Alfred Guggisberg, the founder of Guggisberg Cheese ,. He was only sixteen when he began to study the art of cheese making in the high pastures of the Alps in his home land of Switzerland. Upon completing his schooling, Alfred spent a number of years making cheese throughout Europe and parts of Africa before coming over to the United States in in search of a new challenge.
As a result of his abilities, Alfred was sought-after by Amish farmers in Holmes County, Ohio, who were in search of a cheese maker to provide a market for their milk. The operation that Alfred took over, known then as Doughty Valley Cheese, evolved and became Guggisberg Cheese in In the s, after having sufficient time to experiment with the local milk, Alfred was able to develop a new style of Swiss.
His objective in doing so was to come up with a taste that was more favorable to the less-developed American palate. With Baby Swiss starting to become an established product, competitors began coming out with their own imitations of the cheese. Guggisberg is the original Baby Swiss and the taste has yet to be mirrored by any of its competition. At the dawn of World War I, concerns about food supplies became paramount.
The Association of Swiss Cheese Export Firms was established by the Swiss government, and given sole authority over who could export Swiss cheese and who could not. Later, the ASCEF became the Swiss Cheese Union; it had exclusive control over the entire Swiss dairy industry, which was totally fine and caused no problems or controversy. Just kidding. Predictably, many were unhappy with their increasingly draconian stewardship of Swiss cheese. The Swiss Cheese Union expanded their reach into quality control as well as export rights monitoring.
Fast forward to the s, when industrial technology had increased the scale and, accordingly, the export side of the Swiss cheese industry. By this point, there was a labyrinthine web of government control, subsidy, and delegation surrounding the cheese making, milk, and cheese trading industries, all of whom were back in some way by the Cheese Union which was still a pseudo-government body.
As the Cheese Union strove to keep the industry afloat and maintain quality, rigorous standards were introduced. These standards included shaving down the available variety of cheeses for manufacture into just 14 varieties. Of those 14, only a couple were actually, truly endorsed for graded manufacture and export. You can probably guess which two of the thousand Swiss cheeses those were: yup, Emmental and Gruyere. All the other cheeses would have to find their way from the farmers themselves to customers abroad.
In a pre-internet age, that was tough. The cheese was of uniform quality anywhere you encountered it. There is comfort in consistency. With less salt and acidity, the cheese became a suitable environment for useful microbes and moulds, giving aged cheeses their respective flavours. The earliest ever discovered preserved cheese was found in the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang, China , and it dates back as early as BCE.
Ancient Greece and Rome. By Roman times, cheese was an everyday food and cheesemaking a mature art. Columella's De Re Rustica circa 65 CE details a cheesemaking process involving rennet coagulation, pressing of the curd, salting, and ageing. Cheeses of the Alps and Apennines were as remarkable for their variety then as now. A Ligurian cheese was noted for being made mostly from sheep's milk, and some cheeses produced nearby were stated to weigh as much as a thousand pounds each.
Goats' milk cheese was a recent taste in Rome, improved over the "medicinal taste" of Gaul's similar cheeses by smoking. Of cheeses from overseas, Pliny preferred those of Bithynia in Asia Minor. Origin of Cheese in Switzerland. Swiss cheese was mentioned by the first century Roman historian Pliny the Elder, who called it Caseus Helveticus — the "cheese of the Helvetians", one of the tribes living in Switzerland at the time. For centuries, the standard type was cottage cheese, made by souring milk, and which did not keep.
The technique of using rennet — a substance taken from the stomach lining of calves — to make hard cheese first appeared in Switzerland around the 15th century. Since such cheese could be stored for lengthy periods it is not surprising that it soon became part of the basic fare of travellers. The monks who looked after the hospices at the top of some of the major passes, snowed in for part of the year, kept large stocks of it for their guests.
They needed to be large: one guest who passed through the hostel on the Great St Bernard pass was Napoleon , who — with the help of his 40, troops — got through a tonne and a half of the monks' cheese in May Post-Roman Europe. As Romanised populations encountered unfamiliar newly settled neighbours, bringing their own cheesemaking traditions, their own flocks and their own unrelated words for cheese, cheeses in Europe diversified further, with various locales developing their own distinctive traditions and products.
As long-distance trade collapsed, only travellers would encounter unfamiliar cheeses: Charlemagne 's first encounter with a white cheese that had an edible rind forms one of the constructed anecdotes of Notker's Life of the Emperor. France and Italy have perhaps varieties of cheese each. Many cheeses today were first recorded in the late Middle Ages or after—cheeses like Cheddar around , Parmesan in , Gouda in , and Camembert in Modern Era Switzerland.
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