GreekIslandGirl wrote:RichardB wrote:GreekIslandGirl wrote:I posted the other day (then self-deleted) that my mum used to use
lemon juice. I've just double-checked to see how wide-spread this practice is and apparently lemon juice is commonly used for cheese-making instead of rennet.
The Greeks adored cheese. In the eighth century B.C.E., Homer mentions cheese in his epic poem, “The Odyssey.” Olympic athletes grew fleet and brawny on a mostly-cheese diet.hobbyfarms.com
Hi Miss Asian cheeses are ofter made ucing lemon juice (citric acid)
Aahh, that would be my great, great, great etc grandfather, Alexander the Great, who taught them that!
Yes but who taught him to make Cheese? Don't let your pro-Hellenic fantasies get the better of you. Cheese making was not after all a Greek invention. The fact is that Cheese making was known to have occurred in many places outside of what is now Greece and in particular in the area invaded and conquered by that imperialist Alexander, e.g in Sumer and Akkad, long before even Homer: a Sumerian/Akkadian bilingual lexicon of about 1900 BC lists twenty kinds of cheese. It is surmised some ancient Cheeses which long predate anything Greek are like modern Fetta.
Indeed I would go so far as to suggest that it was possibly only after the time of Alexander that the Greeks acquired the technique of using Citric acid from Greeks returning from the area of Persia as at the time Alexander went through the Citron was known in Persia but possibly not in Greece: this is at least implied by the works of Theoprastus, a contemporary of Alexander, who remarked it grew in Media and Persia, but no mention of it in Greece. The lemon only appears to have entered the Mediterranean area from its Asian origins a couple of hundred years
after Alexander.
Interesting that it mentions a bilingual lexicon.....
