No one really knows who made the first cheese and when. According to an ancient legend, it happened accidentally when an Arabian merchant who had put his supply of milk into a pouch made from a sheep’s stomach, set out on a longer journey across the desert. The rennet in the lining of the milk container, combined with the heat of the sun, caused the milk to separate into quite solid curd and whey. To his disappointment, that night he had no milk to drink, but he found that the whey satisfied his thirst, and the cheese (curd) had a delightful flavour, which satisfied his hunger. The microbes contained in milk together with the bioactive substances in the sheep stomach combined with the heating effect of the sun together with the swaying movement of the pouch, and the pressure onto it turned the milk into curd. It is probable that the process of cheese making was discovered accidentally first in Asia and Arabia from where it later on spread to Europe. The earliest cheeses were probably made 6000-7000 years ago. Making and eating cheese was popular in ancient Rome: there were even special cheese kitchens in the households of wealthy Romans. The contribution of Romans into cheese making is considerable: they initiated aging and smoking of cheese which both prolong the preservation time of cheese. The Latin word “caseus” meaning cheese and having reference to casein – a family of milk proteins, has been inspiration for the English word “cheese”, German “Käse”, Italian “queso”, and Dutch “kaas”. In Estonia, cheese has been known for centuries; first written records of cheese are from the 14thcentury. Back then cheese was enjoyed as a dessert by wealthy city freemen and landlords. In the Middle Ages, local people were suspicious of eating cheese: according to them cheese was food that had gone off: cheese kept aging for a long time and it had a peculiar smell. Cheese making started spreading in the dairies of Estonia’s country estates during the 19th century and it gained popularity with founding of co-operative dairies in the first half of the 20th century. Today there are about 4000 different varieties of cheese. Many of them are world-famous, such as the Swiss-style, Italian, or French cheeses.
