How Black Markets Saved Spanish Cheesemaking (Plus, a Cookie Sequel)

Spain is now known to food lovers as one of the great cheese producers of the world, but it wasn ’t always so. At one of my favorite websites, Atlas Obscura,Jackie Bryant tells the story of how “one of Europe’s oldest and most varied artisanal cheesemaking cultures… was once entirely illegal. And its survival can be largely attributed to a black market of underground cheese.”The villain in the piece is dictator Francisco Franco, who ruled from 1939 until his death in 1975, his policies on this subject lingering on for some years thereafter. With a taste for centralized command, Franco wanted to impose mass production and its efficiencies of scale on the dairy sector:  As part of this policy, quotas were enacted that outlawed milk production under 10,000 liters a day. This made small dairies and cheesemaking productions … illegal. To comply with the law, they had to sell their milk to larger companies.Enric Canut, a Barcelona-born cheesemaker, agricultural engineer, and dairy consultant, recalls a catalogue of Spanish cheeses compiled by the government in 1964. “Five years later,” he says, “most of those same cheeses were illegal!”So traditional cheesemaking went underground. Especially in independent-minded rural areas like Galicia, most farmers quietly defied the government. They would report milk  as having been personally consumed by the farm family itself, even if that meant by the hundreds of gallons a week. And they would meet in covert open-air m...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs