The legend of the “blue cheese” - Why do we eat spoiled food?

Cheeses veined with blue-gray mold are a symbol of good taste and luxury. They are mass produced nowadays and are renowned as cheeses of exquisite flavor. What made people want to eat something that is essentially spoiled?

Each version says it was just a coincidence.

According to The New York Times, the first blue cheese was made two millenia ago. The Roquefort cheese is mentioned by Pliny the Elder in the 1st century A.D. However, some historians claim that Pliny simply praised a goat cheese from Gaul, without ever mentioning it was blue.

According to a legend, a Gallic shepherd left his lunch, made of bread and cheese, in a cave, in order to meet his lover. While the outcome of the love affair is not known, the legend says that the shepherd returned three months later and remembered that he had left his lunch there. He was probably very hungry, so he ate the moldy blue cheese he had found there and evidently liked it very much.

Ever since then, Roquefort (and other blue cheeses) has been a famous and valued cheese, and it proved to be a favorite of kings as well. The French King Charles VI (The Mad) signed a protocol in 1411 putting the cheese under protection from foreign competition.

The British have their own version of this cheese, as do other nations (Danish Blue). Each country has its own origin story, with accident playing a key role in all of them.

The mold developing in the cheese is called Penicillium roqueforti and is in fact a type of fungus. It is found in Roquefort, Gorgonzola and other cheeses. Even though traditional ways of production, entailing leaving the cheese to “ripen” by itself under controlled conditions to the point where the mold develops, is still practiced by some, mass production is much more widespread. The fungus is now purposefully added in the factories and today's cheeses feature controlled aromatic mold patterns.

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Danish Blue Cheese

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