Estate Living Magazine Retirement Living - Issue 40 April 2019 | Page 60

G O O D
L I F E
HOW WE
GOT HERE
FROM
THERE
From Sumer to Vredendal, two Thursdays more than seven
centuries apart play a serendipitous role in the emergence of
South Africa’s cheese industry.
First Thursday
On the second Wednesday of the third month of the year 5546 BCE, Aradegi,
a Sumerian engineer, told his wife, the ever patient and beautiful Anrum, to
pack the camels for a two-day trip. They were to go to the town of Al Diwaniyah,
where he was to design an agricultural irrigation scheme. Because McDonalds
and Wimpy had not yet arrived in Sumer, Anrum had to take food for the road,
including some milk for Aradegi’s breakfast the following morning.
In those days people carried water in the air-dried stomach of a goat, so she
filled a newly dried one with fresh sheep’s milk and packed it among cool
eggplants to hang on the shady side of the packing camel. Anrum was looking
forward to the two-day trip to an area where she’d not been before and to
camp under the stars for a night – alone with her husband. But the trouble
started the first morning when Anrum wanted to pour some milk on Aradegi’s
breakfast dish of roasted wheat and millet. Instead of milk, she found a soft
solid white ball floating in a greenish liquid. Although she did not realise it
then, Anrum had just made the first cheese – ever! Soon the clever Sumerians
worked out that rennet, the milk-clotting enzyme found in the fourth stomach
of most ruminants, had simply coagulated the milk and, with the help of the
desert heat, made fresh cheese.
And so the first cheese was made on the second Thursday of the third month
of the year 5546 BCE in Sumer, known today as Iraq.