The regional cheeses that define European food cultures

Europe has a habit of naming its cheeses after places rather than people. A Comté, a Stilton or a feta tells you where it comes from before it tells you anything else, and in many cases the law insists on it. Behind that legal tidiness is something more interesting. Each of these cheeses grew out of a particular landscape and a particular problem with milk.

Which is why a cheese board can work rather well as a map of Europe.

The places that still decide what Europe's cheeses taste like

In the Jura mountains of eastern France, Comté is a cooperative effort. Farmers bring raw milk from their Montbéliarde cows to village dairies known as fruitières, where it is pooled and turned into wheels weighing around 40 kilograms. Each wheel takes several hundred litres of milk and is aged for at least four months, often far longer. Some of them mature inside Fort Saint-Antoine, a former military fort where rows of wheels are turned and brushed in the cool dark.

In Somerset, the cheese gave its name to a method as well as a village. Cheddaring involves cutting the curd into slabs, then stacking and turning them so the whey drains away. Some cheese is still matured in the caves of Cheddar Gorge. A short drive across England reveals the strangeness of place names: Stilton cannot legally be made in the village of Stilton, only in Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire.

North Holland is flat, wet and very green, which is ideal for cows and not much else. Gouda takes its name from the town where it was traded rather than where it was made, and trading remains part of the story. In Alkmaar, the cheese market still runs on Friday mornings through the warmer months. Wheels are laid out on the square, tested, weighed at the old weighing house and carried away on wooden barrows by porters in white.

Portugal's Serra da Estrela does something unusual with its sheep's milk. Instead of animal rennet, cheesemakers curdle it with dried cardoon thistle flowers, which gives the cheese a faintly bitter edge. It is made in the colder months, and a ripe one is soft enough that the top is often sliced off and the inside eaten with a spoon.

In Poland's Tatra mountains, oscypek belongs to the summer grazing season. Highland shepherds make it in their huts from sheep's milk, press it into carved wooden moulds that leave decorative patterns on the surface, and then smoke it. It is often grilled and served with cranberry preserve, which may sound odd until you try it.

Feta, protected in Greece since 2002, answers a different problem altogether. Made from sheep's milk, sometimes with a little goat's milk, it is kept in brine, which made it practical in a hot climate where fresh milk did not last long. The brine is not decoration. It is the reason the cheese exists in this form.

The easiest way into a regional cheese is to ask what it was protecting against. Winter, heat, distance from market and the end of the grazing season all leave their mark on the rind.

Europe's cheeses are often described as tradition. They are just as much a record of practical decisions made by people with too much milk and a long season ahead.

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