Buffalo mozzarella cheese: a bit of history

Mozzarella was first created and produced in Italy near Naples from the rich milk of water buffalos. In spite of the shortage of bibliographic sources, in Italy, the presence of these animals can be placed between the XII and the XIII century, in a sure and documented way. At the beginning of the year 1000, the water buffalo’s breeding developed in southern Italy and kept very often confined inside some of the big monastic orders of these Dark Age. Many documents between discovered in the Episcopal Archives of the XII century seem to prove historically that the consumption of buffalo cheeses became a part of ecclesiastic and laic customs in this period.

Mozzarella and Tomatoes

A medieval legislative document, the “Acta Imperia Seculi”, confirms that the commercial valuation of water buffaloes in 1200 and 1300 AD was even greater than that of other bovines. In Milan’s Sforzesco Archives of Milan some documents testify the presence of the buffalo also in some north regions; but here, they didn't find the same favorable natural environment which allowed their diffusion like in the South. In the half of the second millennium, the breeding of buffaloes became an important social and economic reality especially in the marshy zones of the central and south Italy.

By 1300, the breeding of water buffaloes was very much rooted in the south of Italy and its rural economic reality, in the Roman Pontifical State and also outside this part of southern Lazio. From this period, water buffaloes breeding became the uncontested way to use effectively the many marshy zones of Tuscany, southern Lazio, Campania, and Puglia where the damp marshes and the malaria often increased a progressive abandon of these territories from the local population forced to relocate in better areas. For the few small villages and communities of ecclesiastics and the little remaining population buffaloes represented a real fortune. Water buffaloes are strong animals, resistant to diseases, able to provide their own contribution to the work of the man at almost no costs and in very hard conditions. From their rich milk, more abundant in the winter months they produced appreciated cheeses still appreciated today like the “caciocavallo", buffalo milk butter, the fresh buffalo "ricotta" cheese and the excellent “provola affumicata” or wooden smoked mozzarella cheese.

This was a real wealth in such difficult harsh swamp lands where agriculture was almost impossible for the few who stayed. The buffaloes breeding activity expanded in Campania, Puglia, Calabria, Lazio and Marche and wherever the hydrologic system turned into a swamp of many of coastal areas and lowlands like the Pontino’s marshes in creating the favorable conditions to the diffusion of the breeding of the buffalos. Buffalos spread rapidly and adapted well in Low Volturno (northern Campania on the border with south Pontino and in Sele Plain; they exploited the marshland pastures otherwise not utilizable because of the periodic floods of the main local rivers. The breeding was based on a cyclical winter-summer transhumance to better reflect the nature and wild behavior of the animals.

Only few centuries later, between the XVII and the XIX century, the breeding of the was diffused steadily in many of the south zones of the Italian peninsula. While before milk had been worked and transformed in cheese mainly in the same place where the milking took place, from 1600, it was worked in specific rural buildings the "bufalare": they were rough countryside buildings of a circular shape, with a central chimney which allowed the right space to heat milk for the curdling and to provide hot water for the shaping of the forms.