There is "nothing good" on the intarwebs today, so I figure that even if it IS boring for most, generating some fodder for my f-list might be the considerate thing to do. (I realize that many of you have no interest at all in cheese, but I'm also somewhat gratified to discover that a rather surprising number of you DO have an interest...)

I was reading a redaction of slippcoat cheese as done by a reasonably respectable SCA-dian. This redaction appeared in Tournaments Illuminated, which is a reasonably respectable publication... And I don't agree with some aspects of the redaction... I think my arguments are also reasonable... And this makes me feel SMRT.

Here is a link to the redaction and original post-period (only slightly) recipe.

I'm copying the author's original commentary below, because it's his reasoning that I find simultaneously educational, and incorrect/incomplete.

A dairy farmer informed me that strokings are the final few ounces of milk from each milking; to get them you have to be more gentle when stimulating the cow's udder, hence the name. They are lower in butterfat than the morning milk, so a lower proportion of cream is added to the morning milk to approximate stroakings and cream.

Very interesting... Stroakings are mentioned in quite a few period cheese recipes and I hadn't the faintest notion WTF they were talking about. Anyone know what "faire water" is?

Getting some rennet was a problem living where I do. I was finally forced to buy a cheese-making kit at a home brewing supply store, of all places. The kit also provided a nifty draining basket and a lot of other stuff I didn't use.

The milk was pasteurized but not homogenized; it came from the farmer's market, as did the cream. My basket was designed to hold the curds from a gallon of milk, so I cut the recipe down a bit: approximately one hundred ounces of milk to twenty of cream, and eight ounces of live-culture sheep's-milk yogurt.

You can find vegetarian (non period ingredients) rennet at Whole foods, though I buy calf rennet (period) from this company. They carry products for a reasonable price and are very, very quick!

I disagree with his choice of live cultures, and let me tell you why... Yogurt culture is what is referred to as a "thermophilic" culture. That is "heat loving." To get a thermophilic culture to grow well, you need to heat it to around 110 degrees. This is why thermophilic cultures are most often found in cheese of SOUTHERN origin. Italian cheeses, especially. Most of the cheeses made in England and northern Europe utilize what is referred to as a "mesophilic" culture that can easily be grown at room temperature. This is the culture that is found in buttermilk, and sour cream.

I heated my pasteurized milk and cream to about 88°F.; almost all the modern cheese recipes I've seen call for a temperature range of 75 - 90° F. before adding a bacterial starter culture, which is where the yogurt comes in.

The process of cooling, heating, and cooling again achieves two ends: not only does this process reach and regulate a specific temperature in an age before thermometers, but it gives the milk just enough time to sour a bit. Rennet works much more efficiently in the presence of acid, and I figure that porous wooden bowl the recipe speaks of has acid-producing lactobacilli lurking in every microscopic nook and cranny. Rather than trust in nature and airborne bacteria, I innoculated my milk with a known, non-mutated strain of lactobacillus, one which would not make the milk bitter. I chose sheep's milk yogurt on a moment's whim. Buttermilk, sour cream, or ordinary yogurt would have done just as well. Most of the sourness, by the way, stayed in the whey, which left fairly sweet curds when drained off.

While the wooden bowl would have contributed to "contamination" of the milk, lactobacillus, both mesophilic and thermophilc, occurs naturally in the environment. It thrives on the teats of cattle - where it can get a regular supply of milk. This is why you rarely ever see anyone adding cultures in a period cheese recipe. If they just let the milk sit at whatever their local room temperature happens to be (75-90 for mesophilic and 90-110 for thermophilic), they will end up with sour milk of one type or another. (This is why yogurt is so common in the middle east and buttermilk is often seen in recipes originating in Europe... It's just what happens to your milk if you haven't got pasteurization and refrigeration...) All the milk we buy in modern American grocery stores has been pasteurized, which is to say, it's been heated enough to kill off all the bacteria that were living it it. This is why modern cheese makers have to re-culture their milk to make cheese.

I used half a rennet tablet dissolved in warm water, in lieu of the soaking liquid from reconstituting a dried cow's rectum, the dried curds from the stomach of an unweaned calf, or a variety of alkaloids from relatively unobtainable herbs, all of which are far more in period. I'm sure you won't mind.

Otherwise there were no significant deviations from Digby's recipe, except that I had to refrigerate the cheese for part of the ripening process. Excessively warm weather was causing the cheese to sweat butterfat, which goes to show you why the manufacturers of commercial cream cheese generally stabilize their product with gum emulsifiers.

I have no idea what recipe he got his hands on that called for the asshole of a cow, but I've never EVER seen it... Or heard of it, before he brought it up. It makes no logical sense to me why you'd even *try* to use that part of a cow instead of the stomach, or a vegetable source... But I'm going to try not to dwell on the grossness...

Animal rennet comes from the 4th stomach of an un-weaned ruminant (grass eater with multiple stomachs). What we refer to as "rennet" is an enzyme called chymosin that nursing cattle need in order to digest milk. Once the cow/sheep/goat is weaned, chymosin production stops. Chymosin also appears in purple thistle flowers, fig tree sap, black snails, and certain types of fungus. Because most people aren't particularly big on slaughtering cute-baby-cows, most modern cheeses are made with genetically engineered rennet. Basically, the kind of chymosin produced by baby cows was close enough to the kind produced by fungus that scientists found a way to trick certain yeasts into producing cow rennet instead of mushroom rennet. Thus, it's highly unlikely that any baby cows were *recently* slaughtered to make your cheese.