Salva Cremasco

Salva Cremasco is an uncooked whole cow's milk cheese from the Lombard plain, made across the provinces of Cremona, Bergamo, Brescia, Lecco, Lodi and Milan. The shape is a square-based block, 11 to 13 centimetres a side for the small format, 17 to 19 for the large, and 9 to 15 centimetres tall, weighing between 1.3 and 5 kilos.

The rind is thin, yellow-pink, carrying natural surface moulds, and is washed and brushed with salted water through the ageing period. That washing keeps a bacterial smear alive on the surface, and the smear ripens the cheese from the outside in. The result is the feature that identifies Salva at a glance: a soft, almost translucent creamy band under the rind and a whiter, firmer, faintly crumbly core at the centre. The older the wheel, the further the creamy band has marched inward.

Minimum ageing is 75 days, but most Salva is sold at three to six months and some reaches a year. It has been DOP since 2011.

It is far less famous than its Lombard neighbours (Taleggio, Gorgonzola, Quartirolo) despite having the clearest origin story of any of them, one that is written into the name.

Two cheeses in one slice, and that is the point. The band under the rind is soft, lactic and savoury, with a washed-rind depth that suggests cellar and cooked butter without ever becoming pungent. The core is fresher, whiter, faintly crumbly and mildly acidic, tasting of clean milk and yoghurt.

Overall it sits between a ripe Taleggio and a young Tomme: milder than the first, more interesting than the second. The aroma is assertive when you unwrap it and much gentler on the palate. Older wheels get saltier, deeper and more mushroomy, and the acidic core recedes.

Eat it with a pickled green chilli, as they do in Crema, and the whole thing reorganises: the vinegar cuts the cream, the mild heat lifts the finish, and you understand why this specific cheese was paired with this specific pickle for a century before anyone wrote it down.

Start with the local way, because it is not decoration: thick slices of Salva with whole tighe alongside. Tighe are green chillies pickled in vinegar, grown around Crema: barely hot, sharply acidic, still crunchy. The vinegar cuts the creamy band under the rind and the mild heat lengthens the finish. In the osterie of the Crema plain this is served as an antipasto, a light main and sometimes as the entire meal.

If you cannot find tighe, any crunchy, sharp, low-heat pickled chilli does the job: Turkish or Greek pickled peperoncini are the easiest to buy abroad and are close enough.

In cooking it melts evenly and behaves well. Lay it over hot yellow polenta, stir it into risotto off the heat, or use it in a vegetable tart where you would otherwise use Taleggio: it brings more savour and less fat. On short pasta with pumpkin or radicchio it is excellent.

Whatever you do, take it out of the fridge half an hour early. Cold, the creamy band is firm and mute; at room temperature it turns spreadable and the cheese doubles in flavour.

This is a cheese that keeps working while it sits, and the rind drives it. A vacuum-packed wedge keeps at 4 to 8 C to the date the dairy prints; once open, wrap it in waxed paper and shut it in a lidded box, in the least cold part of the fridge. The box is not optional here, because the rind scents whatever shares a drawer with it. Never press cling film against the cut paste: the surface sweats and goes slick within a couple of days.

Over two to four weeks the creamy band under the rind widens further into the chalky core and the paste goes from crumbly to yielding, the smell strengthens, and the rind darkens and dries at the edges, sometimes growing a light bloom. The cut faces skin over and can be pared back with a knife before serving. Very little of this survives the freezer: the water in the paste tears the structure at minus 18 C and it thaws grainy, with liquid in the wrapping, so the fridge and a shorter horizon are the way it is kept.

Salva Cremasco is a brick, taller than it is wide, which is unusual enough to identify it across a counter: a rectangular block with square faces, a rough wrinkled rind in grey, ochre and brown patches, and the DOP mark on the label or the paper. The inside tells the age. Young, the core is chalk white, compact and crumbly, with a clean lactic smell; from a few months on, a soft creamy band spreads inward from the rind while the centre stays firm, and the rind itself gets emphatically pungent while the paste stays mild.

The two Lombard squares beside it are different cheeses. Taleggio is flat and wide with a smooth orange washed rind and a uniformly soft paste. Quartirolo Lombardo is low and flat with a very thin pale rind. Washed-rind cheeses on foreign counters, from Epoisses to Limburger, share the smell but not the crumbly centre. It is a small production and rarely leaves Italy, so where it does turn up it is priced as a specialist import and sold in wedges cut from the block.

Salva Cremasco travels badly and sells mostly at home. In the US it appears through Italian specialist importers and the better cheese counters, at roughly 18 to 26 dollars per pound and be prepared to order rather than browse. In the UK, Italian delicatessens and cheese specialists carry it occasionally at about 24 to 34 pounds per kilo.

Ask for the age. At three months you get a centimetre of creamy band and a large fresh core; at six months the band is three or four centimetres and the cheese is a different, deeper thing. Both are correct: decide which you want.

When judging a piece, look for the two-tone paste at the cut. A uniformly firm slice means it is too young; a uniformly soft one is not Salva. The rind should be damp and pink-yellow with natural moulds, not dry and cracked, and the smell should be cellar-like rather than ammoniac.

In Lombardy the price is 13 to 19 euros a kilo for standard wheels and 20 to 26 for raw-milk artisan production. For comparison, Taleggio, thirty times the output, sells at 11 to 16.

Crema is the place: a compact walled town on the Lombard plain, an hour from Milan and forty minutes from Bergamo and Cremona, with a Gothic cathedral facade on the main square and a run of osterie where salva e tighe is a standard order rather than a curiosity. Film-minded visitors will recognise the town and the surrounding countryside from Call Me by Your Name, which was shot around here.

The villages nearby repay a day on a bicycle: Pandino with its Visconti castle, Soncino with a Sforza fortress you can walk the walls of, Castelleone, Offanengo, Rivolta d'Adda. This is prosperous, flat, un-touristed farming country, and the dairies sell at the door.

At the table, do not leave without eating tortelli cremaschi, pasta parcels filled with crushed amaretti, raisins, a spiced biscuit called mostaccino and Roman mint, dressed with butter and grana. They are sweet, savoury, divisive and made nowhere else.

Cremona, half an hour away, gives you mostarda and violin workshops; Lodi and Bergamo are equally close. The whole area is an easy day trip from Milan and almost nobody makes it.