The historic shipwreck of the Swedish royal vessel Kronan is the gift that keeps on giving.

The Kronan has been at the bottom of the Baltic Sea since 1676, when it was sunk during a battle between Denmark and the Netherlands. (The fact that two of the gentlest countries in Europe used to fight each other is kind of cute, isn’t it?) The shipwreck was discovered in 1980 and, since then, has proved a treasure trove for researchers. Its 17th-Century artefacts, which have included currency, old-school pharmaceuticals and brain tissue belonging to the ship’s ill-fated crew – macabre, we know, but still – have all helped to give historians a much-needed window onto the past.

Now divers say they’ve discovered something far more important to hungry magazine types like ourselves: a hunk of 340-year-old cheese.

“It’s a pretty good guess that it’s some kind of dairy product, and we think it is cheese,” Kalmar County Museum researcher Lars Einarsson told reporters last week.

Einarsson and his colleagues were diving through the wreckage at the beginning of July when they came across a black tin jar buried in clay on the seafloor. When they brought the jar back to the surface, the change in pressure caused some of its contents leak out through the lid (which kind of makes us hungry for queso fundido).

“That’s when the smell hit us,” Einarsson said. “I certainly don’t recommend tasting it. It’s a mass of bacteria.”

He compared the smell to a mixture of yeast and Roquefort

“It’s been in the mud, so it’s reasonably well preserved, but at the same time it has been at the bottom of the sea for 340 years,” he said. “We’re not talking Tutankhamun’s burial chamber.”

We’re going to go out on a limb here and say that Einarsson’s being overly cautious. People eat ancient food all the time. Indeed, some actually pay a premium to do so.

Champagne lovers have been well-served by shipwrecks in the past. One hundred and sixty-eight bottles of bubbly were discovered by divers in 2010 in another Baltic Sea wreck– dangerous sea, the Baltic, as far as sinking and dying goes – as were a number of bottles of what is believed to be the world’s oldest drinkable beer. The bottom of the ocean provided perfect storage conditions for both: total darkness and a constant temperature. Wine experts who tried the sparkling said it was just about perfect.

But you certainly don’t need to sink a ship in order to perfectly preserve something. In 2014, Irish chef Kevin Thornton sampled a 4000-year-old lump of butter someone had found preserved in a peat bog. (As we have reported in these pages in the past, people are finding butter in bogs all the time. Thanks to their temperature, acidity and oxygen levels, such swampy quagmires were apparently a great way for our Iron Age ancestors to preserve dairy products.)

“There’s fermentation, but it’s not fermentation because it’s gone way beyond that,” Thorton said. “Then you get this taste coming down or right up through your nose.”

Last year, a group of polar scientists working in Greenland came across a cache of military rations – crackers, jam, cocoa powder, meatballs and beans – from an expedition 60 years earlier. They readily tucked into them.

“It was funny actually,” expedition leader Gina Moseley told reporters at the time. “We had kilograms of porridge back at basecamp, so we were eating a lot of it. Just dried milk powder and porridge. It was nice, but we were thinking ‘some jam would be really nice right now.’”

Actually, writing this article has made us rather hungry for cheese. Unfortunately, the stuff that was discovered on the Kronan is currently being kept at low temperatures to keep it from decaying while researchers study it, which means we’re going to have to satisfy our cravings elsewhere.

“I think it smells quite nice, because I like exotic food,” Einarsson said. “But I would not want to taste it.”

That’s all right, mate. We’ll take your share.