The cheese that explains a country

Cheese is a storage technology. Every regional cheese in Europe is an answer to one question — what do we do with milk in a place where the animals are far away, the summer is short, or the winter is long — and the answers are specific enough that you can work backwards from a cheese to its geography.

Hard alpine wheels exist because the herds go up in summer and the cheese has to come down on a back. Gruyère, Comté, Bergkäse: big, low-moisture, made in eighty-kilogram rounds because the size is what lets them survive the descent and the winter. The economics of a mountain pasture are visible in the diameter.

Blue cheeses cluster around caves. Cabrales in the Picos de Europa is aged in limestone caves at high humidity, and the Roquefort caves are the same principle in a different range. Nobody invented these; a cave was the only cold place available and the moulds arrived on their own.

Brined white cheeses belong to the hot end of the continent, from the Balkans to the Aegean, where a cheese that sits in salt water keeps and a cheese that sits on a shelf does not. Feta, sirene, brinza: the same solution to the same summer.

And the fresh, sour, eat-it-this-week cheeses — quark, skyr, kajmak — belong to places with cold cellars and short distances, where you did not need to store anything for six months.

This is why the single most useful thing you can do in a European market is ask where the cheese was made and how high up. The answer tells you what the land does, which is usually the thing a visitor spends three days failing to work out from the view.

The corollary: a mountain region with no cheese tradition is a mountain region where somebody else owned the pasture. That gap is as informative as the cheese.