Formaggio di Latteria Turnaria

Not a recipe so much as an institution: the latteria turnaria was a cooperative dairy in which each member took his turn at the cauldron, made his own cheese and sold it himself. The system was formalised in 1880, the first opening at Maniago, and it spread by the dozen across Friuli and beyond into Veneto, Trentino and Slovenia. It was already being abandoned after the Second World War when the 1976 earthquake finished most of them; reconstruction closed many dairies outright, and the survivors went as the small family farms went and as policy pushed producers to merge for the volumes and certifications that national sale demands.