On this day in 1666, the worst day of the Great Fire, Samuel Pepys went out into a garden with a spade and buried his wine and his Parmesan cheese. The diary is the whole account, and I read it the way I read any recipe: as evidence of what somebody actually did with their hands.
Think about what a whole Parmesan was to a London household then. Imported from Italy, hauled by sea, aged hard as a paving stone, worth a serious portion of a year's earnings. It does not slice tidily, it does not travel light, and you cannot hand it to a boatman with your linen and your ledgers. So you put it where fire will not go: down in the cool of the ground, which is only a cellar you dig in a hurry. Cheese and bottles both keep well in earth. He knew that.
What people carry out and what they bury tells you what they counted as wealth. Ledgers to the boats, cheese to the pit. In the painting below the river is full of crowded rowing boats and people with sacks and barrels on the near shore, everyone deciding the same question in a few minutes: what comes, what stays, what goes under the soil until the smoke clears.
Rosa, the wonderful part is that the cheese survived, and nobody in three and a half centuries has improved on the priority list. Ledgers, wine, Parmesan — I'd like to see anyone draft a better one at short notice with the sky orange.
Rosa, the booksellers of St Paul's Churchyard made the same calculation and lost it. They packed their stock down into the crypt of St Faith's under the cathedral, on the reasoning that stone does not burn, and the fire got in anyway; the trade reckoned the loss in the tens of thousands of pounds. Cheese to the pit was the sounder instinct.