| the cheese. 
| way, ana well covered up from the air for a few 
| weeks, becomes thoroughly impregnated with the 
| distinguished from the old one. 
sold at a shilling or even tenpence per pound. | of about 120°, in a large copper caldron, shaped 
All good varieties of it are made of the cream of | like an inverted bell, and so suspended on the 
two milkings, and the milk of only one of the 
two; so that they contain twice as much buty- 
raceous matter as the best of simply whole-milk 
cheese. 
the whey is gently removed. All require to be 
kept during two years, and some during three 
years, in order to acquire their due or character- 
| istic degree of mellowness and power; and many, 
it is believed, are kept in moist warm cellars, 
while others are wrapped in strong brown paper, 
and plunged into a hotbed. A ready and curi- 
ous method of inoculating a new Stilton cheese, 
or a new butyraceous cheese of any kind, with 
the flavour of one which has become oid, mellow, 
and incipiently putrid, was communicated to the 
secretary. of the Highland Society, in 1832, by 
| Mr. Robison, the secretary of the Royal Society 
of Edinburgh. “ This,” says Mr. Robison, “ may 
| be done by the insertion in the new cheese of 
portions of the old one containing blue mould. 
_ The little scoop which is used in taking samples 
of cheese, is a ready means of performing the 
operation, by interchanging ten or a dozen of the 
rolls which it extracts, and placing them so as to 
disseminate the germ of the blue mould all over 
A new Stilton cheese treated in this 
mould, and generally with a flavour hardly to be 
In selecting 
cheeses for this operation, I have chosen them dry, 
and free from any unpleasant taste; and I have 
never failed in obtaining a good result, although 
sometimes, when the old cheese had decayed mat- 
ter mixed with the blue mould, the flavour and 
appearance of the inoculated cheese differed a 
good deal from that of the parent one. I have 
sometimes treated half a Lanarkshire cheese in 
this way, and have left the other half in its natural 
state; and have been much amused with the re- 
marks of my friends on the striking superiority 
of the English cheese over the Scotch one.” 
Parmesan cheese, though reported to be made 
of skimmed-milk, has so decidedly an oleaceous 
character, and possesses so piquant a taste, and 
sells in London at so extravagantly high a price, 
that. 1t must be placed in the same category with 
whole-milk cheeses. It is made not only in the 
little Italian state whence it takes its name, but 
throughout the luxuriant district of the Milanese 
situated between Lodi and Cremona. The milk 
for it is drawn from cows which are stall-fed on 
hay throughout the winter, and on cut grass 
throughout the summer; and each cheese of it 
has usually a weight of between 60 and 180 lbs., 
and is produced by a group of dairymen, on a 
sort of joint-stock plan of association. The milk 
for a prime cheese of it is a mixture of the even- 
ing’s milking skimmed in the morning and at 
noon, and of the morning’s milking skimmed at 
noon. This is gradually heated to a temperature 
CHEESE. 
The curd is not greatly broken; and. 
| 
a 
arm of a lever as to be removable off and on the 
fire at pleasure; it is then taken from the fire, 
set with the rennet, and allowed about an hour 
to coagulate; and it is next put anew upon the 
fire, gradually raised to a temperature of 145°, | 
and incessantly and briskly stirred till all the 
curd separates into small pieces. Part of the 
whey is first taken out, and a little saffron put 
in for colouring ; and when the whole of the curd 
is thoroughly broken, almost all the whey is 
taken out, and a sufficient quantity of water 
poured in to enable the operator to bear the 
heat with his hand. The curd is now collected, 
by means of a cloth passed beneath it, and 
gathered up at the corners; it is pressed into a 
wooden frame on a platform, and covered with a 
piece of wood and a very heavy weight; and, 
during one night, it throws off most of its con- 
tained whey, and acquires a firm consistence. 
During forty days, it is daily turned, and has its 
uppermost side rubbed with salt, so that each 
side receives twenty saltings; and after the ter- 
mination of the forty days, its outer crust is 
pared off, its fresh surface is varnished with lin- 
seed oil, and its convex side is coloured red. A 
strong suspicion very generally exists that the 
fatty or oleaceous matter which fills the pores of 
Parmesan cheese originates in the mixing of rape 
oil, olive oil, or hog’s lard with the curd. A Par- 
mesan cheese, at all events, in spite of being pro- 
fessedly made of mere skimmed-milk, is the fat- 
test, as well as the most pungent and acrid-fla- 
voured variety of cheese in popular favour; and 
its fat has far more the appearance of oil or of 
hog’s lard, than of butyraceous matter or richly 
creamy milk. 
The skimmed-milk cheeses of Britain are ex- 
ceedingly various in quality, partly from the 
same causes which control the quality of whole- 
milk cheeses, but chiefly from the degrees of de- 
privation of cream which are practised upon the 
milk. One, two, or three creamings may be 
taken ; or the milk may stand through very 
various periods, and under very various con- 
ditions, so that the resulting degrees of rich- 
ness or poverty in the cheese may be numerous 
and wide. If but little cream be taken away, 
the cheese may be only one degree inferior to 
Dunlop or double Gloucester, and if the whole be 
taken away, it may be a hard, coriaceous, indi- 
gestible mass of mere caseum, not fit for the use 
of a human being, and requiring rather to be 
chopped with a hatchet than cut with a knife. 
The skimmed-milk cheese of Suffolk, Tweeddale, 
and some other districts of Iingland and Scot- 
land, where better things might be expected, is 
so dismally bad as to serve chiefly for exercising 
the teeth and jaws, and testing the power of the || 
stomach; and that not long ago in general use || 
among the Scottish peasantry was so vilely manu- | | 
factured as to be an absolute abomination. “ It 
