Cheese isn’t naturally orange. These days the orange color comes from the seeds of annatto, a Central/South American plant. But the desire for yellow-hued cheeses goes back at least to the middle ages, and possibly even earlier…
The yellow and orange-colored cheeses are especially common in Northern Europe, where the majority of cheeses are made from cow milk. Cow milk has less fat than either sheep or goat milk, so it tends to have a more translucent quality to begin with.
In the later middle ages, especially in England & Holland with their rapidly growing urban middle classes, demand for butter–long a great luxury–was soaring. Which left dairyfolk w/a bit of a dilemma. They made a lot of money on butter, so there was real incentive to skim the cream off their milk before turning it into cheese. Certain breeds of cattle retain a fair amount of beta-carotene in their milk, but it mostly stays with the fat. Lower fat cheese, more of a dull-white hue. So for sales purposes, there was now also incentive to add colorant to the cheese. The video that spurred this post mentions marigold, in the days before South American plants were readily available in Europe.
But there’s another option: Lady’s Bedstraw
As that blog describes, Lady’s Bedstraw has long been used for dyes and also medicinal purposes. But it has yet another property: it’s a coagulant.
We don’t actually know when people started using animal rennet, but for most of history, plant rennets would have been more accessible for most people. I describe this a bit more in Ep 2. In the Mediterranean basin, fig sap, thistles and nettles were commonly used. But those aren’t things that grow as widely in northern Europe. OTOH Lady’s Bedstraw grows all over the place.
So it’s possible that Northerners were used to cheese being slightly yellow for centuries, long before the issue of fat levels came into question.
Originally tweeted by IntoTheCurdverse (@curdverse) on March 15, 2022.
Into The Curdverse 