Today at lunch someone mentioned a cheese I have never heard of. This person seems to be quite knowledgeable about food so I will trust her judgment, but I cannot find this cheese anywhere. I believe she called it something beginning with the word “cente” …or maybe it was “venti” it had a number in either case and it is nowhere to be found in my massive Italian cheese encyclopedia. Although the book does only cover DOC cheeses, which means they are traditional to a region and made according to strict, or semi-strict regulations.
The Tomme
This book is published the Italian media outfit RAI and the Institute for Rural Culture and Agriculture. It contains the recipes for hundreds of cheeses and gives their exact specs. The book also contains the histories of certain cheeses and cute little anecdotes about Italians and cheese. It is particularly interesting how the book explains the reasons why some cheeses have become huge worldwide successes, while others remain popular only in the land they originate from. For example in the section on Sicily it is explained that cheese production there was often limited due to the presence of large latifondi or land estates. The author of this section, Girolamo Sineri, talks at length about the use of raw sheeps milk in rural Sicily for drinking and uses the proverb: “La spiga mangia la pecora.” This translates to “The spike (or ear as in ear of corn) eats the sheep.” I cannot make sense of this, but I am going to assume it has something to do with poor people using all parts of the sheep to survive… (Any help on this phrase is welcome.) There are even maps:
I special ordered this book about five years ago. I was living in Perugia, working for a New York based editor on an International cheese encyclopedia which to my knowledge has never actual reached publication. I didn’t think I would still be on the same topic five years and many diversions later, but I am. I still don’t know what cheese we were talking about at lunch, but I am sure within these 700 pages there is something similar. (A)
