giveaway winners and QUEIJO
Firstly! The winners of the paperback copies of Felicia Davin’s amazing The Scandalous Letters of V & J are Mary, Amara, Jessica, and Elizabeth. You’ll be getting an email shortly asking for your preferred mailing address!
And now, a few thoughts about Portuguese cheese.
I am trying to find out more about a group of traditional Portuguese cheeses which are made with sheep’s milk and a coagulant which is otherwise rarely used: the purple stamens of the cardoon, the wild thistle. (Most cheese is traditionally made with the animal rennet, produced from the fourth stomach of nursing ruminants, like cows, sheep, or goats.) The ancient Romans used the artichoke cousin for this purpose, as reported by Columella. There are other traditional sheep’s milk cheeses along the edge of the Mediterranean which are made in a similar way, but the Portuguese cheeses are distinct in this group in flavor and appeal.
Cardoon has some known issues when used as a rennet, in that cheese made this way can over time develop off flavors, especially bitter ones, and they do so less predictably than with other rennets. For this reason, cardoon cheeses are typically eaten much younger and are typically soft cheeses (often spoonable directly from the rind.) I believe this is also why sheep’s milk is most often used for cardoon-based cheeses (aside from the confluence of geography — sheep do much better on the rocky, steep bits of Portugal than cows, and cardoons are everywhere for the harvesting); sheep’s milk, on average has double the fat than cow or goat milk. From American Farmstead Cheese, we find that cow milk averages out around 3.7% fat across different breeds and sheep about 7.4%. This is why sheep cheese tends to be extremely buttery, and I think that butteriness stands up better to the bitter flavors of cardoon. Think of having a coffee with cream, or cooking with white wine and butter.
I bought three cheeses for tasting comparison, two Portuguese cheeses and one Italian cheese made in this manner.
I should admit that I let these cheeses sit in my fridge for longer than I should have (wrapped in paper, but still), and this type of cheese does not improve with age. That being said, I found the two Portuguese cheeses very pleasant; the bitterness reminded me a bit of walnuts or coffee, and it played well with the buttery flavor. By contrast, unfortunately, the mold on the rind of the Italian cheese combined with the bitterness of the cardoon to produce an especially sour, armpitty kind of flavor, which I did not enjoy. I think possibly the Pencillium molds don’t play nicely with the flavors of this rennet.
The historical development of this cheese is something I’m still investigating. My initial assumption was that because an adult sheep produces valuable wool, it was not in a shepherd’s best interest to kill any lambs to use their stomachs for rennet. However, other well-known sheep cheeses made in close geographical proximity (Manchego!) are made with animal rennet, so that’s not the full answer.
However, the Oxford Companion to Cheese (a copy of which I have just acquired for myself, thank you very much) suggests that Portuguese thistle-coagulated cheeses actually find their origins in Jewish dietary law, which bans eating milk and meat in the same meal.
Jewish people arrived in the Iberian peninsula with the Romans and are attested in writing since the 5th century. They were particularly able to flourish in Portugal from 711 to 1294, when that portion of the Iberian peninsula was under Islamic rule, and in exchange for a yearly tax they could practice their religion freely and live in autonomous communities. Jewish people had an outsize impact on literature and architecture in Iberia, probably due to their high rates of literacy and numeracy. (Men such as Isma'il ibn Naghrilla were both military leaders and poets; buildings he designed in Granada are also believed to have the basis for the later efflorescence of the spectacular palace of the Alhambra.) However, this era of cultural growth ended with the Catholic reconquest of the peninsula, when Jewish people were forced to leave, creating the Sefardi diaspora in northern Africa and elsewhere, forced to convert, or immediately killed.
Jewish communities were able to eke out a precarious existence in Portugal for about a hundred years after they were expelled from Spain in 1492. However, even those who converted to Christianity were at risk of extreme state violence. As a result, most Portuguese Jews ultimately emigrated, to Brazil, Turkey and Greece, Amsterdam, and northern Africa.
According to the Oxford Companion, the presence of thistle-coagulated cheese follows the movement of Jewish people through the Iberian peninsula. The cheese is in that way kind of a ghost: a shadow of people who were forced to leave a land they made better and richer (both spiritually and literally) by their presence.
In the spirit of cheese, hospitality, and human dignity, I encourage you to read about the extreme miscarriage of justice happening to many immigrants right now, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Neri Alvarado Borges, and thousands of others. I encourage you to look into how your state and local governments can or already are fighting back against the federal government’s deployment of ICE: a masked secret police with the effective power to arrest and detain anyone with no records, including U.S. citizens, in extremely violent ways.
While the federal law introduced to ban law enforcement officials from wearing masks is unlikely to progress while Republicans hold the majority in Congress, you can still call and write your representatives about it. More importantly, it is a template which can be used by states to ban the wearing of masks by ICE and other law enforcement (and states such as Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York have already introduced this type of legislation.) Given that local law enforcement bodies across the country are choosing to collaborate in the stripping of constitutional rights from U.S. residents, including citizens, I do not think they should be exempted from the requirement that they show their faces while they do so.
States can also codify in law the right of children to a public education, whether documented or not, as Massachusetts has just done. Laws to prevent state resources from being used for immigration enforcement are being proposed here and in other states, but many are stalled in the legislature. Call; write; tell other people about what’s happening.
We are not helpless. We do not have to collaborate in the making of ghosts.
With hope,
Sharon