You are immediately introduced to Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Crow” – the one in which the crow has found a piece of cheese but is tricked into dropping it by the flattering fox. Push a button and listen to it being recited in wonderfully incomprehensible West Flemish dialect.

A bit further, posters explain the importance of milk in the human diet. It starts off nice and easy with Romulus and Remus being nourished by the mother wolf. Then there’s a picture of…crikey, what on earth is that old man doing? It’s the legend of the mammelokker. A toothless old criminal was thrown into a dungeon in Ghent and sentenced to death by starvation. The only person allowed to visit him was his daughter. She had just given birth, and a daily breastfeed through the bars of his cell kept him alive.

In a review of sensational ways to point out the health benefits of drinking milk, that would be pretty high on the list.

After that, things calm down, although there are still plenty of surprises. Did you know that original mozzarella cheese was made from water buffalo milk? And in medieval Europe milk was not obtained from cows, but goats. Apparently, before the cow was domesticated, it was a fleet-footed, deer-like creature nimbly bounding through the forests. Kind of hard to imagine, but it wasn’t until cows were converted into beasts of burden that it was discovered that a cow supplies much more milk than a goat.

Then you enter a reconstruction of a cheese factory from the 1930s. The original museum building was a 19th-century farmhouse. During the First World War, the Spruytte family fled to Normandy and lived on a farm where cheese was made. After the war, they returned to Passendale and rebuilt their farmhouse.

“They decided to make the most of their new skills and started to make Pont l’Evêque,” explains the museum’s curator Michaël Pector. “By the 1930s, their cheese factory was proving to be a great success, especially as cheese-making was new to this part of Belgium.”

In the 1940s, when they moved production, the building gradually fell into disrepair. In 1995, the old cheese factory and its material were given protected status and restoration began. De Oude Kaasmakerij was officially opened in 2003.

Multilingual displays describe how cheese was made in the 1930s, while TV screens show video clips of modern-day production methods in the Belgomilk cheese factory down the road in the centre of Passendale.

A further fascinating insight can be gained by examining the factory’s home-made milk churn draining rack. When milk was received from the farmers, the churns were emptied into the weighing basin and the weight of milk recorded so that the farmers could be paid. Time is money, so there was no time to wait for the churns to drip dry. At least that’s what they told the farmers.

However, when the farmer left, the supposedly empty milk churns were placed upside down on a rotating rack to drain at leisure into a vat. In effect, it was free milk. A draining milk churn provided about 10 centilitres of milk dregs. Not much, you might think. But with 500 churns passing through the factory each day, that adds up to a daily gain of 50 litres, or 15,000 litres of free milk per year.

Ten litres make one kilogram of cheese, so that’s a lot of cheese made with free milk. “Very West Flemish,” adds Pector with a rueful smile.

Today, milk is subject to all kinds of tests. In the past, as the museum’s rudimentary laboratory shows, the best way to discover whether milk was good or bad was by tasting it. Later in the process, the same cheesemaker would taste a piece of cheese, check its colour, feel its consistency and smell a sample to know how well it was maturing.

The museum invites you to play your own smelling game. Buttons release a series of cheesy odours into tubes, over which you are encouraged to take a deep whiff. They include over-ripe Camembert, Roquefort and goat’s cheese.

Children can participate in a treasure hunt and take their own photographs which will then appear on the museum’s website. Outside they can play a tune on the “churn organ”.

New for 2009 is an exhibition on the Milk Brigade. This was a Belgian promotional campaign that was launched in 1959 to encourage children to drink milk. If they promised to drink one glass every day they would become Milk Brigadiers. It was a huge success. On display are the  membership cards, posters and TV commercials. Prizes could be won, including modern inventions such as transistor radios and cassette players, as well as tickets to the Olympic Games.

Look out for the cute photos of the 500,000th Milk Brigadier, Rudi Meeuwis, who seemed to achieve the status of a minor celebrity. Thankfully for the organisers, he was a fresh-faced, well educated and perfectly bilingual young boy. What a “lucky” scoop!

According to tradition, Cleopatra owed her beauty to daily baths in donkey milk. Cows’ milk can start to congeal with body heat, explains Pector. “Asses milk contains little or no casein so would have been ideal for bathing in, although she would have needed a lot of it.”

At the end of your tour, you come face to face with a full-size and amazingly lifelike model of the beautiful queen reclining naked in her bath, provocatively sponging milk over her perfect breasts. I just love these West Flemish.

www.deoudekaasmakerij.be