Milk

by Anne Mendelson

  One way to describe the change is that the economic center of gravity began to revolve around cities, which (like imperial Rome in its day) looked increasingly to the countryside to supply them with food. Another way to look at it is that most kinds of specialized farming for profit got to northwestern Europe sooner than anywhere else in the world, foreshadowing the modern commercial production and transport of many foods. One of the first results was an expanding interest in ripened cheeses, already better known here than in any other stronghold of dairying. The larger kinds were not economically feasible to produce except through sizable cooperative ventures that pooled the milk and labor of many farmers (or a whole village or district) and rested on the knowledge that a market for the end result justified the expense of production as well as transportation to towns and cities.

  During the many European economic shakeups following the Age of Discovery, more and more milk was diverted to large-scale manufacture of aged and other specialized cheeses, usually from cows’ milk. Fresh cheeses continued to be eaten in the northwest, but with snowballing urbanization and the displacement of peasants from the countryside in many areas, they were less often made and consumed in the households of people who actually owned a cow or goat. The farmers who remained either participated in large-scale cheesemaking based on milk pooled from a group of farms or carried out independent small-scale dairying for profit. Farmstead dairying was chiefly managed by women, who produced butter and fresh or aged cheeses (often bearing regional names) for nearby markets.

  It began to be not only possible but highly desirable to target market segments, to put forth products that might claim distinction by virtue of novelty, unusual appearance, or manufacturing nuances reflected in some fillip of flavor or texture. In other words, western European dairyists were ready for a systematic commercial exploitation of diversity more intensive than anything in older regions. The contents of today’s more ambitious cheese shops reflect the aggressive, long-continued pursuit of this aim—which incidentally diminished the importance of simple fresh dairy products that before the age of refrigeration could not be brought to market without spoiling.

  Part of the reason that diversification triumphed was that the strikingly varied, broken-up geography of western Europe itself created an infinite number of environments. The seventeenth-century Dutch, still engaged in the giant engineering projects that would give them fine tracts of grazing land reclaimed from the sea, led the way in commercial dairy specialization. From the Low Countries into southern Scandinavia or southward to the Alps, westward to the Atlantic coast of France, or beyond the North Sea in the diverse topographies of Great Britain, the production of countless characteristic—even unique—local cheeses or other dairy specialties consciously tailored to particular domestic or foreign markets became an ever more lucrative enterprise. As systematization advanced, the many northwestern European microclimates enabled farmers to develop a large range of cattle, goat, and sheep breeds for milking and also encouraged dairyists to work with a great spectrum of naturally occurring microflora—bacterial strains that might present some marvelously flavorful departure from the kinds in the next district or the next valley. (This is why things that may look alike on paper—for instance crème fraîche in Normandy and sour cream in southern Germany—often seem to have come from unrelated planets when you taste them.)

  THE GROUND SHIFTS

  With shrinking rural populations and the growing professionalization of cheesemaking after the late Middle Ages, fresh milk for drinking became a less prominent feature of everyday country diets. The focus of milk consumption gradually began to center on towns and cities, where it was increasingly sold for cash. As will be explained in “The Story of Modern Milk,” the perishability of milk would limit the shift until the nineteenth century. But meanwhile, other kinds of change were afoot in the kitchen as medieval culinary models yielded to new ideas.

  Both sweet cream and (in some regions) cream cultured to local preferences became valued as tokens of luxury in Northwestern Cow Belt cooking after the sixteenth century. Discerning consumers began to recognize schools of elegant buttermaking. New families of butter-based sauces gained prominence, especially in France, while sweet cream began to find its way into ice creams and different kinds of sauces. In the west of England it was made into the renowned local specialty called clotted “Devonshire” or “Cornish” cream. Cream in whipped form was a great discovery of this period, though whipping techniques were at first limited by the comparatively primitive state of whisks (see this page).

  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries unsoured milk had not yet acquired the commanding position it was to achieve, but it became more popular both drunk by itself and in sweetened beverages, roux-based sauces, and sweet or savory custards. The soured counterpart seems to have undergone a corresponding decline by the nineteenth century. Rural Scandinavian cooks retained the most, English and American cooks the least interest in different forms of soured milk with a real lactic-acid tang. Even in the British Isles and the new United States, a taste for true buttermilk (often though not always ripened) survived for centuries, while other locales remained loyal to particular cultured milk specialties.

  Fresh cheeses had varied fortunes. Most ceased to be made at home except in country districts. Regional preferences in fresh cheeses sold at market went in highly varied directions; as a result, something like German Quark is only crudely interchangeable with English or North American opposite numbers. In France an impressive variety of forms appeared as objects of great culinary interest in their own right. This richness makes sense, because it was early French commercial dairyists who worked most intensively to exploit subtly differentiated strains of local bacteria—without microscopes, and long before the advent of the large industrial laboratories that today maintain colonies of microorganisms engineered to manufacturers’ preferences.

  The range of English (and early American) fresh cheeses appears to have been much smaller, though there was a demand for what was called “cream cheese”—a term hard to interpret but certainly not much like today’s factory product. Long after the general decline of home-produced fresh cheeses, an occasional English observer would wistfully comment on curd cheeses or “bonnyclabber,” still recalling the rural British past in remote Scottish or Irish districts. In the American Deep South, “clabber,” or “curds and cream,” was a beloved regional dish for generations. After the mid-twentieth century, universal pasteurization and homogenization of milk would wipe out many of these local favorites.

  The tangled paradoxes of the northwestern European legacy wouldn’t be as glaring if not for the fact that people from the region eventually became the voice of progressive diet-and-nutrition officialdom issuing recommendations to the whole human race, with little understanding of their own pre-industrial dairying past. Since at least the late nineteenth century, Western manufacturers and nutritional experts have been exporting versions of the modern Northwestern Cow Belt mentality to Latin America, developing tropical countries, and even the far older dairying zones of the Near East and India. This mind-set stacks up pretty woefully against the deeper, broader heritage of northwestern European dairy foods and milk-based cooking. Luckily for us, other possibilities are gaining ground by the minute.

  WHERE GLOBAL MILKY WAYS MEET: DAIRY FOODS IN TODAY’S AMERICA

  At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the far-flung areas constituting the old Northwestern Cow Belt suddenly find themselves absorbing all manner of contributions from the other three primary milking zones—the gift of peoples who have immigrated from those regions. And considering the predicament to which industrial dairying “progress” has brought us here in the United States, they’re arriving not a moment too soon.

  In the late 1960s, just before immigration from every corner of the globe had begun to skyrocket, the American food scene represented either the collision course or the prolonged romance of two goals reflecting opposite sides of the northwestern European mark
et ideal. One was to get as many differentiated products as possible before the buying public, the other to weed out all possible alternatives that interfere with profits. Both aims still merrily coexist, with lunatic results exemplified by, let’s say, yogurt.

  You can now walk into thousands of supermarkets and take your pick of “amaretto cheesecake” or “lemon cream pie” nonfat yogurt; low-fat yogurt with a choice of chocolate chips, granola, or Reese’s Pieces as topping; or milk-free vanilla or chocolate soy yogurt—without necessarily being able to find any item that people brought up on the real thing would recognize as plain yogurt worth putting a spoon into.

  The tide of immigration from the world’s older dairying strongholds has redrawn the picture. Depending on where you live, you may have access to grocery stores or even supermarkets with fresh, creamy, and soul-satisfying plain yogurt made by small companies for particular immigrant communities. What’s more, a taste for plain whole-milk yogurt from sheep’s or combined sheep’s and goats’ milk has begun crossing over from Turkish- or Greek-born consumers to growing numbers of other Americans. Rich, intense Greek-made yogurt partly drained of whey in true Yogurtistan tradition has developed a following here among many food lovers.

  Densely toothsome yogurt made from buffaloes’ milk now regularly reaches some specialty food stores. Start frequenting small restaurants specializing in south Indian dosas (fermented rice-batter crepes), and you may soon find yourself adoring the southern-style yogurt- or buttermilk-based cold beverages that they serve, laced with whole spices, garlic, herb sprigs, and hot peppers. Where Russian immigrants have settled, wonderful sour cream and farmer cheese, prostokvasha (a pourable yogurt), and butter with the taste of clotted cream usually follow. The list can only grow as foreign-born cooks and food lovers put down roots here and find themselves able to introduce people raised in a narrow modern version of the Northwestern Cow Belt mentality to some of the “new” (though really old) fresh dairy products that have come to America.

  And this isn’t to mention a growing revolt against milk processed to a fare-thee-well before any of us can get our hands on it. For all the continued prominence of horrible examples to the contrary, today it is more possible than it’s been in at least half a century for many of us to find honest, unhomogenized whole milk from small herds and dairies run by businesspeople who care about well-tended milch animals and fresh milk flavor.

  In short, I think it is realistic rather than naive to hope that the United States will consummate the story of the great dairying zones by giving the best elements of all four a chance to flourish on American soil. That prospect makes a detailed historical look at the worst side of our own dairying traditions less discouraging than it might be.

  THE STORY OF MODERN MILK

  Or, Is This What We Really Want?

  You can love fresh dairy products as some of life’s best pleasures and still be saddened by the spectacle of modern dairying. Milk deserves many superlatives. But unfortunately, among them is the title of this country’s most misunderstood food. Nothing more cruelly illustrates the unholy wars between desire and fear, gratification and denial, cravings and paranoias that now beset millions of American consumers.

  As I have pointed out, signs of improvement are now dawning. In fact, the unhappy story I’m about to sketch may be headed for a not-so-unhappy outcome. American consumers may be ready to develop an enlarged perspective on why milk matters, a question now sunk in great historical amnesia. Even if we grew up on dull, featureless milk, we now have the advantage of living alongside many people raised in livelier traditions of milk-based cookery. And part of what they have to teach us is that something very curious happened in the Western world’s use of milk starting about two centuries ago.

  The story gets—to borrow from Lewis Carroll—curiouser and curiouser as it goes along. Its convolutions often reflect visions of dollar signs dancing in various heads. It zigzags through human digestive vagaries and cultural biases, science and pseudo-science, milk-processing technology, animal breeding and feeding, obscure consequences of refrigeration, the dawn of cyberfarming, and more. But little of all this could have been foretold at the outset, when popular eighteenth-century nutritional theory leapt to wrong conclusions that suggested new entrepreneurial opportunities. Late in the century, residents of the area that I’ve called the Northwestern Cow Belt—especially England and its North American colonies—began placing great emphasis on one particular way of consuming milk: in fresh drinkable form.

  At that time, commercial trade in fresh milk was only slightly more possible than trade in the morning dew. Up to a century or two earlier, people who drank fresh milk had generally gotten it by milking their own cow or goat. City dwellers willing to gamble could buy it from someone who drove a cow or goat about the streets and milked a few cups’ worth into a customer’s bowl or pot, or hawked it from pails. (The gamble was on not being killed by any plagues carried by the animal, milker, or pail.) But everyone was at least as used to soured as fresh milk until an urban market specifically for fresh milk began to take shape, fostered by ideas about health that in a few generations would make fresh milk a nearly mandatory part of everyone’s diet, especially children’s.

  Now, many very real medical considerations are involved with milk and linked with its modern commercial fortunes. But fear of catastrophe through lack of fresh unsoured milk—that form specifically—is the least rational of the lot. In fact, it is purely imaginary. It couldn’t have originated if people in nineteenth-century England and North America had known anything about another medically loaded issue that I’ve only incidentally touched on until now: lactose tolerance or intolerance.

  THE DIGESTIVE MAJORITY AND MINORITY

  To summarize briefly: The lactose dissolved in whey is the principal sugar of milk, an energy supplier otherwise unknown or almost unknown in the animal or vegetable kingdom. Unlike milkfat and milk proteins, it is the same in composition from one animal’s milk to another. It belongs to the family of disaccharides (double-barreled sugar molecules) and consists of a unit of simple glucose linked with a unit of another simple sugar, galactose.

  In healthy baby mammals drinking mother’s milk, an enzyme called lactase severs the link between the two halves of the molecule in the small intestine and frees the galactose to be converted (by yet another enzyme) into glucose, eventually releasing into the bloodstream two glucose molecules’ worth of energy from each original lactose molecule. This feat of transformation becomes unnecessary when the child advances to a milkless adult diet. At that point lactase production stops—though in most cases not completely. Almost all human beings retain at least a vestige of lactase activity throughout their lives. And a few belong to odd mutant populations that never lose lactase activity in the same way as do most people or animals, a condition known as lactase persistence that is as anomalous as a fawn’s keeping its spots once they have served their purpose. For most of the human race, when more than small amounts of unsoured milk get into the digestive system, the lactose in the whey passes almost intact into the small intestine. It draws diarrhea-producing water in its wake, while resident bacteria eventually reduce it to tatters and by-products including painful amounts of gas. (Note that this reaction, though unpleasant, is not an actual allergy. True milk allergy, potentially life-threatening but luckily rare, is an immune response in which the body reacts to milk proteins as foreign substances to be fought off with antibodies and a surge of histamines.)

  As any glance at the world’s dairying regions and cuisines shows, lactose intolerance doesn’t stop adults from consuming milk. It usually deters them from drinking the fresh unsoured milk that suddenly acquired vast prominence in Western diets during the nineteenth century. The milk drinkers of the Northwestern Cow Belt didn’t know that they were mutants able to do something very unusual. And until the vogue for fresh—that is, full-lactose—milk appeared in early modern times, even northwestern Europe treated it as only one possible form of milk among man
y others with little or no lactose.

  PURITY AND PRESTIGE

  A shift in priorities occurred in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. The new focus on milk for drinking reflects a “perfect storm” convergence of circumstances. First of all, cash-crop farming began to attract ambitious specialists who saw opportunities in feeding cities. City provisioning had become more complex and troubled as the rural poor, progressively dispossessed by new patterns of land ownership, migrated to urban centers. Townsfolk became both more isolated from once widespread skills like dairying and more dependent on retail sellers who came to the ever-expanding city markets or trolled the streets for customers. A smaller but notable factor was the advent of hot tea and coffee with fresh milk added. All this coincided with an emerging popular-science vogue that claimed to incorporate the discoveries of the first real modern chemists and public-sanitation pioneers.

  CHILDREN OF THE AFFLUENT BEING FED MILK IN ST. JAMES’S PARK, LONDON.

  The new idea that many substances were acids, bases, or neutralized products of reactions between the two seems to have captured many imaginations by the end of the eighteenth century. So did the concept of “putrefaction” as a process of chemical decomposition. Putting two and two together and coming up with five because as yet nobody knew anything about bacteria, some influential would-be experts decided that acids were damaging substances and alkalis benign, while acid fermentation of foods was often a sort of dangerous putrefaction likely to lead to dyspepsia if not pestilence.