Herders and nomads: cheese and tradition
Cheese of the herding peoples: transhumance, the steppe, the mountain and the desert.
Cheese began with herders, and herders still make some of the world's most distinctive cheeses. Moving with their animals between seasonal pastures, they need food that travels and keeps: hard-dried churpi in the Himalaya, kurt on the Central Asian steppe, aaruul in Mongolia, wagashi among the Fulani of West Africa, and the oscypek and bryndza of Carpathian shepherds. Sami reindeer herders once made cheese as well.
The steppe and Mongolia
On the steppe of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia, herders keep sheep, goats, cattle, yaks, horses and camels, and make a long list of dairy foods: kumis from mare's milk, öröm, a clotted cream, byaslag, a pressed cheese, and aaruul, dried curd. Summer, when the herds give most milk, is the season of white foods, and families dry aaruul on the roofs of their gers for the winter. Kazakh and Kyrgyz kurt, salted balls of dried curd, travel in saddlebags.
Mountain shepherds
In the Carpathians and the Tatras, shepherds spend the summer in wooden huts, milking sheep and making cheese twice a day. Polish oscypek and bryndza, Slovak bryndza and Romanian caș and telemea come from this life. In the Pyrenees, shepherds made Ossau-Iraty in summer huts in the high valleys. In the Himalaya, Gaddi shepherds and Bakarwal herders move their flocks to the high meadows each summer, and the yak herders of Ladakh, Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan make churpi at their summer camps.
Africa and the far north
In West Africa, Fulani herders make wagashi, a soft cheese set with the sap of the Sodom apple, Calotropis procera, and often coloured red on the outside with the leaves of a sorghum plant; it is sold in markets in Benin, Nigeria and Ghana. In Mauritania, camel herders supplied the milk for Caravane, the camel's milk cheese of Nouakchott. In the far north, Sami herders once milked reindeer in summer and dried the rich cheese for the winter.
Worth knowing
- Kurt: Dried curd balls of the Kazakh and Kyrgyz steppe
- Aaruul: Mongolian dried curd
- Byaslag: Mongolian pressed cheese
- Oscypek: Smoked cheese of Tatra shepherds
- Bryndza: Soft sheep's cheese of the Carpathians
- Ossau-Iraty: Pyrenean shepherds' cheese
- Wagashi: Fulani cheese set with plant sap
- Chhurpi: Himalayan herders' cheese
Sources and further reading
- Transhumance on Wikipedia
- Mongolian cuisine, Wikipedia
- Calotropis procera, Wikipedia
- Bryndza, Wikipedia
Original text by the EveryCheese desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Customs are described as tradition, not as advice. If we have something wrong, tell us.
Herders and nomads on EveryCheese
The cheeses written up so far, best known first.
Nothing matches those filters yet. Take one off, or check back: new cheeses are written every day.