Banbury Cheese

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Hello everyone, I'm currently trying to recreate a lost cheese based on a 16th century recipe and while I've managed to gain some information the recipe as a whole confuses me. Here is the recipe:

Take a thin cheese vat, and hot milk as it comes from the cow. And run it forth withal in summer time. And knead your curds but once. And knead them not too small, but break them once with your hands. And in summer time salt the curds nothing but let the cheese lie 3 days unsalted. And then salt them. And lay one upon another but not too much salt. And so shall they gather butter. And in winter time in likewise, but then hot your milk. And salt your curds for then it will gather butter of itself. Take the wrung whey of the same milk and let it stand a day or two till it have a cream and it shall make as good butter as any other

Some things I was able to gather from the recipe is: the curds are cut lightly by hand and that it uses a thermophilic cheese culture.

 

[bernardsmith]

Responding with complete ignorance. It would seem to me that you are not really able to tell what cultures may have been involved, given that they seem to have added none but use the milk from the cow and so made use of whatever cultures were in the milk. And summer temperatures in Oxfordshire were /are sorta kinda temperate.


You might simply try what you imagine they might have done after obtaining some raw milk. I see Wikipedia suggests that in 1965 they tried to recreate this cheese but that no cheese maker was able to successfully pull it off. What you might do is check out historical food groups on facebook. There are some scholarly ones and they may be able to provide you with some more information.