In English, this is also popularly known as Lady's Bedstraw or Yellow Bedstraw – in France it is also called "Caille-Lait" = "Milk curdler".
On Wikipedia it is described as an herbaceous perennial plant of the Rubiaceae family, native to Europe and Asia, a low scrambling plant with stems growing 60-120cm long, frequently rooting where they touch the ground.
This plant was often used in the Poitou area of France (could this be the influence of the Moors who knew about their plants – in particular the fig tree and the thistle – which would cause their milk to curdle?). Vegetable and fungal rennets are less used as they can cause a bitter taste. But these are compulsory in certain Spanish PDOs.
And one shouldn't forget that lemon or vinegar can also be used to make milk curdle and turn it into fromage blanc – but that's about all! Although... if I remember well, to make bruccio (a Corsican fromage frais - goat or sheep) they precipitate the whey with lemon.
in Gloucestershire, it is used to colour the cheese Double Gloucester
A French reader of this blog wrote me that scientists doubt for a very long time the capacity of Gaillet to make the milk curdle. Diderot, d'Alembert and Parmentier, to quote only them but also modern researchers recently tried the experiment and deducted from it " what it remarkable there, it is that since Dioscoride until us there is not a single author who even dared to raise a doubt on the property of the caillelait. So as it is entitled to conclude that all the writers copied slavishly, and so they passed on an error a single experiment would have so easily been able to annul. [] "!!
Pictures of Galium here
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