provolone

The word provolone first appears in 19th-century Italian documents as an augmentative of provola, a pulled-curd cheese made in Campania and Calabria. Where provola was small and round, provolone was large: the suffix -one in Italian simply means the big one. Cheesemakers in the area around Battipaglia and Aversa stretched hot curds into teardrop shapes and smoked them to create a rind that could endure weeks of aging.

Provola itself traces to the medieval Latin probare, meaning to test or prove, a reference to the cheesemaker's art of testing the curd's elasticity before pulling it. The pasta filata technique, literally spun paste, was documented in southern Italian monasteries by the 14th century. The technique required heating curds in hot water and stretching them by hand until they reached the right texture, a process that could not be hurried.

In the 1860s and 1870s, northern Italian industrialists began relocating provolone production to Lombardy and Veneto, where dairy cattle were more plentiful and refrigerated railway cars could carry finished cheeses to Milan and beyond. By 1900, Cremona had become a center of provolone production, and the cheese appeared in Italian immigrant markets in New York and Buenos Aires. The name stayed the same even as the geography shifted dramatically northward.

Italy granted provolone PDO status in 1996, distinguishing Provolone Valpadana from the Campanian original. Thousands of tons are now exported annually, and the word provolone appears unchanged in English, French, German, and Spanish dictionaries. The augmentative that once described a large local cheese now names a category recognized on menus worldwide.