Five

A Hard Road to Ennoblement

Heated debates and interminable polemics accompany the social ascendancy of cheese. Traditionalists resist, but it is a battle of the old guard.

The celebration of cheese is treated in the literature of the sixteenth century with much enthusiasm, even too much. The hyperbole has all the earmarks of a provocation, a challenge to the traditionalists, the old guard who continue to regard cheese as a plebeian food unsuited to gentry.

At times the echo of the dispute appears only between the lines, as in the case of the Ferrara nobleman Ercole Bentivoglio, who published in 1557 an ode in praise of cheese. After hailing cheese as the most ancient and most glorious human foodstuff (“Cheese is the first human nutriment”), the essential complement to every respectable dish (“pasta, tortelli, or meat pies without cheese cannot be . . . perfect dishes, but on the contrary, are bland, tasteless, unrewarding, dull”), and an indispensable integrator of physical energy and sexual potency (“I do not believe that a man who does not eat it can be truly vigorous”), he does not fail to observe, given these incontrovertible truths, that only fools can call it the food of the populace and the peasantry: “Blind and dumb are those who say it is a food for rustics.”

In other cases the polemic is more overt and more clamorous, as in La Formaggiata, written by Count Guido Landi in honor of cacio piacentino (better known now as parmesan and made in the same province of Emilia), the star of Italian cheesemaking, which “never spoils a pasta dish” and “enhances every kind of preparation.” Published precisely during those polemical years (the first edition came out in 1542), the book appeared anonymously—attributed to an improbable “Mister Stentato”—and was dedicated to cardinal Ippolito Medici, nephew of Clement VII, in whose service Landi had access to the papal court. Along with the book he sent to the cardinal was a gift of cheese: “I am sending Your Eminence a cheese from my birthplace, Piacenza.” For Landi, this seems to have been a common practice. Claudio Tolomei, he too an intellectual in the service of cardinal Ippolito, thanks his friend “for the cheese you sent me.” In La Formaggiata this practice is even recommended: “Whoever has to negotiate with people of standing . . . should offer a good cheese and immediately room is made for you and doors open.”

This treatise starts out with explanations of the “material parts,” meaning the substance of the cheese, whose uniqueness is the result of good pastures, fragrant grass, water, and air that contributed to its birth; the fat, healthy cows from which the milk came; and the quality of the salt that was added to it. Apart from its substance, what is perfect is its round shape (the circle is said to be the highest of all forms) as well as its extraordinary size. A cheese like that can only be “noble”: “The reverend abbots, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and popes; counts, marquises, dukes, archdukes, kings, and emperors are proud and consider it a great honor to have piacentino cheese on their table.” This almost sounds like an echo of the “social” considerations made a century earlier by Pantaleone. Here the rage against the ignorant, stupid antagonists of cheese is more ferocious—Landi calls them pecora campi, sheep in the fields—“who generally speak ill of cheese, as though there could be anything bad about it.” And why do they do this? Because, they claim, cheese is made by “gross, filthy, bestial boors,” and is thus as vile as those who make it.

Landi obviously cannot deny that it is peasants who make cheese. Quite the contrary, he recognizes that “much art and skill are needed to bring this process to its completion.” A certain kind of ability, a peasant know-how, deserves some manner of respect. But this does not interest Landi. Scion of the same antipeasant culture that gave rise to the prejudices he would like eliminate, he exceeds all limits of imagination (partly in jest, partly in seriousness), inventing a countryside in which the peasants become pastoral characters out of courtly operettas, having first changed their manners and even their gender. Piacentino cheese, Landi explains, is not, in fact, made by brutish, vulgar male peasants, but by “gentle shepherdesses who are pleasing and pretty,” who, to begin with, draw the milk with their white hands, “sweetly singing its praises and those who produce it,” then pour it into “clean, shining receptacles, which they leave to cook in large bell-shaped ovens, “well scrubbed and washed,” where the milk curdles under the action of the rennet. At that point, cheese is born and the shepherdesses hasten to place it in “round molds that are bright and clean” which they begin turning. Anyone seeing them at work “with their blond braids wound around their heads,” their bare arms and their skirts hiked up to their knees, their features in full sight “would be overcome by the sweetness of it all” and would willingly offer to help them with the turning. The cheese remains covered in those molds for four days, and then “the graceful, delicious shepherdesses” return to salt it, repeating this every week for a period of two weeks. At that point they oil the outside of each wheel with “charming, caressing movements” and place them in the larder. To make cheese this way “is truly a thing of lords, kings, and emperors.”

Why, then, is it not appreciated by everyone? This is the same old question, no longer born of social prejudice, but of hygienic and dietary prejudices. At the heart of the polemic it is not the old guard any more who understand nothing about “the new gastronomy,” but the doctors, who, with “witless and hackneyed obstinacy,” continue to speak ill of cheese despite the improvement in the quality of the product. There may have been a time when it was legitimate to denigrate it because “one could not find a worthy cheese.” But the old complaints have lost all validity. Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna were great scientists, but “things have changed today.” And cheese “has been ripened and refined with time.”

Landi’s Formaggiata is a tribute to piacentino, but for us it takes on the broader scope of clearly showing us the cultural aspect of the changes taking place.

“The witless and hackneyed obstinacy” of the doctors who refuse to admit that history marches on will continue beyond 1550. “All cheeses are bad at their core,” wrote Baldassare Pisanelli in 1583, apart from those freshly made, “because as they age they get worse.” In 1592 Alessandro Petronio repeats: “Every type of cheese . . . stirs up phlegm and coughing in those people who go through life without exercising, for this reason: since it cannot soften or liquefy, without great difficulty, it congeals, grows harder and remains longer in the stomach.” The exercise referred to is physical, the daily labor of peasants and other workers whose robust stomachs would even digest stones (“As is known,” says the peasant from Ruzante, “work can make stones digestible”). For the stomach of a peasant, cheese is just fine, but not for a gentleman’s.

The decades pass, but the polemics do not abate. Quite the contrary, they become more embittered and more specific in the seventeenth century with the appearance of dissertations expressly devoted to “the noxiousness of cheese.” De casei nequitia, the title of a treatise by Johannes Lotichius published in Frankfort in 1643, proposed for a change that the pernicious products be left “to farmers [zappatori, people who hoe] and proletarians.”

By then it was a battle of the old guard. This is apparent from the tone of these works, conceived almost as a riposte to the everincreasing admirers of cheese. Landi and his Formaggiata are the direct targets at which Alessandro Gatti aimed his Formaggio biasmato (cheese condemned), published in 1635 though written at the end of the preceding century, in order to maintain that “cheese has no merit, is in fact extremely unwholesome and unworthy of a reputable table.”

All the arguments are familiar. “It is revolting to see animals as filthy as cows, ewes, goats, buffalo and mares, stomping night and day in their own manure, being milked by hands dirtier than the muck itself. Is it possible to find a well-born, refined person who, thinking about all that filth, can enjoy eating cheese?” Learned citations from the classics are used to demonstrate that cheese is suited only to “rustics and peasants . . . poor people and beggars . . . servants and other such low people.” Absurd etymologies (formaggio means fuor el meggio, from fuori, outside, il meglio, the best, in modern spelling) alternate with puns, literary disquisitions, invectives against the pappaformaggio, cheese gobblers. “One should therefore stay away from any cheese,” is the conclusion, and “that fool who authored La Formaggiata makes me laugh” with the bunch of nonsense he invented “to prove that cheese has any merit and, despite all medical advice to the contrary, is good for the health.”

But the nonsense of “that fool who authored La Formaggiata” definitely made a breach. It is Gatti himself who lets us see that the general attitude has changed, that his point of view is now in the minority. “I do not fear the opposing multitude,” he declares in the end, as though to compare his views with those of an adversary who, on the wave of a new way of looking at things, “is making every effort to defend the contrary,” that is, the excellence of cheese. An “opposing multitude” had overturned the parameters of culinary taste.