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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• cheese
• technology

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alison K. Smith

Alison K. Smith is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Toronto, and the author of Recipes for Russia: Food and Nationhood under the Tsars (DeKalb, 2008) and Cabbage and Cuisine: A History of Food and Drink in Russia (London, 2021), as well as co-editor with Tricia Starks and Matthew Romaniello of The Life Cycle of Russian Things: From Fish Guts to Fabergé (London, 2021).