rennet, parmesan,
by MARY-LIZ SHAW
It is little more than the natural result of combining warmed raw cow's milk with rennet and time.
But to the world's gourmands, from Catherine de Medici to Sophia Loren, the cheese we call Parmesan was and is nothing less than a work of epicurean art.
This hard, grainy, pungent cheese from the northwest cuff of Italy's boot has been the snack of monarchs and the pride of popes, including Julius II, the Renaissance pontiff who had a taste for fine things: He commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel and Raphael to spruce up a few rooms in the Vatican.
Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the most erudite and cultured of the Founding Fathers, would have considered the larders of Monticello lacking without a wheel of fine Parmesan.
The great French dramatist, Moliere, would eat nothing else in the last days of his life.
And when Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century English diarist and confidant of two kings, looked out into the streets of London as the Great Fire of 1666 ravaged neighborhoods, he realized he would have to bury his most valuable household items or watch them go up in smoke. His wheel of Parmesan was one of the first things to go into the hole.
Fit for a king
Parmigiano-Reggiano, the Italian name for the original and best form of the cheese, and Proscuitto di Parma, the ham that comes from the same part of Italy, are "almost mythical" in their stature in the culinary canon, says Ivan Day, an expert on food history in Britain who has a vast personal collection of rare historical cookbooks.
"Parmesan" was a French word, later adopted by the English (sometimes as "Parmezan"), to identify the toothsome Italian cheese.
Day found a reference to Parmesan in a detailed account of the coronation party of King James II, published in 1687. The first course at the new king's
Item No. 134 is listed simply "Parmesan," meaning the great cheese was considered fancy enough to be served to King James as is, without embellishment.
"This was one of the most sought-after cheeses in England at the time," Day says. "It really doesn't surprise me that it's on this royal table."
Parmesan only gained stature throughout the world, even as it reached beyond kings' tables to the well-stocked kitchens of the upper middle class, Day says.
Parmesan was a luxury item throughout the 19th century and was a measure of a family's wealth among what used to be called "the civilized classes."
It helped that the hard, heavy cheese traveled well and stored even better, Day adds.
Ships' captains liked it as cargo because it served a dual purpose: Several dozen wheels of Parmesan in a hold were excellent ballast on the high seas; once in port, the wheels always fetched a premium price.
"It was always expensive," Day says. "It had this cachet of luxury that went with it. It was a status food."
As good as gold
Parmigiano-Reggiano still reigns as a food for refined tastes, "like a fine Cuban cigar or a Ferrari," says Maria Liberati, a former New York supermodel whose new book, "The Basic Art of Italian Cooking," is a collection of recipes handed down through her Italian family for generations.
Liberati, who now lives most of the year near her family's ancestral home in Abruzza, Italy, observed the intricate process of Parmigiano-Reggiano production when she sat for months for a portrait by an artist who lived in the Reggio-Emilia region, the heart of Parmigiano-Reggiano country.
She learned that the Credito Emiliana, a bank in Reggio-Emilia, still holds more than 300,000 wheels of prime Parmigiano-Reggiano in its vaults, as collateral on loans and as securities on the volatile European cheese markets.
It remains a luxury item. One 80-pound wheel of the rarest form of Parmigiano, derived from the milk of Vacche Rosse cows, goes for about $3,200, wholesale.
Hard to believe that a cheese of such regal provenance and currency was devised by an unnamed Benedictine monk more than 1,000 years ago.
One of the earliest written references comes from the Italian poet, Giovanni Boccaccio, who wrote "The Decameron" (1349-51), a collection of stories similar to Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." One of the stories describes a mythical kingdom built upon hundreds of wheels of Parmigiano.
Recently, Liberati says, the Italian consortium that authenticates the cheese and monitors its production and sale found an even earlier written reference to this beloved formaggio in a legal decree from Genoa dated 1254.
It's the cows
That the cheese enjoyed such status even then, 800 years ago, suggests that its production had been perfected for years. Just as startling is that the cheese-production process has changed very little in those eight centuries, according to the Web site for the Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano-Reggiano. As it happens, the provinces where it is produced, Parma, Reggio-Emilia, Modena, Mantua and Bologna, have remained the same geographically, the agricultural methods unchanged.
No comments:
Post a Comment