Milk

by Anne Mendelson

  Cattle domestication had been established in the Near East by about 7000 to 6000 B.C. As with sheep and goats, milking apparently did not follow for many centuries. By then, however, local societies had taken to plowing with oxen or cows, a breakthrough comparable to the later invention of tractors. Before that, would-be farmers had had to dig with handheld sticks, and settled agriculture had been restricted to tiny plots with very light soil. Neither goats, sheep, nor humans were able to drag a larger, heavier version of a stick with enough force to penetrate dense clayey soil or well-rooted sod. Domesticated cattle were the plowers that literally broke the ground for the diffusion of grain farming beyond its Near Eastern cradle.

  AN EGYPTIAN COW GIVING BIRTH

  The spread of the animals didn’t necessarily go with a taste for their milk. To this day, cows’ milk is less dominant in the old Diverse Sources Belt countries than in other parts of the world. Though they have been milked there since antiquity—cows are depicted in scenes of milking activity on a third-millennium B.C. frieze from Tell el-Obeid in southern Iraq—they had to be carried into far southerly and northerly regions to become the milch animal par excellence. No reader of Homer, the Old Testament, or Virgil automatically thought of cows on hearing the word “milk”; the main association was with goats and sheep. Locales where cows came to be prime milk sources from early times were, and are, marked by very different ways of life and culinary preferences. The first of these places was India.

  THE BOVINE AND BUFFALO BELT

  As Jared Diamond has pointed out in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Old World food crops and other resources had to overcome more obstacles in order to move north and south than east and west. The reason is that the all-important factor of temperature varies directly with latitude, not longitude.

  Some plants and animals brought to new environments managed to cope with heat, cold, and other variables better than others. Goats, horses, and sheep proved to be hardy under many conditions, but tended to be challenged by tropical humidity. Cattle were another story. As descendants of creatures that had flourished in glacial chill, they would have been thoroughly defeated by Torrid Zone heat and humidity had it not been for a timely genetic freak.

  ZEBU COW AND CALF

  People had been husbanding cattle for meat, draft purposes, and, to an extent, milk in ancient Mesopotamia for centuries when a strange new type appeared, probably between 3000 and 2500 B.C., somewhere between southern Persia and the western Pakistan-Afghanistan fringes. The same aberration may (no one is sure) have occurred independently in another spot or two between the Middle East and Nilotic Africa. In any case, the new creature—later christened Bos indicus by zoologists to distinguish it from Bos taurus—was the reason that milking and milk-based cuisine were able to penetrate throughout the Indian subcontinent and much of Africa.

  The most visible difference between ordinary cattle and the indicus variant was the latter’s pronounced neck or shoulder hump. Eventually naturalists started calling the humped cattle of India “zebus” and a similar race in Africa “sangas.” To sidestep learned debates about zebu-sanga classifications and whether indicus designates a subspecies or separate species, I have lumped together both humped kinds as “zebu-type.”

  The hump, which was larger on bulls than cows, went along with a pendulous dewlap, a narrow bony frame, thin skin, and many environmental advantages. Zebu-type animals can tolerate sweltering tropical heat, resist certain diseases and parasites, and subsist on more meager pasturage than other cows. Today the zebu-type milch cows of Nilotic Africa at least as far south as Tanzania support the world’s most intensely cow-centered pastoral cultures, and those of India symbolize an entire nation—at least, as seen by militant patriots.

  JUNGLE, MOUNTAIN, RIVER

  The Indian milch-animal scene is riddled with strange complexities, puzzles, and paradoxes, one being that though the subcontinent is framed by regions representing the most diverse bovine gene pool on earth, most of India’s Asian neighbors scorn the creatures’ milk. From Assam eastward into several Southeast Asian countries, wild bovine jungle species, including gaur, kouprey, and banteng, still survive along with some domesticated offshoots. But there is little local use of either the tame animals’ milk or that of zebu cattle.

  YAK

  To the north, the picture is different. From the western Himalayas through and beyond Mongolia, people have been herding a towering, fur-draped bovine cousin, Bos grunniens, for about twenty-five hundred years. Americans usually call it “yak,” though Tibetan speakers protest that the correct word for the female is dri. In any case, not only is yak, or dri, milk famously cherished wherever the creature is raised, but it is traditional to exploit the phenomenon of “hybrid vigor” by crossbreeding yaks with both zebu and taurine cattle for, among other benefits, increased milk yields in female offspring. Western observers who have tasted dri milk report that it is a lovely golden color with an extraordinarily deep, rich flavor; some experiments with Western-style cheeses have been made in Nepal and elsewhere, and it isn’t out of the question that the few small yak-husbandry ventures that have recently started in North America may generate a bit of local interest in the milk.

  WATER BUFFALO

  None of these bovine cousins encroaches on the milk-giving role of the sacred zebu cow in India proper. But an entirely different creature does. Strange as it may seem to anyone else, Indians rely less on the milk of the sacred cow than on that of this nonbovine competitor, the fourth of the world’s leading dairy animals. More than half the nation’s milk supply actually comes from the “river” strain of the water buffalo, Bubalus bubalis.

  This formidable-looking ruminant is a long, massive, low-slung, splay-footed beast with a hide like a hippopotamus and a pair of fearsome ridged horns. Water buffaloes should not be confused with bison, which strictly speaking aren’t buffaloes at all. The true buffalo’s closest ancestors probably were staking out habitats in the wetlands of southern Asia at about the same time that aurochsen began roaming their own northern haunts.

  Like oxen elsewhere, domesticated buffaloes were the great facilitators of a certain staple crop—in this case rice, since they can pull plows through muddy or semi-flooded paddies that other animals could never negotiate. Their meat is considered at least equal to beef wherever both are eaten. But for some reason, only India showed any interest in their milk or developed a particular strain suitable for that purpose. All other Far Eastern regions bred large, thickset draft buffaloes of the “swamp” strain. The Indian “river” buffalo is a rangier, bonier type that diverts a great deal of food energy into lactation. In fact, it may be the most remarkable of all milch animals.

  What sets river buffaloes apart from the rest of the crew is that they produce not only richer milk but more milk than nearly all the rest—and this with far less intensive breeding-and-feeding efforts than have gone into increasing the yields of Western dairy cows, the only higher-volume producers among the four major milch animals. Only sheep give milk that is equally or more concentrated—but, as noted, there’s very little of it. A good milking ewe can, under favorable conditions, yield two or three quarts (four to six pounds) of milk a day, while two to three gallons (sixteen to twenty-four pounds) is by no means exceptional for a buffalo.

  Buffaloes’ milk has an odd glaucous appearance, suggesting that it shouldn’t be nearly as creamy as cows’ milk. In fact, it is much creamier. People who have tasted it fresh (I have not) say that it seems almost like a concentrated milk reduction. Judging from the buffalo yogurt and mozzarella that I have eaten, it seems to have some special earthy dimension of its own quite unlike the goaty-sheepy flavors of caprines’ milk. What’s more, the animals thrive and produce copiously on cheaper and coarser tropical forages than cows.

  Though reliable statistics are hard to come by, there are known to be many more zebu cows than buffaloes milked in India. But the latter account for more than 50 percent of the nation’s commercial milk supply. Why the animal itself nev
er came to be revered is a mystery. Zebu cows in India became important as domestic livestock and sources of milk earlier than water buffaloes, and perhaps the quasi-divine status that they eventually acquired did not admit of diminishment by being shared with another beast.

  Paradoxically, the very fact that water buffaloes are not considered holy may have made Indian commercial milk producers willing to undertake more aggressive, systematic management measures; though millions of cows are left to wander the countryside without anyone trying to improve their milk yield, dairying interests apparently feel freer to intervene in buffalo destiny.

  GODS AND DEMONS PULL ALTERNATELY ON OPPOSITE ENDS OF A GIANT SERPENT TO ROTATE THE MIRACULOUS COSMIC “CHURN” OF HINDU MYTH.

  Western dairyists’ lack of interest in buffaloes’ milk is equally puzzling. When taken from the tropics, buffaloes are surprisingly good at adapting to other surroundings. They probably ranged as far north as southern Mesopotamia from ancient times, and since then have been successfully introduced into Egypt, the Levant, and parts of Italy and the Balkans. But only today are a handful of experimenters trying to see how well water buffaloes can tolerate more northerly temperate climates. Some British and American farmers have managed to generate a little publicity for swamp buffaloes’ meat as an alternative to beef, and a very few are trying to do the same for river buffaloes’–milk yogurt and mozzarella cheese.

  Possessing two milk sources of equal culinary importance makes India unique among the world’s dairying countries. (There is some use of goats’ milk in hilly northern regions, but nationally it ranks a very distant third.) Cows’ milk and buffaloes’ milk are used all but interchangeably for every kind of dairy product. But because buffaloes’ milk is more concentrated and gives higher yields of milkfat, protein, and virtually any other milk-derived product per original pound of milk, it is more commercially profitable. Cows’ milk enjoys higher prestige, undoubtedly because of its association with the sacred animal.

  Brahmins have long cherished an image of the cow as a crown jewel in a complex, prohibition-fenced scheme of beliefs about the ritual purity or pollution of food. In this worldview she is the wellspring of life in palpable form, inexhaustibly pouring forth the miracle of milk, a holy substance considered to have been purified by inner fires in the grass-transforming alembic that is the cow’s body. (In fact, a Hindu creation myth describes a primordial sea of milk as the stuff from which many great gifts of the world were “churned” under the direction of Vishnu.) The cow-mother also gradually became a symbol of Mother India—originally, a benevolent symbol; now something more aggressive. Cow worship never used to have anything like the frankly militant Hinduist associations that it enjoys in today’s political-religious tinderbox. (Not only is there a national prohibition against beef slaughter, but people remarking too loudly that even Brahmins used to eat beef in Vedic times are likely to incur harassment if not death threats.) Not surprisingly, modern industrialized cow dairying has proceeded somewhat cautiously in India despite a good deal of entrepreneurial interest and expertise, and despite the fact that milk is more central to cooking there than in any other nation. It is no exaggeration to say that, without milk, the doctrine of ahimsa (the inviolability of animal as well as human life) could not have achieved its primacy and the flowering of vegetarianism throughout India would have been impossible.

  THE SOUL OF A GREAT CUISINE

  From prehistoric times, the sweltering Indian climate ensured that, as in the Diverse Sources Belt, milk would be more often used soured than fresh. But there are several critical differences. Not only Western-style aged cheeses but the fresh and brined cheeses of the earlier milking region are conspicuous by their absence from Indian tables. In fact, so are most dairy foods made from raw rather than cooked milk.

  Boiling milk after milking and before using it for most other purposes seems to be a very ancient Indian culinary tradition. It changes the milk’s receptiveness to different culturing organisms, discouraging those that would produce fresh cheese. (A second anticheese factor is that killing young animals for rennet would violate the principle of ahimsa.) But boiling makes milk all the more suitable for yogurt, which depends on having “thermophilic,” or heat-preferring, bacteria introduced at a temperature close to 110°F. Most of the favorite Indian dairy products start off with milk being boiled and allowed to cool until it reaches the right stage to be inoculated with a little of yesterday’s yogurt.

  You might not guess how thoroughly yogurt from both cows’ and buffaloes’ milk pervades the cuisine from the many Anglo-Indian books about food that insist on saying “curd” or “curds” for indigenous words such as the Hindi dahi and Tamil thayir. Yogurt is a dish in its own right and the foundation of various beverages and cold relishes, as well as an element in innumerable sauces, dressings, soups, and desserts. It is also the starting point of churned butter (Hindi makkan, Tamil vennai). Because of its basis in yogurt, the buttermilk (Hindi chhas, Tamil moru) resulting from butter churning has nuances that would be hard to duplicate here in America.

  In fact, anything based on yogurt—highly nonstandardized throughout the subcontinent—is likely to taste different even from one Indian region to another. In addition, there will be differences between the cows’-milk and buffaloes’-milk versions. Buffalo yogurt starts out creamier and denser, and yields more butter in churning. The butter itself is almost pure white because it contains more finished vitamin A than the yellowish precursor beta-carotene that predominates in most cows’ milk.

  Freshly churned butter of either kind can be eaten as is, but is more often slowly simmered to produce the ambrosial cooking fat called ghee (Tamil neyyu), which is also yellow or white depending on the animal it came from. The long, gentle cooking evaporates any remaining water and makes it easier to “clarify” the milkfat, or separate it from any residual milk solids; without such treatment it would be extremely perishable.

  Plain fresh milk does play a part in Indian cuisine, but there are distinct regional preferences that perhaps reflect different degrees of lactose tolerance. Though it is hard to sort out the many statistical claims that have been published with very hazy scientific documentation, people in the northern states appear much more likely to maintain lactose-digesting ability into adulthood. In those regions, people occasionally drink milk as a beverage—but usually when it has been heated and partly cooled, and usually with some kind of sweetening.

  The north has also produced a milk-based specialty that arouses curious reactions in other regions of India. It is a kind of curd made by heating milk (sometimes buttermilk) and adding an acidulant like lemon juice that causes casein (the major milk protein) to precipitate out of the whey in a semisolid white mass. Called chhenna in that form, panir when cut into cubes, this very bland and slightly rubbery substance often turns up on English-language restaurant menus as “cheese” or something like “cottage cheese,” “soft cheese,” or “pot cheese.” In fact it is none of the above, never having been exposed to either rennet curdling or bacterial fermentation. But it is a wonderfully versatile foil to rich-flavored sauces and purées, and in the form of chhenna makes lovely patties and dumplings.

  The idea for this not-exactly-cheese may have come from either the conquering Moghuls, who swept through India from north to south starting in about 1525, or the Portuguese, who were already carving out spheres of influence before the Moghuls arrived. There was a block to its acceptance: the widespread Hindu belief that “breaking,” or “cutting,” milk into “parts” (curd and whey) violated the holy substance’s integral nature. For some reason, the taboo was soon overcome by northern Hindus but frequently persists elsewhere. This is why chhenna and panir never became everyday foods in regions where Moghul or Portuguese influence was slight. Generally speaking, they are less important the farther you get from the first Moghul strongholds in the north.

  A more widely accepted northern contribution is unsoured milk cooked down to different concentrations, usually with adde
d sugar. Among the passionately loved specialties based on reduced milk are several forms of clotted cream (malai); various sweet, rich milk puddings thickened with rice; and a fudgelike concentrate known as khoa, which is the basis of an entire sweetmeat industry (especially in West Bengal State and neighboring Bangladesh). For non-Indians, the huge repertoire of reduced-milk confections and sweets tends to be at best an acquired taste. On their home territory, however, they are as defining a preference as whiskey in Scotland.

  As in the Diverse Sources Belt, the practice of drinking milk fresh and unflavored has historically been infrequent, even in zones of widespread lactose tolerance. But today India has an aggressively progress-minded dairy industry (though it is somewhat constrained by attitudes toward cows), powerfully influenced by modern Western notions about milk drinking and eager to be a model for Western-style dairying enterprises in the less-developed Asian and African tropics. It is impossible not to wonder how the older milk-based traditions will be affected by the imposing of views originally shaped by radically different cultures and geographies.