1. Definition and background

A long history

Any cheese-maker will tell you that knowledge of cheese-making technology is an accumulation of an understanding of accidents.

It's interesting to imagine that 7,000 years BC (perhaps 12,000 years, according to recent discoveries), the beginnings of the farming and dairy civilization were succeeded by the cheese-making civilization, thanks to an accident. One day, supposedly in Mesopotamia, the first man to become a cheesemaker was carrying milk in a ruminant bladder used as a sack, which gelled under the effect of time and heat. The scientist could have explained to him a little later that the abomasum, a veritable stomach, naturally contains two types of enzymes, chymosin (from the Greek khumós, meaning juice or mood) and pepsin (from the Greek pepsis, meaning to digest),...