British Dairy Farming. 
161 
system of manufacture it has been necessary for me to make 
two visits to Italy, with the result not only of learning something 
about the cheeses of that country, but of forming an agreeable 
acquaintance with some of the first authorities upon Italian 
dairy farming. To these gentlemen I owe much of the informa- 
tion which is contained in the following lines. Details of the 
system of making Gorgonzola have been written by Dr. Giacomo 
Maffei, to whom many thanks are due for his personal assistance 
and instruction in the mysteries of the manufacture of Parmesan, 
and by Dr. Luigi Manetti, director of the Royal Dairy Station ; 
but these details differ as much as the systems which are adopted 
by different manufacturers. Indeed it is somewhat difficult to 
lay down any fixed rules for making the cheese, inasmuch as 
there are two classes of persons who are engaged in the work, and 
who are controlled by entirely different circumstances. In the 
one case there are the cowherds, without homes, who originated 
the Gorgonzola, and who after preparing the. curd, sell it for 
conversion into cheese ; while on the other hand there are the 
ordinary farmers, or milk-buyers, who conduct the entire opera- 
tion for themselves. Gorgonzola cheese takes its name from a 
small town, near which the cowherds are accustomed to rest on 
their passage to and from the Alps with their cattle. It is the 
centre of a small district in which the pasture is unusually rich ; 
hence they take advantage of it, more especially on their way 
to the towns of Lombardy in October, finding as they do a 
comparatively rich feeding ground for their cattle after the 
pasturage upon the Alps has been exhausted. Originally the 
milk produced during the rests made here and at other places 
by these cowherds was literally sacrificed, for as they live for the 
most part of the year without fixed homes, they have no means 
of making either butter or cheese for themselves. At last, how- 
ever, they hit upon the plan of converting their milk into 
curd, and selling it in its raw state to persons in the district of 
Gorgonzola, who made it into a refined cheese. Since, however, 
this cheese has been perfected and become known in other 
countries, it has been manufactured by persons of a different 
class in other parts of the north of Italy, although I believe 
it is made nowhere in such perfection as in the district which 
gives it its name. My friend Dr. Maffei, of Reggio, Emilia, 
says in one of his articles that the English have awarded a 
royal crown to this product of Lombardy, which, by-the-bye, 
is commonly called Stracchino, the word being derived from 
stracco, the Italian for the French word las, signifying that the 
cheese is made from tired cows on their way home from the 
Alps. The manufacture of Gorgonzola cheese demands several 
important considerations : considerable skill, prolonged atten- 
VOL. XXIII. — S. S. M 
