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I'll be making fresh cheeses again for Shavuot, the Jewish harvest
festival celebrated this year beginning at sundown Thursday and running
through sundown Friday. In ancient times, Shavuot was a joyous
pilgrimage festival celebrating the annual wheat harvest, when
thousands of farmers and their extended families traveled to the Great
Temple in Jerusalem to offer a basket of wheat and their first fruits
to God. Then, acting on behalf of the whole nation, the high priest
would place on the altar the offering that is unique to Shavuot: two
loaves of bread, baked from the newly harvested wheat. So why make
cheese?
Because just as the holiday has changed over the millenniums, so have
the culinary customs. Centuries after the destruction of the Temple,
exiled to foreign shores, the scholars of the Talmud infused the
holiday with new meaning; the ancient harvest festival, they explained,
coincided with a "spiritual harvest" -- namely, the date the Torah was
revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai.
To prepare for this blessed event, legend has it that the children of
Israel ate only dairy products to purify themselves, and in Hebrew
numerology, or gematria, the word for milk (halav) equals 40 -- the
same number of days Moses spent on Mt. Sinai as he waited to receive
the laws. This was incentive enough to have dairy products evolve as an
integral part in the holiday's fare.
Nature itself, though, provides another explanation. Like the spring
holidays of ancient Canaan and Rome, Shavuot occurs in the season when
animals grazing in the lush pastures green from winter rains produce an
abundance of milk; cheese-making, too, was part of spring harvest
festivals around the world.
But in those days, you wouldn't expect to find a Roquefort or a
cheddar. Even before the advent of global warming, the hot climate in
the Middle East precluded the aging of cheese. Instead, what you would
expect to find is creamy fresh white cheeses that were eaten fresh,
rolled into balls and packed in olive oil, or dried in lumps for
transporting on camelback to be grated as need be.
--
butterflygirl |
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