Cheese has been making it onto people’s dinner plates (or their equivalent) since the early Stone Age some 10,000 years ago. The oldest pictorial evidence of the existence of cheese dates back 4500 years to the Sumerians of Mesopotamia and clearly shows cows being milked, the milk being strained and butter being churned. It is not a huge leap from this frieze to cheese production, as it is directly mentioned only 500 years later, again by the Sumerians, on a clay tablet inscribed with pictograms. A Sumerian farmer had used the tablet to record how many head of cattle he had and the harvest he gathered over a number of years.

Ever since archaeologists discovered a way to tell from old bits of pots what was once stored in them, we have discovered that the Egyptians have been eating cheese for the better part of 5000 years. The cheese in question would have been either goat’s or sheep’s cheese. Both receive a mention in the Bible. The doubting Job is quoted as spouting: “Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese?” The Bible also tells the story of how David, son of Isaiah, presents his brothers’ employer with the gift of ten fresh cuts of cheese and the circumstances of his defeat of Goliath.

Cheese was also something the Greeks ate on a daily basis, as evidenced by Homer’s Odyssey. The biggest producer in this tale is the giant Polyphemus, who keeps Odysseus and his companions prisoner in a dark cave. Homer writes: “Then presently he curdled half the white milk...that it might serve him for supper.” The Greeks stored their cheese in baskets weaved from reeds.

The Romans were au fait with a good dozen different cheeses as early as imperial times, and knew how to make it last longer by squeezing out the whey, adding salt and smoking it. However, local gourmands grew bored of their home-grown cheeseboard and soon took a fancy to Bithynian cheese from Asia Minor, the Gauls’ caseus nemausensis (the forerunner to Roquefort) and German cheeses. Indeed, they gave German the word for cheese that is still used today, Käse (from caseus), while the French and Italians took fromage and formaggio from the late-period Latin formaticus, the name for a range of small cheeses. The Romans later also enjoyed Swiss cheese, with emperor Antonius Pius said to have eaten himself to death indulging in cheese from the mountains of Helvetia.

The first cheese recipes date from the time of the Roman writer Columella and appear in the ten-volume De re coquinaria published by one Marcus Gavius Apicius. It is thought that Apicius himself was not the author, although he was renowned as a gourmand not only for his lavish parties, but also for inventing new types of food which were taught in schools founded especially for this purpose. Apicius’ work even includes a kind of precursor to fondue. The Roman spent the majority of his fortune on his culinary hobbies, and when it dwindled away to nothing, he took his own life for fear of starving to death.

Since cheese was commonly eaten by the Germans of old, reports of it can be found as far back as Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum. However, it was Emperor Charles the Great who issued the world’s first butter and cheese directive, in Aachen in 812. He was terribly fond of the stuff, which had been offered to him by one of his bishops during one of his unannounced visits, so he imposed an annual tax on the church that comprised two consignments of the cheese. Norms existed at the time in terms of how big cheese should be, as it was a means of payment on mandatory taxes for feudal lords, and farmers attempted to slip smaller cheeses into their consignments.

The Germans, who were specialists in sour milk cheese, learned to make a kind of mixed cheese from the Romans that used rennet fermentation. It was at this time that nuts and pepper also started to be used to add flavour to the cheese.

The Swiss Schabziger cheese is first mentioned in the year 1000, followed closely by the French Roquefort in 1070. Gruyere and Cheshire were well known by the 12th century, when the earliest records of Parmesan and Gorgonzola emerge. Sbrinz, Taleggio and Pecorino date back to the 13th century, when Emmentaler first goes by that name. Many of them are in fact much older though, having their origins with the cheese-loving Romans. Around 1225 the order of the knights of Saxony allowed butter and cheese to be produced in the dairy manors of Pomerania. Cheese production was a thriving industry in the Germany and western Europe of 1500, mostly thanks to monasteries and convents, in which it was eaten during Lent.

Quite how long people have actually been eating cheese though is anybody’s guess, but it is thought that cheese has been around as long as Homo sapiens has been domesticating cattle. The Bible talks about cheese on a number of occasions. For example, Isaiah sends his son David into the war camp of King Saul with ten fresh cuts of cheese and some bread, as is illustrated in an engraving from 1542.