Milk

by Anne Mendelson

  THE NORTHEASTERN COW BELT

  It took many undocumented centuries for livestock husbandry, including milking, to spread from the Diverse Sources Belt not only southward into India but northward beyond the Black Sea and the Caucasus into another east-west zone stretching from the western Russian steppes through Ukraine and north of the Carpathian Mountains into Poland, parts of the future Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Baltic lands, and the fringes of Scandinavia (where there is also an admixture of other influences from the west). With this third great dairying zone we move a little closer to the preferences that most Americans understand and that are now being exported all around the world.

  Cattle held an advantage over the other domestic animals introduced to northeastern Europe: They’d been there before. That is, they were returning to parts of the chilly latitudes where their aurochs forebears had been roaming when the last ice sheet decamped for the North Pole. (Aurochsen were still at large in Neolithic times; they became more elusive as human populations took over, but they didn’t absolutely disappear until one last female died in Poland in 1627.) Long, cold winters and brief, relatively cool summers with good amounts of rainfall to keep pastures green were exactly what cattle needed to thrive and produce milk. Wherever they were brought in these parts, they became the dominant milch animals.

  The number-one status of cows rested not only on their environmental suitability but on a preference for their milk, clearly evident by modern times. Goats had their niche as “the poor man’s cow” where grass was too meager for a real one. Sheep were mostly relegated to wool or (more sporadically) meat production, with milking a very minor priority. The comparative blandness of cows’-milk products emerged as the way many people thought dairy foods ought to taste. This preference was largely shared by Slavs, Balts, and the Ashkenazic Jews who diffused into many parts of the region. The contribution of Jews to local dairying from the Middle Ages on must have been vast. No one else had any particular religious motivation for exploiting varied uses of milk. Observant Jews, however, were required to prepare either “meat” or “milk” meals with no mixing of the two. Not only were “milk” meals cheaper, but it was easier to turn milk into a range of delicious forms.

  As in the two previously discussed zones, people very rarely made a habit of drinking fresh milk as it came from the source—and this despite the fact that at least some northeastern Europeans have a certain degree of lactose tolerance (Ashkenazim less so). Even in northerly climes, milking seasons used to coincide naturally with the warmest weather of the year, when milk sours fairly fast without refrigeration. (Manipulation of milking cycles for year-round production is a modern commercial development.) Here and there, unsoured milk was used as a thrifty base for soups in lieu of meat, or went into the cereal porridges that were the crucial peasant mainstay everywhere. But for the most part milk was consumed in cultured form, either drunk plain or made into fresh curd cheeses. Renneted fresh cheeses from uncultured milk also had some currency, but most kinds used a combination of souring and renneting. The whey was yet another porridge vehicle. (Grain-based porridges were the basic survival dishes of the Northeastern Cow Belt, and even small amounts of milk or whey greatly increased their nutritional value.)

  Brined cheeses like those of the Diverse Sources Belt never became popular except in a few Central European areas of overlap with the Balkans (for instance, Hungary and Romania). And generally speaking, neither the local kinds of sour milk nor the local fresh cheeses closely duplicated those of the more southerly milking zone. The reason is that under slightly cooler conditions, different types of bacteria with slightly different flavor effects are likely to work their will on milk either spontaneously or through inoculation. To produce what traditional yogurt eaters will recognize as yogurt, you need emphatically warm temperatures (and preferably a preliminary heating of the milk). Milk left to sit out at less sultry temperatures will attract “mesophilic” bacteria like those responsible for souring today’s cultured buttermilk. Add rennet at a strategic moment and you will get something not unlike the pot cheese or farmer cheese familiar to many Americans, with a softer or firmer curd depending on very small gradations of temperature. But with patience you can arrive at a very similar, slightly tarter cheese made without rennet—the practice of observant Jews, since milk could not come in contact with an animal substance like rennet.

  Cream in cultured form enjoyed greater importance in the Northeastern Cow Belt than in the lands to the south. Because cows’ milk separates more quickly and fully on standing than goats’ milk (though not as readily as water buffaloes’ milk), it is easier to skim off the cream for use by itself, fresh or sour. Cooler temperatures also aid the process. Clotted cream, which is really cooked, did not become as important here as in other regions. Sour cream, ranging from slightly runny to nearly as thick as cream cheese, became a versatile cold sauce base, spread, and enrichment for soups and other dishes.

  Northern ideas about butter diverged sharply from those in the two older milking zones. In both India and the Diverse Sources lands, butter was commonly churned from whole-milk yogurt. (It was seldom made from anything but cows’ or buffaloes’ milk, because producing butter from goats’ milk with its very small fat globules was extremely difficult before modern centrifuges. Sheep’s milk worked better, but was less cost-effective given the small amounts of milk per animal.) Most often it also underwent a slow simmering process, as for ghee. The northerners took another tack by using cream (usually soured) rather than whole milk for churning and omitting the prolonged cooking. This process produced an entirely different substance, smooth and unctuous at ambient temperatures where ghee and other forms of clarified butter would be grainy, and also containing subtle flavor notes lost in clarifying. The downside of using cream was that you got a smaller amount of less flavorful buttermilk.

  The northerners’ butter was also a cooking fat as excellent in its own way as ghee—a fact of crucial importance, because the region lacked any source of edible oil comparable to the Mediterranean olive or Middle Eastern sesame seed. People could, of course, render lard, beef suet, or poultry fat to be used in cooking. But the process required amounts of time and fuel that butter churning didn’t. Once you had butter, you had a marvelously versatile food that could be incorporated into some kinds of rich bread and pastry doughs or spread on already-baked bread, melted over cooked foods as a sauce, worked into fresh skim-milk cheeses as an enrichment, or used as a sautéing medium that imparted a lovely flavor to anything cooked in it. Its biggest drawback was that it went rancid easily if stored long without refrigeration. As for the buttermilk, it could be either a beverage in its own right or a cooking liquid (especially for porridges).

  The Northeastern Cow Belt also happens to be an unparalleled center for all kinds of brine-pickled vegetables and fruits, from sorrel and cabbage to apples and beets. Like sour milk, these depend on fermentation of carbohydrates to lactic acid (though the starting point is not milk sugar). The two kinds of lactic-acid products—bracingly sour pickles (or their brine) and smooth, more gently tart cultured milk or cream—make a wonderful marriage, especially when the pickles are garlicky. This magical combination has produced a large family of cold soups that are among the glories of Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and other cuisines. Like many yogurt dishes of the Middle East and India, they are a lesson in milk’s affinities with partners that few American cooks would have thought of a generation ago.

  Until modern times the Northeastern Cow Belt shared the two older milking regions’ general indifference to any kind of ripened cheese. For centuries almost no cheese was produced there other than the small fresh kinds that could be easily made at home. Of course, Jews faced the obstacle that putting rennet in milk is almost automatically a violation of kashruth. (“Almost” because under certain convoluted interpretations not accepted by all, animal rennet can be judged to have lost its “meat” status.) And for everybody including Jews, a broader limiting factor was the absence of prove
n markets able to repay the sustained efforts involved in producing and selling aged cheeses—which brings us to what is in many ways the strangest of the world’s dairying zones.

  THE NORTHWESTERN COW BELT

  Geographically, this used to be the smallest of the major Old World regions where strong traditions of fresh dairy foods developed. But after some five millennia it suddenly ended up as the largest. Consequently it is enmeshed in snarls of contradiction-laced history.

  The core areas are northern Germany, the Low Countries, northern France, and especially the British Isles. In southern Scandinavia, eastern Germany and the western Baltic lands, France and Germany as far south as the northern Alps, and some of the old Austro-Hungarian domains, the zone shades into traditions more akin to the Northeastern Cow Belt or the Diverse Sources Belt. And before modern times the links with such eastern neighbors were stronger everywhere. The premodern history, however, hasn’t been much explored. In fact, a general failure of historical perspective set in at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution after Great Britain exported its own milk-centered customs and attitudes to all the Anglophone colonies including the future United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. For all practical purposes these are now extensions of the original Northwestern Cow Belt.

  From early times one huge factor has set apart the population of this zone from most of the human race: a capacity for digesting lactose, discussed from a biological standpoint in “The Story of Modern Milk.” A second, almost equally important difference rooted in the northwestern European transition from the medieval to the modern economy came into play later (and as we shall see, decisively shaped the mentality of modern dairying). But at least at the outset, the uses of milk in the future Great Britain and its near European neighbors don’t seem to have been decisively different from other people’s.

  Livestock husbandry and dairying probably spread out from the Near East into northwestern Europe at around 3000 B.C. As in the Northeastern Cow Belt, cattle constitutionally liked the local weather and soon became more dominant milch animals than sheep and goats. By medieval times sheep’s milk was highly valued by many but discouragingly labor-intensive to produce; where sheep were raised for wool, people sometimes came to ignore any other purpose. Goats tended to be preferred for milking in areas too steep or bleakly exposed for cattle grazing (for example, parts of Norway and Scotland). But this is to get ahead of the story.

  How did prehistoric farmers of the northwest use cows’ or other animals’ milk in the unrecorded millennia before the Romans arrived? Set aside modern assumptions based on an industry that brings fresh drinkable milk to millions, and the truth is that there’s very little to go on. One crucial fact is that since Neolithic times the region has contained one of the planet’s most remarkable pockets of “lactase persistence,” or “lactose tolerance,” the ability to digest the lactose in unsoured milk long beyond infancy. Archaeologists hypothesize that the genes governing the condition occurred widely in a prehistoric culture that occupied parts of southern Scandinavia, the Low Countries, north coastal Germany, and the Baltic lands. (Other lactose-tolerant peoples are scattered in Africa and northern India, and there may be still more elsewhere.) But the ability to do something isn’t the same thing as a preconditioned choice to do it all or even 50 percent of the time. There is little evidence to prove that the early peoples of northwestern Europe had as highly developed a preference for drinking milk fresh as their modern descendants. Milk sours there as regularly as in the Near East (though more slowly) and has the same advantages in that form.

  WHAT THE ROMANS SAW

  The first observers who might have cast some light on the prevalence or nonprevalance of milk drinking were the Romans, who described what they saw in breathtakingly unhelpful language. The problem in trying to decipher their accounts of Gaulish foodways is that they brought a distinctly southern perspective to every northern region they explored.

  From a dairying viewpoint, things had taken very different turns north and south of the Alps when agriculture diffused westward into Europe. The Mediterranean coast from Italy to Iberia—the Romans’ “Cisalpine Gaul”—developed a version of Diverse Sources Belt preferences without quite as wide a range of milch animals; sheep and goats became the primary sources, with cow dairying becoming competitive only in pockets. It appears that, except for fresh cheeses, the fresh dairy products that are the focus of this book either didn’t acquire as much importance in the south as in the four major milking zones or were relegated to a lesser role in early modern times, when consciously market-oriented dairying choices began outstripping home-centered ones. In any case, cheeses of all kinds eventually predominated over other ways of consuming milk.

  The Romans themselves were great pioneers in cheesemaking, because parts of northern Italy were lucky enough to possess both rich grazing lands and a climate cool enough for the prolonged fermentation processes that aged cheeses require. Besides, the city of Rome at its height was a magnet for specialized luxuries from the countryside that would not be equaled in Europe until the end of the Middle Ages. But the Romans had a hard time making sense of the non-Roman ways with milk—perhaps cheese—peculiar to northerners.

  Because cattle were more important to both Romans and Greeks as beasts of burden than as sources of milk, neither civilization had deeply explored all the culinary qualities of cows’ milk liked by other peoples. Greek observers returning from Scythia on the southern fringes of the Northeastern Cow Belt reported that people there consumed an alien stuff for which they could find no better designation than “cow cheese,” or boutyron—a word that makes a certain amount of sense, and that became the Latin butyrum (and our “butter”). But when the Romans got to “Transalpine Gaul,” or the Gaulish lands beyond the Alps, it is difficult to sort out just what they meant to say about the uncouth peoples’ dairy foods. Their accounts present major roadblocks for anyone trying to establish in what form the peoples of the new Roman possessions liked to consume milk.

  Tacitus and Pliny the Elder, both of whom had been stationed in Gaul after Julius Caesar’s conquests, unmistakably say that the barbarians ate some form of curdled milk. The term Tacitus uses is not caseus (“cheese”) but lac concretum (“solidified milk”), while Pliny marvels at the very fact that cheese was not known among the Gaulish tribes; he vaguely describes the usual form of milk as something that they “thicken to a pleasant sour substance,” but doesn’t seem to distinguish this very clearly from butter. Caesar laconically says that the Gauls ate “milk, cheese, and meat,” which leaves us wondering about the contradiction with Pliny (who presumably had more knowledge of the colony’s peacetime domestic arts) and whether “milk” specifically meant fresh milk.

  All of which goes to show that despite the odd genetic makeup of the peoples who were living in the Northwestern Cow Belt a couple of thousand years ago, conclusions about how often they actually used their unusual ability to drink unsoured milk are impossible. Certainly they did turn milk into various curdled forms (meaning ones with most of the lactose removed). But we also know that their better-documented descendants during the Middle Ages sometimes drank cows’ and other animals’ milk fresh, sometimes turned it into various soured products, fresh cheeses, butter, and aged cheeses. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to guess that the pre-Roman Gauls also enjoyed both fresh milk for drinking and milk variously transformed by lactic-acid bacteria.

  THE MEDIEVAL PICTURE

  As in the other major dairying zones, no fresh milk industry existed in medieval Europe, or could have. Milk didn’t change hands for money as often as it was consumed by small householders with their own cow or goat. Most farming was comparatively small-scale and unspecialized except for a few great commodities like wool. Dairy husbandry was usually a home enterprise, with peasants or smallholders milking an animal or two (rarely many more) and sometimes drinking part of the milk fresh or soured before making it into other simple products for their own use. Where larger operations existed,
they were usually part of monastery or manor farms.

  In most of northwestern Europe, butter was the cheapest and most plentiful of fats rather than anything epicurean. Cream was not particularly prized in cooking; when it was skimmed, it went into butter. The ever-useful by-product of that process was true buttermilk. Not too dissimilar from some of today’s cultured buttermilk was whole milk fermented just long enough to become refreshingly tart but still liquid enough to drink, perhaps close to Pliny’s “pleasant sour substance” and analogous to the yogurt of southern regions. People do not seem to have cooked with fresh milk nearly as much as we do; at any rate, it crops up less often in surviving medieval cookbooks than almond milk.

  The fresh cheeses that were ordinarily the most practical kinds for householders to produce were based sometimes on the skim milk saved from buttermaking, sometimes on whole milk. (In the latter case any butterfat that drained off along with the whey was separately saved for whey butter. The whey itself furnished a common drink; if people didn’t consume it, it often ended up in pig swill.) Fresh cheeses ranged from simple curds, eaten either along with the whey or after being drained of it, to “green cheese,” or curds allowed to take on a cheesier nature but eaten before aging. The curdling could be done by bacterial souring, rennet, or a combination of the two, with the flavor and texture varying according to how strong the action of the acid or enzyme was and how far coagulation was allowed to proceed.

  A NEW AGE DAWNS

  So far, the region’s dairying preferences had much in common with those of northeastern Europe—and even the older milking lands of the Near East, when it came to the importance of soured milk and fresh cheeses. But a few centuries or generations before Columbus, something started happening that would propel western Europe and later North America toward radically changed ideas of food, or rather of how to buy and sell it.