Milk

by Anne Mendelson

  You will notice one great omission fitting into none of these categories: the milking regions and traditions of Africa. My reason for leaving them out is that many crucial practices simply are not reproducible in American kitchens. Even today the uses of milk in the chief dairying areas (the east, southward from parts of Ethiopia and the Sudan to Mozambique) are stamped by ancient pastoral, semi-nomadic ways of life and particular techniques—for example, impregnating the interior surface of milk-collecting gourds with smoke from fragrant grasses or wood chips—that probably are impossible to translate into meaningful terms for cooks in industrialized societies. At least, I’ve found no sources of culinary information, though in the United States we’re starting to get some picture of Ethiopian foodways, including a few milk-based specialties.

  THE DIVERSE SOURCES BELT

  At the outset, today’s cooks should know that much of what’s worth discovering about milk as a culinary treasure first emerged throughout a certain broad swath of Eurasia centuries (at least) before milking spread to regions north and south, and millennia before more specialized approaches carried the day in industrialized Europe. The beginnings were almost surely in the prehistoric Near East, several hundred miles from the coastal Mediterranean sites where grain crops were first domesticated: present-day Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, starting at some point before about 8000 B.C. Somewhat eastward and many centuries later, other nameless pioneers applied the idea of domestication to the animal kingdom. They began with a few local creatures—possibly objects of sacrificial cults—that hunters had already found to be promising sources of meat and hides. In time they, and neighbors in gradually widening areas over a general eastward-westward course, extended the new practice to more species, until people throughout a several-thousand-mile range from the Balkans, Mediterranean North Africa, and the northwestern fringes of Arabia far into central Asia were herding and tending more than half a dozen kinds of four-footed livestock. Unlike people in the other principal zones, they have continued to use several if not most of these creatures as milk sources to this day.

  The practice of milking didn’t develop as early as other uses of domestic animals. It must be seen in contexts quite unrelated to modern milking—for example, climate and geography, which nowadays hardly impinge at all on the lives of the largest dairy-cow herds.

  The cradle of animal domestication, from Asia Minor eastward into present-day Iraq and Iran, was not gentle. Most of the region was arid and had brutally hot summers, a fact that would intensely stamp the oldest chapters of dairying history. The geographic range of livestock herding gradually expanded eastward and westward in ancient times to embrace a greater range of terrains both more and less hospitable, but largely sharing some harsh features of the eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia.

  Throughout the great east-west belt where milking first took root, the chief livestock animals were goats, sheep, pigs, cattle, horses, asses, and camels. Pigs were the odd ones out here. All the rest had at least dual careers as sources of meat and milk, with some also doing duty as beasts of burden.

  What made them suitable for the milking part of the arrangement? Or to put the question differently, why were pigs not used for milking? One obvious reason is that pigs—as equal-opportunity scavengers of vegetable and animal matter—are the only nonherbivores in the lineup. No society has ever habitually consumed milk from any animal that doesn’t live on grass and leaves. The preferred species have always been ruminants (sheep, goats, cattle, the reindeer of far northern Europe, the water buffaloes of India), other cud-chewing animals (dromedaries, Bactrian camels), and a few non-cud-chewers fairly good at converting vegetation into milk and meat (horses, asses).

  It may be—I’ve never talked to anyone in a position to know—that flesh eaters and omnivores communicate some flavor to their milk that made prehistoric peoples reject it. But regardless of this point, anatomy alone would have put them at a disadvantage for being milked. The club of domestic milch animals consists of fairly, though not unmanageably, large hoofed beasts standing high enough off the ground for human hands to reach under them without great difficulty. Carnivores like dogs and omnivores like pigs give birth to large litters, which means that the mammary system is spread out along the whole length of the mother’s belly. She nurses lying on her side, while with long-legged hoofed mammals both mother and offspring stand during nursing. The large grass eaters all bear single young, or at most twins or triplets. This makes it possible for the mammary gland to assume the compact (and from the human viewpoint, convenient) form of an udder beneath the animal’s hindquarters. As a final advantage, all have nipples elongated into teats that hands can easily grasp.

  All the major Eurasian milch animals also live and move in herds, ranging over sizable territories in search of food. They are well adapted to open grasslands of different kinds, from dry steppes to steep hillside pasturage to well-watered plains. (Pigs would starve on any such ground.) The sparser the vegetation, the more widely they need to wander. Thus they have always been a more natural fit with some form of pastoral nomadism than with settled farming on limited tracts of land. (The latter won out in most of the world, but without large-scale technology and transportation it is a difficult balancing act.) The tremendous east-west sweep of the globe running from Hungary and the Balkans across the Hellespont through Asia Minor, south of the Black and Caspian Seas and north of the Himalayas, on into Mongolia and western China is remarkably rich in grasslands that must have been the original habitats for the wild ancestors of today’s milch animals. Even today, a few groups of pastoral nomads still tend roving herds of goats, sheep, cattle, camels, and to an extent horses in parts of central and western Asia. Milk has always been a prominent part of the bargain because lactating females can in essence carry part of a tribe’s daily food supply on the hoof, relieving people of the need to haul it around.

  THE FLAVOR COROLLARIES

  From a culinary point of view, there are striking implications. The part of the world with the oldest and most deeply ingrained milking traditions is also the one where milk came from the most varied sources—animals whose milk generally had pronounced and diverse tastes. Cows’ milk is blander than any of its competitors, though undoubtedly this was less true of prehistoric cows that grazed in nomadic conditions and gave scantier amounts of more concentrated milk than their modern counterparts.

  The prevalence of arid climates with fierce summer heat was also significant. It meant that cows were seldom the dominant milk source, because of all dairy animals they are the least able to tolerate heat. (There are exceptions, of which more later, but not in the Diverse Sources latitudes.) Then there were the seasonal reproductive cycles of the major herd animals. Most give birth close to the time of new grass in spring, so that the mother has the advantage of the year’s most plentiful grazing just as she comes into milk. Lactation continues for some months until the young are weaned, the supply dries up, and the mothers are again ready to breed. People would therefore have done most of their milking during the months when milk sours most quickly once it is taken from the ewe, mare, goat, or other source.

  Clearly the earliest milk-eating experiments must have been done with milk fresh from the udder. But until very recently this did not become a favorite form in the Diverse Sources Belt, except sometimes as a food for young children. Set aside any assumptions based on the availability of refrigerators, and you will see that the natural fate of milk left to sit around in extreme summer heat is swift colonization by neighborhood bacteria. Some kinds are harmful (in fact, occasionally lethal) and some benign, but at ambient hot-weather temperatures one group of nonharmful bacteria has a certain competitive advantage. They feed on lactose, the special sugar of milk, converting it to lactic acid and incidentally rendering the milk more digestible for grown-ups who have lost the usual childhood tolerance for lactose. In the process, they lower the pH of the milk enough to make it inhospitable to many disease-carrying organisms. This isn’t to say that le
tting milk sour is an infallible measure for keeping pathogens at bay, but it affords some protection.

  The particular kinds of lactic-acid bacteria that would have got there first in the blistering summers of the Middle East and Central Asia produce something resembling yogurt, though until fairly recent times no one used that name or sought to inquire whether one group’s milk-souring bugs were identical to another’s. The crucial thing to realize is that in nearly all of the Diverse Sources Belt—which, as I’ve suggested, is nearly tantamount to “Yogurtistan”—the simplest way for most people to consume milk was soured, in the form of yogurt or its close cousins.

  Two other forms became universal enough over most of Yogurtistan to suggest that they also go back to very ancient times. The first probably was hit upon after a very young kid or lamb had been butchered and eviscerated. Somehow milk came in contact with the lining of the animal’s stomach and later was found to have curdled to a cheeselike substance through the action of an enzyme peculiar to the digestive systems of nurslings. Eventually people learned to use the mysterious curdling agent (the modern name is “rennet”) in tandem with natural souring to produce agreeable-tasting—though short-lived—fresh cheeses in which the flavors of the original milk were both transmuted and intensified.

  The second step forward followed the discovery that a strong brine solution would stop spoilage in such cheeses and enable them to be held for weeks or months. Ripening or aging in the fashion of modern European cheeses was impossible because the process requires cooler surroundings at some crucial stages. In hot, arid climates, lightly salted fresh cheeses can undergo some primitive flavor-altering and spoilage-preventing changes simply through drying out. (French crottins are an example.) But the requisite conditions for more sustained, complex fermentations did not exist in prehistoric times. Brining, on the other hand, was a convenient preservation technique for anyone with access to salt. Most parts of the Diverse Sources Belt thus have had some long-standing tradition of brined cheeses—that is, versions of what Americans usually call “feta.”

  Several features of this ancient milking landscape are bound to surprise people used to modern commercial dairy products. Maybe the most striking is the absence of blandness, not only in the milk itself but in what’s done to it. For millennia, people in the oldest dairying regions consumed milk that started out with distinctive flavors mirroring individual animal sources and then acquired lively lactic-acid notes when it became something we would recognize as yogurt or the related versions of fermented milk now known as kefir or kumys (see this page). (Cooks should also note that eventually the habit of heating or boiling milk to be used for yogurt became almost universal, because it produces a richer and silkier-textured result.) The oldest and most universally eaten cheeses also tasted firmly of the original milk, with a briny tang superimposed in the case of the feta relatives.

  Many cuisines of the Diverse Sources Belt (though not all) also used some form of butter. Where it existed, it was generally stronger-tasting than ours both because of the animals the milk came from and because it often underwent an extended period of storage, sometimes after a flavor-intensifying treatment such as long simmering with or without herbs and spices. Different versions of clotted cream—some with emphatically ripened flavors—also seem to have been widespread for many centuries. When we come to cheese, however, the range of possibilities was seriously restricted until fairly recent times. Even today only a few kinds of cheese other than fresh white cheese and feta are produced in the old Diverse Sources Belt. For the most part their descent can be traced to Western influence and modern European originals (e.g., Greek graviera, which takes its name from Gruyère) rather than to ancient local tradition.

  As you will see from many of the recipes in this book, cooks of the Diverse Sources Belt love to set off dairy foods with pungent flavors of many kinds. Certain combinations or effects crop up again and again. Pairing chunks of brined white cheese with green herbs and crunchy raw vegetables is as natural in Bulgaria as two thousand miles away in Uzbekistan. Romanians are as fond of cucumbers with yogurt as are Iranians and Afghans, and yogurt-garlic sauces are loved from one end of the zone to the other. Perhaps the most fascinating discovery for me was the array of cereal products for soups and porridges that are made—like Greek trahana and Turkish tarhana—by drying and crumbling a fresh or fermented mixture of grain (or flour) and yogurt, often with the enrichment of vegetables and herbs.

  THE DRAMATIS PERSONAE: THE ORIGINAL BIG THREE

  Only three of the major Diverse Sources Belt milch animals ever achieved enough importance as milkers anywhere else to have crossed the path of most American food lovers. Camels chiefly remained in the drier areas of the primal milking zone. Horses (and their close equid relatives, asses) spread nearly everywhere in the Old World, but the intensely horse-centered way of life anciently pursued by some nomadic tribes of Central Asia didn’t. In no other societies did mares’ milk enjoy great popularity as a food. The Big Three that eventually adapted to lands far north and south of the first milking belt were sheep, goats, and cows. For the sake of practicality my recipes generally call for dairy products based on cows’ milk, but I urge you to seek out the other two wherever possible. Sheep’s and goats’ milk will give you at least a little idea of how much wider some people’s dairying horizons used to be.

  ANCESTRAL WILD SHEEP (MOUFLON)

  Sheep and goats (to zoologists, Ovis aries and Capra hircus) go together like firs and spruces, and were the core milch animals in more areas of the Diverse Sources Belt than any other contenders. Apparently descended from a common ancestor that lived before the last ice age, they resemble each other in so many skeletal features that zooarchaeologists often can’t tell whether a few stray bones belonged to a goat or a sheep. The catchall term “caprines,” or more ponderously “ovicaprids,” is often applied to both.

  Caprines almost certainly were the subjects of the earliest Near Eastern human milking experiments, after some centuries of being kept for meat and skins. By classical times goats and sheep were being raised side by side throughout the Diverse Sources Belt and had made their way beyond it. There was great logic to their original tandem success in and around mountainous reaches of the Near East, the region where they had evolved. Both were born to thrive in this arid land of fierce summers and bitter winters. They also had the advantage of being small enough for people to tangle with and live to tell the tale, but large enough to give amounts of milk that would repay the effort of collecting it. When raised together, they complemented each other’s ways of getting the most out of local resources. Goats are light and nimble enough to climb forbidding rocky slopes—even shrubby trees—in search of food, while the heavier, shorter-legged sheep efficiently work flat, grassy pastures. Goats eat nearly anything with leaves and shoots; sheep (which seldom eat leaves) can crop grass closer than any other herd animal. Sheep, being sheepish in temperament, are also easy to keep track of and herd into folds, while the more contrarian goats range adventurously in search of anything edible.

  ANCESTRAL WILD GOAT (PERSIAN WILD GOAT)

  The world’s first pastoralists found that both sheep and goats obligingly came into season in the fall and gave birth after roughly five-month pregnancies, in time to reach peak milk production in late spring and early summer. The milk of the two tasted as similar as you might expect of such close evolutionary cousins. But the goats, even though slightly smaller, managed to yield several times more milk than the sheep. The latter contributed a meager amount of naturally rich, concentrated milk that intensified the whole (goat-and-sheep dairyists regularly pooled the two creatures’ milk, as is still common from the Balkans into western Asia) beyond all proportion to its volume.

  Cattle did not become realistic candidates for domestication and milking until many centuries later. The most obvious obstacle was size, coupled with a murderous disposition.

  Modern cows and bulls are descended from a great creature called the aurochs (plural, �
��aurochsen”), or urus, that evolved somewhere in northwestern Asia in the last ice age. By the time the glaciers retreated, the aurochs species, Bos primigenius, ranged widely throughout much of the Old World. Wherever they went, the fierce and kingly beasts aroused wonder, often to the point of religious awe. Full-grown bulls could stand some six feet high at the shoulder; the largest must have weighed well over a ton and a half. The huge, sweeping horns that still give pause to people looking at the painted Lascaux specimens were accompanied by an extremely short fuse.

  As compared with the wild ancestors of goats and sheep, aurochsen would have been difficult to bring into the domestic human orbit even if they had not been innately menacing. They were large enough to have trouble maintaining a stable body temperature in the hot summers of the Diverse Sources Belt. (As mentioned earlier, the problem persists even with their smaller descendants.) They were also poorly adapted to arid conditions, could neither forage in the free spirit of goats nor crop short grass as well as sheep, and needed several times more food per head than the caprines. On the other hand, cows gave much more milk than either ewes or “does” (the usual dairyman’s term for nanny goats).

  Over many centuries or millennia, people succeeded in breeding aurochsen to produce a domesticated species, Bos taurus, that was smaller and gentler than its ancestor. All bovines also have the advantage of pronounced sexual dimorphism: The females are much smaller than the males and not nearly so hardwired for aggression. Bulls still were, and are, much the most dangerous of all domestic animals. But early on someone discovered that castrating them before they were full-grown would produce oxen, which nearly matched the docility of cows and are the world’s strongest draft animals other than water buffaloes and elephants. Their muscle power would lead to a revolution in the human food supply.