centuries, before Charlemagne restarted the wells at Salsomaggiore, sailors brought salt from the Adriatic to Parma. For this labor they could receive either money or goods, including Parma’s most famous salt product, ham— prosciutto di Parma .
A fresco on a wall of the Parma city palace that recorded the city’s acquisition of thirty-one wells. The bull is the symbol of Parma. The fresco was destroyed when a tower collapsed on the palace in the seventeenth century. State Archive, Parma
Parma was a good place to make ham because before the sea air reaches Parma it is caught in the mountain peaks, producing rain and drying out the wind that comes down to the plain. That dry wind is needed for aging the salted leg in a place dry enough to avoid rotting. The drying racks for the hams were always arranged east to west to best use the wind.
Bartolomeo Sacchi, a native of the Po Valley town of Cremona, who became a well-known fifteenth-century author under the pen name Platina, gave blunt and easily followed instructions for testing the quality of a ham:
Stick a knife into the middle of a ham and smell it. If it smells good, the ham will be good; if bad, it should be thrown away.
The sweet-smelling ham of Parma earned a reputation throughout Italy that was credited not only to the region’s dry wind but to the diet of their pigs, a diet which came from the local cheese industry. The Po Valley, where butter is preferred to olive oil, is Italy’s only important dairy region. According to Platina, this was more a matter of necessity than taste.
Almost all who inhabit the northern and western regions use it [butter] instead of fat or oil in certain dishes because they lack oil, in which the warm and mild regions customarily abound. Butter is warm and moist, nourishes the body a good deal and is fattening, yet the stomach is injured by its frequent use.
Notice that Platina listed butter’s fattening quality as a virtue, although he was a writer who tended to look for the unhealthy in food including salt, about which he wrote:
“It is not good for the stomach except for arousing the appetite. Its immoderate use also harms the liver, blood, and eyes very much.”
And he was not much more sanguine about the pride of his native region, aged cheese.
Fresh cheese is very nourishing, represses the heat of the stomach, and helps those spitting blood, but it is totally harmful to the phlegmatic. Aged cheese is difficult to digest, of little nutriment, not good for stomach or belly, and produces bile, gout, pleurisy, sand grains, and stones. They say a small amount, whatever you want, taken after a meal, when it seals the opening of the stomach, both takes away the squeamishness of fatty dishes and benefits digestion.
The difference between fresh cheese and aged cheese is salt. Italians call the curds that are eaten fresh before they begin to turn sour, ricotta, and it is made all over the peninsula in much the same way. But once salt is added, once cheese makers cure their product in brine to prevent spoilage and allow for aging, then each cheese is different.
The origin of cheese is uncertain. It may be as old as the domestication of animals. All that is needed for cheese is milk and salt, and since domesticated animals require salt, that combination is found most everywhere. Just as goats and sheep were domesticated earlier than cattle, it is thought that goat’s and sheep’s milk cheeses are much older ideas than cow’s milk cheese. The habit of carrying liquids in animal skins may have caused the first cheeses since milk coming in contact with an animal skin will soon curdle.
Soon, herders, probably shepherds, found a more sophisticated variation known as rennet. Rennet contains rennin, an enzyme in the stomach of mammals which curdles milk to make it digestible. Usually, rennet is made from the lining of the stomach of an unweaned young animal because unweaned animals have a higher capacity to break down milk. Here, too, salt
A fresco on a wall of the Parma city palace that recorded the city’s acquisition of thirty-one wells. The bull is the symbol of Parma. The fresco was destroyed when a tower collapsed on the palace in the seventeenth century. State Archive, Parma
Parma was a good place to make ham because before the sea air reaches Parma it is caught in the mountain peaks, producing rain and drying out the wind that comes down to the plain. That dry wind is needed for aging the salted leg in a place dry enough to avoid rotting. The drying racks for the hams were always arranged east to west to best use the wind.
Bartolomeo Sacchi, a native of the Po Valley town of Cremona, who became a well-known fifteenth-century author under the pen name Platina, gave blunt and easily followed instructions for testing the quality of a ham:
Stick a knife into the middle of a ham and smell it. If it smells good, the ham will be good; if bad, it should be thrown away.
The sweet-smelling ham of Parma earned a reputation throughout Italy that was credited not only to the region’s dry wind but to the diet of their pigs, a diet which came from the local cheese industry. The Po Valley, where butter is preferred to olive oil, is Italy’s only important dairy region. According to Platina, this was more a matter of necessity than taste.
Almost all who inhabit the northern and western regions use it [butter] instead of fat or oil in certain dishes because they lack oil, in which the warm and mild regions customarily abound. Butter is warm and moist, nourishes the body a good deal and is fattening, yet the stomach is injured by its frequent use.
Notice that Platina listed butter’s fattening quality as a virtue, although he was a writer who tended to look for the unhealthy in food including salt, about which he wrote:
“It is not good for the stomach except for arousing the appetite. Its immoderate use also harms the liver, blood, and eyes very much.”
And he was not much more sanguine about the pride of his native region, aged cheese.
Fresh cheese is very nourishing, represses the heat of the stomach, and helps those spitting blood, but it is totally harmful to the phlegmatic. Aged cheese is difficult to digest, of little nutriment, not good for stomach or belly, and produces bile, gout, pleurisy, sand grains, and stones. They say a small amount, whatever you want, taken after a meal, when it seals the opening of the stomach, both takes away the squeamishness of fatty dishes and benefits digestion.
The difference between fresh cheese and aged cheese is salt. Italians call the curds that are eaten fresh before they begin to turn sour, ricotta, and it is made all over the peninsula in much the same way. But once salt is added, once cheese makers cure their product in brine to prevent spoilage and allow for aging, then each cheese is different.
The origin of cheese is uncertain. It may be as old as the domestication of animals. All that is needed for cheese is milk and salt, and since domesticated animals require salt, that combination is found most everywhere. Just as goats and sheep were domesticated earlier than cattle, it is thought that goat’s and sheep’s milk cheeses are much older ideas than cow’s milk cheese. The habit of carrying liquids in animal skins may have caused the first cheeses since milk coming in contact with an animal skin will soon curdle.
Soon, herders, probably shepherds, found a more sophisticated variation known as rennet. Rennet contains rennin, an enzyme in the stomach of mammals which curdles milk to make it digestible. Usually, rennet is made from the lining of the stomach of an unweaned young animal because unweaned animals have a higher capacity to break down milk. Here, too, salt
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