From Gruyères to Gatchina: the meaning of cheese in Tsarist Russia

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although Russia has an extensive tradition of dairy products including fresh cheese, ripened and aged cheeses were introduced from abroad at least by the seventeenth century, and they immediately took on all sorts of new meanings. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cheese was a commodity, an object of international trade; it was the product of technology that Russians came to hope to master; and cheese was part of the world of taste and cultural change, finding its place on the tables of the elite and, eventually, of a wider population.