Extravagant banquets, rivers of red wine, triclinia: this is what comes to mind when we think of Roman food, am I right? Yet some of the most interesting survivals from Roman food culture are way simpler and … rural. In today’s Lazio, we can still enjoy a curious example of ancient Roman gastronomy, in the shape of a small sheep’s milk cheese called caciofiore: to make it, we use a cheesemaking technique already described nearly two thousand years ago.
Caciofiore’s secret is not in the milk, nor in where and how it ages, but in the way it coagulates. Unlike most European cheeses, which use animal rennet, caciofiore is traditionally made using the flowers of wild cardoon, a Mediterranean thistle related to the artichoke. Its dried purple flowers contain enzymes capable of curdling milk naturally, giving the cheese a softer texture and slightly herbaceous, sometimes bitter aromatic profile that is noticeably different from cheeses produced with animal rennet.
