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know your ingredients
Gorgonzola, leek and walnut orzotto, p76
As with many a fine food (tarte tatin, champagne, caesar salad…) the origins of gorgonzola are shrouded in myth. According to legend this classic northern Italian blue cheese was created by accident when a lovelorn dairyman neglected his evening cheesemaking duties in favour of his lover’s embrace. He tried to hide his neglectfulness by mixing the curds that had formed during the night with that morning’s milk. A few weeks later, that particular cheese developed blue veins – and tasted all the better for it.
It’s a story that’s as cheesy as gorgonzola itself and it bears an uncanny similarity to the one behind how roquefort cheese was ‘discovered’ by a similarly amorous Frenchman. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.
To separate myth from fact, I paid a visit to gorgonzola producer Si Invernizzi, a modern, familyowned dairy near Milan. My guide was Marco Invernizzi, whose great-grandfather started the business, and he’s having none of the romantic tales. “The cheese of this region gets its name from the town of the same name near Milan, where one seller was so prolific that people came to associate the name of the place with the cheese.”
Although gorgonzola is now made on the plains of Lombardy and neighbouring Piedmont, Marco tells me that for centuries it was a mountain cheese, originally called stracchino gorgonzola – ‘stracch’ being the Lombard word for ‘tired’.
As Juliet Harbutt says in her World Cheese Book, gorgonzola “was made in the autumn when the exhausted cows returned from the mountain pastures to the watery plains of Lombardy, where gorgonzola was the main trading town.”
Originally it was made with milk collected over two days, with naturally occurring mould, and aged in mountain caves. But since the