Cheese, like wine, is something that can have a lot of variation from area to area, with hundreds of techniques available for creating different kinds of cheeses. And just as there are many variations of cheese, there are many different names of these cheeses to go with them. There is not right or wrong way to name a cheese, though if you have a homemade cheese you want to sell, there are plenty of options for coming up with names of the cheeses you make.
Location
Many of the names
of cheeses come from where the cheese was produced, again sharing a similarity
to many wines that are often named for regions in which they were made. If the
location that you select is your farm, then the names of your cheeses are
something like a brand name, identifying your product with where you created
it.
The name of one
cheese that was determined by this method is Maytag blue cheese, which is made
at the Maytag Dairy Farms in Iowa. One interesting variation is Roquefort,
which is actually named after the caves of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, which is
where this blue cheese gets the mold that makes up its veins.
Rather than coming
up with the name of a cheese based on a farm where the cheese is made, some
names of cheeses are based on entire regions where the cheese is produced. For
example, Limburger cheese is named after the Limburg region of Belgium. Gouda,
similarly, is the name of a cheese from the Netherlands and named after a city
located there.
Variety of Cheese
Sometimes the names
of cheeses become disassociated with the area they originally came from, and
can be made in many different areas with the same name. For instance, cheddar
cheese is the name of a cheese that originally comes from the Cheddar region of
Scotland.
However, it is
common today for cheddar cheeses to be made in Wisconsin and other areas of the
world. In this way, it's like a trademark name that becomes used so much, the
name becomes a generic label for a product, like Kleenex tissues.
In this category,
you may find that the name of the cheese contains descriptive information about
how the cheese was made. For instance, smoked cheddar rather aptly describes
the way this cheese gets its distinctive flavour, as well as how it is set
apart from other cheddar variations.
But by far, most
names of cheeses exist as descriptive ways to show how and where the cheese was
made, and should likely be the basis for the names of your cheeses as well.
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