeeping manual.There are countless ways for a cheese to disappear.
This is the story....
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/an...=pocket-newtab
https://www.insider.com/camembert-cheese-extinct-2017-6