This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2008 by Anne Mendelson
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-35121-8
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4000-4410-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mendelson, Anne.
Milk : the surprising story of milk through the ages / by Anne Mendelson.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4000-4410-8
1. Milk—History. 2. Cookery (Milk) I. Title.
SF251.M46 2008
641.3’7109—dc22 2008019620
Manufactured in the United States
v3.1
IN MEMORIAM
M.I.
E.S.M.
ILLUSTRATIONS CREDITS
AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY LIBRARY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS 1.1 (Richard Lydekker, Royal Natural History [vol. 2], 1894) 1.2 (Richard Lydekker, Wild Oxen, Sheep, and Goats, 1898), 1.4 and 1.5 (John G. Wood, Our Living World [American edition], 1885), 2.4 (William Youatt, Cattle, 1834), 5.3 and 5.11 (John Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India, 1891)
COLLECTIONS OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS: 1.3 (Jean Francois Champollion, Monuments de l’Egypte et de la Nubie, p. 1844–99), 1.6 (Illustrated London News, 1864), 1.7 (Edward Moor, The Hindu Pantheon, 1810), 1.8 and 2.5 (Charles Louis Flint, Milch Cows and Dairy Farming, 1858), 2.1 (George W. Thornbury, Old and New London [vol. 4], 1872), 2.3 (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, May 15, 1858), 6.4 (Magasin pittoresque, 1837)
THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY 1.9 (The Cries of New York, 1845 edition, NYHS negative #54406), 2.2 (Harper’s Weekly, August 17, 1878, NYHS negative #80839d)
THE STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA 4.1 (Australian Illustrated Weekly, November 11, 1893)
RALPH SELITZER, The Dairy Industry in America, 1976 5.1, 5.9, 5.10
HEDWIG DORN, Zur Stütze der Hausfrau, 1918 5.5, 5.8, 5.12, 6.7, 6.8, 8.3
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
PART I
MILK, MILCH ANIMALS, AND COOKING
Beginnings and Traditions
THE STORY OF MODERN MILK
Or, Is This What We Really Want?
RAW VS. PASTEURIZED, ORGANIC VS. CONVENTIONAL
A Minority Opinion
WHITE MAGIC 101
PART II • RECIPES
FRESH MILK AND CREAM
YOGURT
CULTURED MILK AND CREAM
BUTTER AND TRUE BUTTERMILK
FRESH CHEESES (INCLUDING BRINED CHEESES)
A Note on Shopping Sources
Acknowledgments
Select Bibliography
Index
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
PREFACE
This book has grown out of a lifelong love of milk and fresh dairy products. It is the culinary guidebook, dairy-chemistry-for-cooks primer, and eclectic recipe collection that I always vainly wished somebody had written. And it developed into something else that I’d always wanted to find: a geographical-historical exploration of the world’s milky ways, including those that have shaped the modern American milk supply for better or worse.
Milk itself would have been a fascinating subject at any time in history. It is really and truly the First Food, at least for all members of the mammal class. The practice of milking was an anchor of many prehistoric civilizations, one of humanity’s oldest and deepest bonds with domestic animals. The animals raised for the purpose are remarkable creatures, though they remain nearly invisible to most of the people who put milk on shopping lists. What they produce is a biochemical marvel that modern science has not yet finished analyzing. Its still-unplumbed complexities are exactly what make it irreplaceable in a huge number of the world’s cuisines. In the ancient world it often had religious significance as a ritual offering; in India it still has sacred associations. On a more earthbound level, it has figured tremendously in the farm econo-mies of most industrialized nations.
But I’m not sure that any previous historical juncture would have been an equally fruitful—or fraught—moment for stepping back to survey the many dimensions of milk, especially in the United States. It gets lots of headlines these days, some of them pleasanter reading than others. Among the most striking features of the early twenty-first-century dairy scene are:
• Milk in many ways exemplifies an American love-hate relationship with food, an endless tug-of-war between exalting and demonizing things on the basis of medical claims and counterclaims.
• It is also an alarming example of farming and processing technology somehow run amok, careening down ever more extreme paths with less and less connection to anything recognizable as real milk.
• On a more encouraging note, a resurgence of small-scale dairying and dairy farming is proceeding under our noses just as many people become aware of a hunger for something not satisfied by featureless, taken-for-granted, mass-produced milk and fresh dairy products. Today we have unprecedented opportunities to taste milk, cream, butter, fresh cheeses, and other simple milk-derived foods made by, and for, people who know what flavor is.
• Most powerfully of all, milk today represents a time of change in American culinary perspective, stemming from massive change in this nation’s ethnic makeup. Part of the impetus behind this book was my eagerness to share the voyages of culinary discovery that began for me in immigrant neighborhoods of northern New Jersey and ended by completely reshaping my understanding of milk’s place in world history, not to say the world’s kitchens. What I learned, in a nutshell, is that the usual American ways with milk and dairy products are only a narrow, anomalous sidetrack from something immensely larger, richer, and more ancient. It’s my hope that other people will be as bowled over as I have been on seeing how much new Americans from diverse cooking traditions have to teach us about this humble substance.
My entry point to enlightenment was yogurt—not what I’d known from American pop versions but the plain creamy yogurt that kept turning up as sauce, drink, condiment, and just all-around player in small Greek, Bosnian, Turkish, Israeli, Persian, Afghan, and Indian restaurants. Slowly it dawned on me that in simple fermented yogurt I was tasting something that might have been eaten or drunk by Old Testament patriarchs, Sumerian lawgivers, Homeric heroes, Hindu gods, or the flower of Persian chivalry. The uses I saw it being put to in modest little eateries made me realize how little I’d really known about cooking with milk and dairy products.
As the larger picture opened up to me and I began trying to delve into chapters of the culinary past that no one else seemed to have written, I gradually arrived at a thoroughly rearranged world view of milk and things made from it.
In the first place, for most people in most parts of the world, milk has always been not a blandly innocuous food but one with decided flavors of its own. Historically it has come from not only cows—which give the mildest-tasting milk of any dairy animal—but many other creatures, suited to different climates and geographies, whose milk has distinctive flavors peculiar to their species. (Goats’ milk is probably the most familiar example in the United States.) Furthermore, sweet milk—“sweet” in the sense of “unsoured”—is not really as old a part of systematic foodways as milk fermented by friendly bacteria. Since prehistory, most of the milk consumed in all dairying regions of the world has been soured into yogurt or for
ms resembling today’s cultured buttermilk. After all, fermentation is what happens to milk within a short time of milking unless you artificially forestall the event through refrigeration. And if you keep up with the story of lactose intolerance, you will realize that more human beings can more easily digest soured than sweet milk. To use an often-abused word, soured milk is in a very real sense a more “natural” food for people past the age of weaning. Just as crucial from a cook’s point of view, soured milk plays off against other flavors with a many-dimensioned verve that’s missing in the sweet counterpart.
Similarly, fresh cheeses made by a few simple forms of curd-setting are not just primitive precursors of “real” cheeses that have been ripened or aged. They are both older and more globally important than any other kinds of cheese. In their own right they are anything but blah and monotonous. Since ancient times they have been marked by infinite nuances of flavor and texture, depending on local environments, the animals that provide the milk, and the manner in which the curd is set. Fresh cheeses preserved through brining, like the Greek variety we call feta, are also more ancient than European-style ripened ones and figure prominently throughout a wider geographical range—in fact, most of the same geographical range as yogurt.
In the long territorial stretch of the Old World that I came to think of as “Yogurtistan,” people have until recently been much closer than we are to the primal origins of both dairying and cooking with dairy foods. The Indian subcontinent also preserves more links with an ancient past. So do the Russian reaches of western Asia along with adjacent Eastern Europe; the dominant form of sour milk there isn’t yogurt, but continuity still exists with a tradition in which milk was almost invariably fermented before people thought of consuming it or cooking with it. The big global exceptions to the pattern today are northwestern Europe, Great Britain, and several parts of the world—including North America—that became British or French colonies. In the mother countries something happened, only a few centuries ago, to start a huge commercial concentration on two forms of milk that had been little known, or even unknown, among other dairying peoples. They were fresh unsoured milk and its linear opposite: ripened or aged cheese.
Before this switch of direction, there hadn’t been anything remarkably odd about these regions except that they had a high proportion of people with the globally rare ability to digest the lactose in sweet milk throughout their adult lives—a genetic fluke that didn’t stop sour milk and fresh cheeses from being cornerstones of household dairying for centuries or, more likely, millennia. But after cheeses proliferated as specialties destined for particular markets and sweet milk for drinking began to be produced in large volumes for urban clienteles, northwestern Europe and Britain never looked back. (The first change happened about four or five hundred years ago, the second toward the start of the nineteenth century.) It’s this heritage that has chiefly shaped American perceptions of dairy foods.
Few readers of this book will need to be convinced that whether or not aged and ripened cheeses belong to the very oldest and most widespread milky ways, they are a glorious contribution to the joy of mankind. I have not tried to discuss them for the simple reason that there are already many other works treating the subject with the love and intelligence that it deserves—though sometimes also leaving the mistaken impression that fresh dairy products are really cheese manqué.
The situation is very different with fresh milk and such offshoots as fresh cream or sweet butter. They can indeed taste wonderful—I hope to convey an idea of just how wonderful—when carefully and skillfully brought to us in a state of true freshness. They can be invaluable in a savvy cook’s arsenal of resources. But you will note that I’ve written “can be,” not “are.” The triumph of drinkable fresh (or pseudo-fresh) milk as the dominant popular Western form of milk started us off down the garden path to the unfortunate consequences that I mentioned before. It has left millions of us without access to genuinely fresh, excellent milk—or any sense of what we’re missing.
This long deprivation is why the revival of small dairy farms and the reawakening of interest in artisanal fresh dairy products is such cause for rejoicing. It would have been a splendid turn of events at any stage in the last fifty years. Great things are happening when more and more of us have access to butter that tastes like cream, cream that tastes like cream, and—still more important—flavorful unhomogenized milk pasteurized by methods less “efficient” than those now standard in the industry. But by happy coincidence, or maybe not mere coincidence, these developments have arrived at the same moment as have waves of immigrants from parts of the globe where older, non-Western traditions of consuming and cooking with milk still prevail. Some of today’s small farmers are developing an interest in ancient (and excellent) sources of milk that once would have seemed ludicrously far-fetched—goats galore, dairy sheep, and even water buffaloes. Anyone can see that very new Americans from very ancient milking regions will shortly be looking around for what they consider good milk, together with good yogurt or other soured milk, fresh cheeses, and perhaps even their own preferred versions of butter. I believe that with these on hand, America’s culinary horizons will be rapidly and spectacularly enlarged.
As you will see, the book straddles several categories. From a pretty early stage I knew that it would have to be part narrative history, reaching back into the prehistoric past to make clear what extraordinary creatures the milch animals are and including an unflinching look at the course of modern factory-scale dairy farming and processing. People today, after all, are starting to believe that they should know where their food comes from. I was convinced that even a brief account of our Goliath milk industry would make people stand up and cheer for the hundreds of little Davids who are now appearing on the American dairying scene. I saw also that the book would have to make at least a quick foray into the chemical intricacies that are the reason milk isn’t reproducible by phony substitutes. And I knew both that I wanted to present an eclectic array of recipes from dramatically differing world traditions and that what I wanted to show about the incredible versatility of milk in cooking was not going to fit any usual organization of recipes by menu category.
When all the pieces came together, they formed two pictures, both taken from many angles. One is a broad overall look at where milk comes from and what it is, the other a worldwide exploration of milk in cookbook form.
The first section opens with a historical survey of milch animals and milking traditions in the four great geographical zones where milk became a defining culinary element. It goes on to trace the strange fortunes of fresh (well, not very fresh) drinkable milk in modern Western societies, leading up to an age of intensively bred-and-fed supercows, increasingly bizarre forms of processing, and nutrition wars. And before turning to actual recipes, I sketch the biological and chemical underpinnings without which we would have neither milk nor any of the things made from it.
The cookbook portion begins with the uses of fresh unfermented milk and cream (as well as modern canned milk) and goes on to explore yogurt in many guises, other forms of cultured milk and cream, butter (with the true buttermilk that is part of the buttermaking process), and fresh cheeses. The recipes have been chosen to suggest what a wealth of experiences awaits any adventurous dairy-minded cook with the enterprise to plumb both Western European traditions based on fresh milk, cream, and butter and the still more exciting ones now reaching us from entirely different cuisines.
At bottom, Milk springs from both a long-standing concern about our troubled milk supply and a growing belief that we’re on the road to an era of more delicious milk and simple dairy foods, including whole complexes of cooking possibilities that many of us never dreamed of a generation ago. I hope that I have done justice to the beauties of fresh milk and cream, the less familiar miracles of their freshly fermented counterparts (with yogurt occupying a position of special honor), and the pleasures of fresh as well as brined cheeses. My love affair with the subject has been a voyag
e of many discoveries. I will be happy if I can bring other people along on it.
MILK, MILCH ANIMALS, AND COOKING
Beginnings and Traditions
Many thousands of years ago, somebody saw an animal nursing her young and had the eccentric, not to say dangerous, idea of getting in on the act.
This “somebody” was most likely many Neolithic somebodies, independently impelled to the same experiment. Students of prehistory have never pinpointed an exact time or place for one definitively successful attempt at milking. But they have educated guesses about when and where people got the art down pat: probably some time between 8000 and 6000 B.C., somewhere between the Anatolian plateau and the Zagros Mountains of southwestern Iran. They also know one thing about the animal in question: It wasn’t a cow.
A strange custom, this, using another creature’s milk for food. Even today it is anything but universal among the world’s peoples. But where it took hold, other animals’ milk became a staff of life and—odd though it may seem to those reared on cows’ milk from cartons—a source of varied, rich, exuberant, and even exciting flavors in many cooking traditions from prehistory to the present.
The oldest places where humans mastered the skills of milking tend to overlap with the region, where the world’s oldest documented cuisines originated and where some ancestral preferences still survive. Today, when mechanized or even computerized milking is a gigantic commercial enterprise in advanced societies from Australia to Argentina, food lovers everywhere can still learn much from the relationships among humans, animals, and foodways that sprang up in those primal areas, as well as patterns that followed over a few thousand years in several other parts of the premodern world (the premodern Old World, since milking was unknown in North and South America until after Columbus).
Virtually all the most ingenious, flexible uses of milk as a food and cooking ingredient can be traced to four seminal culinary zones of ancient Asia and Europe, each marked by characteristic preferences for certain milch animals as well as particular dairy foods. Starting with the oldest, they can be conveniently thought of as the Diverse Sources Belt, the Bovine and Buffalo Belt, the Northeastern Cow Belt, and the Northwestern Cow Belt. The four primary zones correspond respectively with the great east-west sweep from the Balkans to western Mongolia, the Indian subcontinent, northeastern Europe from the Baltic into Russia, and northwestern Europe.
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