24 Origins of Cheese Names - mental_floss - List Show (243)

Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss on YouTube

And did you know that Gouda cheese is Dutch? It's named after the Dutch city of Gouda, or Gouda

It's been made in the city's surrounding area for at least a thousand years, and then it would be brought into the city to be sold and traded there

That's the first of many cheese name origins that I'm going to share with you today in this video presented by GEICO

Like many cheeses, Camembert is also named after a place, the Camembert region of France

or as the French call it, France. Sorry, I took three years of high school French

France is the only French word I know, so I have to brag about it. The cheese was invented there in 1791 by the farmer Marie Harrel

She was actually trying to follow the advice of a priest she'd met from Brie

Which means, of course, that Brie is also named after a place. By the way, my favorite cheese in the world? Brie

My least favorite cheese in the world? The crust of Brie. Now we don't know for sure when brie was invented, but there are accounts of Charlemagne enjoying

a cheese near Moe, which is a town in Brie. They've been making feta since around the 8th century BCE in Greece

The word is Greek, but it's borrowed from a similar Italian word meaning slice

Monterey Jack is named after both a place and a person. The place, Monterey, California, where Mexican Franciscan friars made the cheese in the 1700s

Then a businessman named David Jack started selling it and added his name

We don have a picture of him but he probably looked like this Monterey Jack is often mixed with Colby cheese which originated in Colby Wisconsin It might have had a different name if it was invented a little earlier though because it was created in 1874 just three years after the town was founded

The cheese was first made by Joseph F. Steinwand. Man, if it had just been invented before Colby was founded, we could call it Steinwand

Stilton is named after the UK village of Stilton, but it's actually illegal to make Stilton in Stilton because Stilton cheese is so disgusting

No, actually it's because Stilton is where the cheese was sold, not where it was made

and when geographic protection for cheeses came in, Stilton wasn't one of the areas where Stilton could actually be made

Cottage cheese has been a thing since ancient Greece and Egypt, but it's only been called that since the 1800s because it was often made in cottages

Cheshire cheese is the oldest British cheese, dating from at least the 12th century, and it's named after the English county of Cheshire

Same place the cats come from, I assume. The French cheese Munster, which is different from Munster with an E cheese, is named after the town of Munster in France

The town was named in the 7th century for its monastery, and the cheese was originally made in those monk's cellars

It's believed that Roquefort cheese has existed since at least the 1st century in Rome, because Pliny the Elder wrote about it

Nowadays it's a law, actually, that a cheese can only be called Roquefort if it was made

out of sheep's milk and aged in the caves of Roquefort-sur-Souzon in France

French fans of mentofloss, how great is my pronunciation of your wonderful homeland

Alright, onto cheddar cheese. Finally something I can pronounce Also named for the caves it was made in these are in the village of Cheddar in Somerset southwest England Manchego cheese is produced in Spain It gets its name from the breed of sheep whose milk is in the cheese Manchega sheep

By the way, the cheese might not have been named after a place, but the sheep are. They come from the La Mancha region of Spain

Pecorino is also a sheep's cheese. In fact, it's named for the Italian word for sheep, pecora

Another cheese named after an animal, bouche de cheve, which is French for roll of goat cheese

Gruyere is from the Gruyere region of Switzerland, and it's been made there since at least the 12th century

It was so popular that they started selling it in the cheese capitals, France and Italy

Speaking of Switzerland, you can probably guess that they gave us Swiss cheese, and they did

but in Switzerland it's known as Emmental cheese, after the region where it was invented

Most of what we call Swiss cheese is actually manufactured in the United States

Provolone is an Italian word meaning large provola, and provola is a different Italian cheese

It's believed that it's named after a tradition where religious leaders visiting the convent of San Lorenzo in Capua would be offered a mozza approvatura, meaning

That was really good, really good Italian! Anyway, as my Phelian-Italian speakers already know, that means like a sample of the main cheese

And if the word mozza sounds familiar, it should, because it would spin off into mozzarella

The Italian word mozzare means to cut off, and the cheese is made by cutting curds and making them into balls

By the way, is this episode making anyone else hungry for extra cheese pizza, or is it just me and Big Zombie

Parmesan was created to resemble the older Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, which explains the name

Parmigiano is named after a couple different Italian provinces Parma and Reggio Emilia Ricotta is the Italian word for re It called that because ricotta is made of the whey that left over after the curds are removed

Limburger cheese is named after the Duchy of Limburg, where it was first produced in

the 19th century. The Duchy of Limburg was a state in the Holy Roman Empire, which included

modern-day Belgium and Germany and the Netherlands, but nowadays most of the cheese comes from

Germany. Gorgonzola is named after the town in northern Italy where residents claim to have invented the cheese. The legend goes that a cheese maker went to meet his girlfriend

one night before he had the chance to finish making a batch of cheese. So the next day

he came back to find that some mold had grown over his batch of cheese. He dumped that batch

in with a new batch so he wouldn't get fired, and that's how the blue veins and unique

odor emerged. And finally, I returned to my salon to tell you that American cheese got its name in the

late 18th century because colonists in the Americas started exporting cheddar cheese back

to Britain. So it was the English who dubbed it American cheese. For a while it was the

was known here as yellow or store cheese. Then about a century later it got nicknames

like factory cheese, rat trap cheese, or rat cheese. But you know, there's something

about the name American cheese that's just a little more appetizing