Making Cheese

At the start of the cheese making process rennet is added to the milk to coagulate it. This causes the milk to separate into solid curds, which are further processed into finished cheese, and liquid whey, which is drained off as it is not required.

Farmhouse cheese makers originally prepared their own rennet which they made from the stomach-membrane of a slaughtered unweaned calf. The recipes they followed had often been passed down through the family from mother to daughter. The resulting extracts they produced varied greatly.

From the 1870s a more standardised commercial rennet became available. This was used in the cheese making factories and by the more enlightened producers, although many cheese makers remained loyal to their home-made preparations for some years.

Once the milk had coagulated the liquid whey was removed leaving behind just the curds. Nowadays this by-product of cheese making is often concentrated and dried for use in the production of other foodstuffs. In the past, however, whey was a valued drink of both farm workers and townspeople while also being an important source of food for the dairy farm's pigs.

Curd cutters were used to cut the curd once the liquid whey had been drained away. By doing so any whey within the curd could also be removed. Dairymaids had at one time broken the curd by hand, squeezing each piece to remove the whey. Later they used wooden and then metal cutters.

The roughly broken curd is then tipped into the hopper of the cheese mill; it will then pass between two spiked rollers at the base of the hopper and then fall, now finely cut, into the container below. They are carrying out this task for several reasons. Milling allows the curd to be evenly salted (salt is added to flavour and preserve the cheese), to further cool the curd and to enable the dairymaids to pack it into moulds prior to pressing. The oldest method of milling was to simply tear the curd by hand. By the late-eighteenth century hand-powered curd mills were known to have been in use in the dairy.

Once the curd had been milled it was placed in a mould to be pressed into shape whilst also being drained of the last remaining whey. Cheese moulds were known by a variety of names such as chessels, chessets and vats. These wooden moulds were made from either a single turned piece of suitable timber or were of coopered construction. Usually only the smallest moulds were turned pieces. In the base of most cheese moulds were small draining holes, permitting any remaining whey in the curds to drain out; most moulds had about eight such draining holes. During the second half of the nineteenth century, cheese makers started to replace their wooden cheese mould with ones made of tinned metal.

When full of curd, the cheese mould would be placed in a press, the pressure applied compacting the curd and removing the last of the whey. Cheese presses were originally locally made of wood and stone. Presses of cast iron were seen in dairies from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.

Several types of cheese press have been used in Britain over the centuries. The oldest is the drop weight press which in its simplest form consisted of a large stone placed on top of the filled mould. Screw presses were also used. Lever presses were operated as the name suggests, a weight being hung on one end of a lever in order to pull the bar or pressing plate down onto the mould beneath. The other end of the lever would be fixed to the press, or, in its oldest form, to a strong static object such as a nearby wall.

In today's factories where great quantities of cheese are produced daily many filled cheese moulds are pressed together in large hydraulic gang presses. In the days of farmhouse dominated cheese making, the new cheeses might remain in the press for a number of days. Only today are they pressed in a matter of hours.

Once pressed the cheeses are then stored and dried on wooden shelves called traves. Each was usually marked with a reference number and the date of making.