Cheesemaking in Italian

The first entry, il latte crudo, is milk that has never been heated, and the adjective inside it is one an English reader should distrust on sight. Crudo is the ordinary Italian word for uncooked: il prosciutto crudo is the ham that is cured rather than boiled, le verdure crude are the raw vegetables on the plate, and si mangia crudo says a thing is eaten as it came. Our own « crude » comes from the same Latin crudus and has kept almost none of that work. It went off to the oil field, where « crude oil » is il petrolio greggio, a different word altogether; and it went off to manners, where a crude remark is una battuta volgare and a crude method is un metodo grossolano. So « crude milk » on a label says something about the dairy rather than about the milk. Italian keeps the old sense alive even in the figurative use — la cruda verità is the truth nobody has softened. Keep « raw » for the milk, the ham and the vegetables, and leave « crude » to the barrel and to the insult.