Wooden cheese press

This wooden fresh cheese press, whose wood has been treated, dates from the late 19th century.

It comes from an Aragonese farmhouse (masía) in the province of Teruel, specifically from the mountainous areas located between the towns of Cantavieja and Fortanete. A masía is an isolated country house dedicated to livestock farming. These buildings were made with the materials available in their immediate surroundings.

It is a press for making fresh cheese, a common food in the diet of the masoveros (farmhouse inhabitants) thanks to the abundance of milk from sheep and goats. The piece incorporates a cavity with a lower hole that allowed the whey and liquids to drain during pressing, facilitating the production of cheese.

Today, in addition to its enormous ethnological and decorative value, this piece can be reused as a small shelf to place spices, small books, plants, or other objects, bringing a rustic and authentic character to any room.

Dimensions: 

Exterior part 
37.5cm x 14cm x 10cm 

Interior part

32cm x 10cm x 6cm

(Objects seen in the image, apart from the wooden fresh cheese press, are not included)

Additional information:

The masoveros began to abandon the farmhouses between 1955 and 1970 due to the lack of electrification in the rural area.

This piece comes from a farmhouse whose owner is a 92-year-old man, a masovero and saddler from the area, one of the last who still dedicate themselves to maintaining the remaining farmhouses. It is made of a single piece of wood, which has witnessed the passage of time and the passing of years. Because of this, the outer part of the wood, called sapwood because it is the youngest part of the tree, has acquired a unique personality thanks to the action of woodworm.

Furthermore, it must be taken into account that this area of the country did not enjoy the benefits of modernity at the same rate as other regions of Spain, and even today it still lacks some of them. It was a forgotten area during both the dictatorship and the current democracy, with unpaved roads and no access to running water or electricity. Practically nothing was done to prevent the people who lived in the farmhouses from having to abandon their childhood homes, where they had lived for generations. All of this caused the area to even remain stuck in time. This allowed its inhabitants to create gadgets like this: an object that does not seek to be of the best possible quality, nor to be made with more refined workmanship, nor to be a mere decorative element. It is an object created to be used, to make people's lives easier. It represents the philosophy of the rural areas of the Iberian Peninsula and their way of taking advantage of everything around them, using a nearby white pine to make a tool for a specific task.

Although it was not an item of great value in its time, because it was an everyday object, the passage of years, continuous use, and the fact of having been created out of necessity and not whim, at a time when the trade of shepherding was in decline, have transferred its history and experiences to the soul of the wood. All of this makes it an authentic piece of history that hopes to continue living for many more years while continuing to fulfill a function.