If the entire milk only be used, we have such cheeses as the Cheshire, the Double Gloucester, the Cheddar, the Wiltshire, and the Dunlop cheeses of Britain, the Kinnegad cheese of Ireland, and the Gouda and Edam cheeses of Holland. Even here, however, it makes a difference, whether the warm milk from the cow is curdled alone, as at Gouda and Edam, or whether it is mixed with the milk of the evening before, as is generally done in Cheshire and Ayrshire. Many persons are of opinion that cream, which has once been separated, can never be so well mixed again with the milk, that a portion of the fatty matter shall not flow out with the whey and render the cheese less rich.
If the cream of the evening's milk be removed, and the skimmed milk added to the new milk of the next morning, such cheeses as the Single Gloucester are obtained. If the cream be taken once from all the milk, the better kinds of skimmed-milk cheese, such as the Dutch cheese of Leyden, are prepared; while if the milk be twice skimmed, we have the poorer cheeses of Friesland and Groningen. If skimmed for three or four days in succession, we get the hard and horny cheeses of Essex and Sussex, which often require the axe to break them up.
Buttermilk Cheese.
But poor or butterless cheese will also differ in quality according to the state of the milk from which it is extracted. If the new milk be allowed to stand to throw up its cream, and this be then removed in the usual way, the ordinary skimmed-
milk cheese will be obtained by adding rennet to the milk. But if, instead of skimming, we allow the milk to stand till it begins to sour, and then remove the butter by churning the whole, we obtain the milk in a sour state, (buttermilk.) From this milk the curd separates naturally by gentle heating. But being thus prepared from sour milk, and without the use of rennet, buttermilk cheese differs more or less in quality from that which is made from sweet skimmed-milk. The acid in the buttermilk, especially after it has stood a day or two, is capable of coagulating new milk also; and thus, by mixing more or less sweet milk with the buttermilk before it is warmed, several other qualities of mixed butter and sweet-milk cheese may readily be manufactured.
Whey Cheese.
The whey which separates from the curd, and especially the white whey, which is pressed out towards the last, contains a portion of curd, and not unfrequently a considerable quantity of butter also. When the whey is heated, the curd and butter rise to the surface, and are readily skimmed off. This curd alone will often yield a cheese of excellent quality, and so rich in butter, that a very good imitation of Stilton cheese may sometimes be made with alternate layers of new-milk curd and this curd of whey.
Mixtures of Vegetable Substances with the Milk.
New varieties of cheese are formed by mixing vegetable substances with the curd. A green decoction of two parts of sage leaves, one of marigold, and a little parsley, gives its color to the green cheese of Wiltshire; some even mix up the entire leaves with the curd. The celebrated Schabzieger cheese of Switzerland, is made by crushing the skim-milk cheese after it is several months old to fine powder in a mill, mixing it then with one-tenth of its weight of fine salt, and one-twentieth of the powdered leaves of the mellilot trefoil, (trifolium melilotus cerulea,) and afterwards with oil or butter, working the whole into a paste, which is pressed and carefully dried.