Cheese history: everything you wanted to know

Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Nothing beats a well-loaded cheese board. But while so many of us enjoy a stinky stilton and ripe brie, or chuck a reliable old cheddar into our basket at the supermarket each week, what do we actually know about the history of the cheese that we eat? Spanning thousands of years in many continents, Cheese's history is a fascinating and surprising one.

For this Everything You Want to Know episode, Isabel King put your questions to cheesemonger and author Ned Palmer. So, Ned, I want to start with a really basic question of what is cheese? How would we define it? Excellent. Starting off with a good question, this might be quite a long answer.

I suspect that there isn't an official legal description of cheese. So for me, cheese is a delicious solid made from liquid milk, milk that has come from a ruminant animal, like a cow, sheep, or a goat or some other milk giving animals. A solid that is derived by fermenting the milk with bacterial starter cultures and getting rid of the water, coagulating that curd with rennet, which is an enzyme that coagulates milk into a solid and adding salt. So it's made with milk from animals, it's fermented with bacterial cultures, it's coagulated with rennet, and it has salt added. That's cheese.

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