If mamia is not eaten after a day or so, it can serve as the beginnings of a sheep cheese. In Catalonia a fresh cheese similar to mamia, called mató, is made and served with honey. Though often produced with cow’s milk today, it was traditionally made from goat’s milk.
In sixteenth-century Britain, possets and syllabubs, made in a similar vein, though without rennet, were popular. Both milk-based, possets were served hot in decorative metal or ceramic pots and syllabubs were served cold in decorative glasses. Syllabubs were probably invented in Tudor England but, like the Tudors, made their way into Scotland, where they enjoyed some popularity. Possets are older; they seem to date back to the Middle Ages as a form of curdled milk. Later, fruit peel and sherry were added to possets.
Elizabeth Cleland’s 1755 recipe for syllabub, like the traditional hattit kit recipe, calls for a visit to the milking shed. Her recipe also shows the belief that fresh milk should be consumed as quickly as possible. Warm milk taken directly from a cow is very frothy and may be the origin of the frothy top of both dishes.
TO MAKE SILLABUBS FROM THE COW
Sweeten either wine, Cedar [cider] or strong ale, put it in a bowl, take it to the cow, and milk her on your liquor as fast as you can. You may make it at home by warming it, and pour it on the liquor out of a teapot.
Cleland also offers two more usual recipes:
SOLID SILLABUBS
Take a chopin of very thick cream, put into it three gills of Malaga [sweet sherrylike fortified wine], the grate of a lemon, the juice of two bitter oranges, and sweeten it to your taste. Beat it well for a quarter of an hour, then skim it with a spoon, and put it in glasses.
A SACK POSSET OR WHAT IS CALLED THE SNOW POSSET
Boil a chopin of cream or milk with cinnamon and nutmeg; then beat the yolks of ten eggs. And mix them with a little cold milk; then by degrees mix them with the cream, stir it on the fire until it is scalding hot; sweeten it to your taste, put in your dish a mutchkin of sack [sherry] with some sugar and nutmeg; set it on a pot of boiling water, and when the wine is hot, let one take the cream, and another the whites of the eggs, and pour them both in holding your hands high, and stirring all together while it is on the fire; when it is scalding hot, take off, cover it, and let it stand a while before you send it to the table. The whites must be beaten with a little sack.
Though Cleland is not clear on this point, the whites are supposed to be a froth added to the top of the posset.
Another idea that became very popular in the eighteenth century was dessert creams, which were nothing more than flavored, thickened, whipped creams. Cleland gives recipes for eighteen creams of various degrees of complexity. One of the most popular was steeple cream, so known because it was formed into a cone shape resembling a steeple.
5
DESERT MILK
When modern people think of a milk culture they think of America today or of early northern Europeans. But there has never been a culture more dependent on milk than the desert nomads known as the Bedouins. Today the Bedouins are losing their traditional way of life—less than 10 percent are still nomadic. But for centuries, the Bedouins were nomads who, unlike other Arabs, lived out in the desert. The word “Bedouin” means “desert dwellers.” Among the first to adopt the religion of the Prophet Muhammad, the Bedouins were devout Sunni Muslims and were much admired by the Arab world. And yet they built no mosques. Or anything else. The Bedouins didn’t build things. They prayed facing Mecca in the open desert, and in ceremonies that involved washing, they washed with sand. They spoke their own language, had their own customs, belonged to no country, and moved continually.
At times, the Bedouin diet consisted almost entirely of milk. The milk came from camels, their most important possession. The Bedouins lived with camels, pitched tents made of camel hair, slept next to camels, traveled by camel, and milked camels. All over the world, nomadic herders lived on milk, but camels are the rare large mammal that is suited to desert life. They eat food that a human would not recognize as food. Sauntering through a desert area of rock and sand that seems barren, they suddenly leave the trail to stick their head around a rock and find a camel-thorn salt bush to munch on.
The camels’ diet does not seem ideal for milk production. If, for example, they feed on the spiky salt bush, more correctly called atriplex, whose roots soak in salt, their milk has a very salty taste. But the Bedouins were, and are, willing to drink salty milk because camels need salty plants. When their salt intake is lowered, they produce less milk. Other unlikely fodder leads to other odd tastes. Nonetheless, the camel, seemingly out of nothing, produces a protein- and fat-rich milk. And, in times when there is a pronounced lack of water, the camel has the ability to dilute her milk to provide her young, and by extension her herder family, with more water. So, depending upon environmental circumstances, camel’s milk varies greatly; at times, it has far more fat and protein than goat, sheep, or cow’s milk, but at other times, it has far less.
The Bedouins usually covered their camels’ udders with cloth to keep the young camels away and reserve the mothers’ milk for human use. They and other desert Arabs milked into a bowl that rested on one knee, with a foot on the other knee; it was an unnatural balancing act, but the camel has an unusually high udder. Some Arabs kept the milk in goatskin or camelskin bags and made it into laban, yogurt, but the Bedouins, constantly traveling, drank it fresh, and preferred it direct from the udder. Because it was warm, they called this milk “cooked” milk.
In the seventh century, the Arabs, the people of the Arabian Peninsula, spread as far north as Iraq and Syria, as far west as the Atlantic coast of Morocco and Spain, and as far east as Persia (Iran). The Arab Empire became one of the largest empires in history, and the Arabs, the ruling elite, reigned over populations numbering larger than their own, populations with cultures, languages, and traditions different from the Arabs’. The one common thread tying the empire together was Islam, both the religion and the culture.
Muhammad and the Qur’an had very specific instructions regarding breastfeeding. Babies were to be breastfed until the age of two. Thus, in the early years of the Arab Empire, few babies were bottle-fed. The edict eventually became contested, however, because a lengthy lactation period is a form of birth control and some religious leaders wanted to encourage large families.
Parents were assured that if an infant died before the two-year nursing period was up, the child would be breastfed in Paradise. Believers were assured that Muhammad was breastfed after an easy birth, and this did not seem surprising, because it was also said that he was born already circumcised. However, a dissident view in the late fifteenth century claimed that Muhammad’s birth had been very difficult and his mother had been able to breastfeed him for only a few months. This raised the question of whether he had been given to a wet nurse.
Islamic law did allow for wet-nursing, and believers ascribed to the ancient, persistent belief that the traits of a wet nurse could be passed to the child. Muhammad forbade the use of wet nurses who showed signs of mental unbalance. Avicenna, a highly influential tenth-century doctor in the Persian court, had a great deal to say about the prerequisite qualities of a wet nurse. He also allowed that if a wet nurse was physically or mentally indisposed, a baby could be artificially fed until she was cured. But artificial feeding was rare in the medieval Muslim world. And few bottles or other feeding vessels have been found.
Maimonides, the famous twelfth-century Jewish doctor and theologian from Córdoba, appears to have been influenced by his Muslim teacher, Averroes. In his Book of Women, Maimonides writes that mothers are to breastfeed for two years, during which time they are to abstain from sex. He also specified that if a woman had twins, she was to breastfeed one and hire a wet nurse for the other. Babies were not to be fed animal milk.
Many dairy products were used for cooking in the Arab Empire, including fresh milk, soured milk, and cheese. Among them was liba, which the ancient Greeks called pyriate, a product made from colo
strum, the first milk produced in lactation. Yellowish and sticky, it does not look or feel like milk. Used as food for a newborn, it contains a high concentration of antibodies, protein, white blood cells, vitamins, and zinc, and it is very low in calories because it has little fat and lactose. It helps protect the newborn from diseases and acquire important building blocks even as the infant loses a slight amount of weight. Lactating mothers produce colostrum for only about three days. In modern times in the West, it became known as “liquid gold.”
When making liba, the Arabs mixed milk and colostrum together, sometimes in equal parts and sometimes using two parts milk. The fourteenth-century cookbook Kitab Zahr al-Hadiqafi al-At’ima al Aniqa said that peasants sometimes made liba entirely with colostrum, but that it had an unpleasant flavor until they learned to mix it with milk. The liba was mixed and cooked and left outside on a warm night. By morning it was solid. And for those who could not get real colostrum, which was available only right after birth and often had to be saved for newborns, there was a fake liba made with egg whites and one yolk and cooked into what was essentially a sugarless custard.
Biráf was milk that was left in the warm night air so that it had soured by morning. Kitab Zahr al-Hadiqafi al-At’ima al Aniqa said that it could be eaten plain or with honey, syrup, or sugar. It added that doctors recommended sucking on a quince afterward or sipping a drink made with vinegar and quince-flavored syrup, what in contemporary America is known as a quince shrub.
The Arabs ate a cheese called halum. Goat’s or sheep’s milk was boiled with thyme until reduced by about a third. Then it was cooled, mixed with rennet, and layered in a mold with fresh thyme and peeled citrus. Next, boiled milk was poured over it, and it was covered with olive oil to seal out air. Halum, which is a stretched cheese like string cheese, is still made today, but with mint rather than thyme.
Yogurt was commonplace, and sometimes it was drained to produce a denser cream called qanbaris. A kind of soft cheese called shiraz was made by adding rennet to yogurt. Sometimes it was mixed with barley or wheat, making a porridge.
In the twentieth century, Spanish scholars found an anonymous manuscript of recipes from thirteenth-century Arab Spain and Morocco that confirmed the Arab use of dairy products and contained the following recipe:
RAFIS WITH SOFT CHEESE
They take crumbs of clean bread, when removed from the oven, and knead the crumbs only without the crust and they are soaked with another of fresh soft cheese without salt and with some butter; it is shaped and melted and clarified butter is poured over it, and the desired amount of cleaned honey without foam.
Note the use of clarified butter, known in Arabic as smen, although judging from its infrequent citations in this manuscript, the word was not in common usage in the Middle Ages. Smen is still used throughout North Africa and in parts of the Middle East. It is also widely used in India, where it is called ghee. Clarified butter is an intelligent way of dealing with butter in a hot country because once the fat solids are removed, the butter becomes a clear oil with a very long shelf life. It is often aged by burying. In southern Morocco, the Berbers, the original pre-Arab inhabitants of North Africa, seal and bury jars of smen at the birth of a daughter and then dig them up for use at her wedding. In Morocco, smen is often made from sheep’s milk, but cow’s milk is considered better.
It is often claimed, though it is probably not true, that the second-oldest book on Moroccan cuisine after the thirteenth-century manuscript found by the Spanish scholars is a small book by Zette Guinaudeau published in 1958. The wife of a doctor, she wrote on the cooking of Fez. This was her guide to making smen:
When melted, the butter is skimmed during boiling, which lasts about a quarter of an hour, and then strained through a fine cloth into a khabia [crock], where it is kept. Salt it lightly before it curdles, stirring with a wooden spoon. A white deposit remains at the bottom of the cooking pan. Use a ladle for pouring the butter (the solids remain on the bottom).
Arabs also have a tradition, dating back many centuries, of drinking lben, which is soured whey left over from making curds or cheese. Madame Guinaudeau, as she was always known, turned lyrical on the subject of lben:
Lben! … Lben! The street cry is heard in Fez as soon as the fine weather arrives. Drunk by rich and poor, city dweller and “fellah,” it is offered in the shops to all who pass by. May you one day know the joy of quenching your thirst with this slightly acidic whey, drunk in the pale shadow of an olive tree after a long excursion on a hot day in June.
In 1326, Ibn Battuta, from an educated family of religious authorities, set out from his native Tangiers on the far western end of the Arab Empire and went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, as all devout Muslims are supposed to do at least once in their lifetime. But he didn’t stop with Mecca, and over the next twenty-seven years he traveled more than 75,000 miles, to visit every land under Muslim rule.
In his travels Battuta often encountered milk, usually soured milk, because fresh milk was a rarity. In Abyssinia, northern contemporary Ethiopia, he was offered plantains boiled in fresh milk, which curdled the milk, and then the plantains and the curds were served in two separate dishes, apparently an unusual enough meal for him to make note of it in his diary. In Mali, when the sultan said he was sending him a gift, Battuta imagined rare textiles, fine clothes, a horse—or “horses,” as he wrote in his diary—but when the gift arrived it was plates of food, “three of bread, with a piece of fried fish, and a dish of sour milk.” Apparently milk and fish were far more rare and valuable in Mali than in Tangiers. Battuta noted, “I smiled at their simplicity, and the value they placed on such trifles as these.”
One of the best sources on medieval Arab cooking is a Baghdad manuscript from the year 1226, when the city was still an important political and cultural center. Thirty years later it would be destroyed by the Mongols. The author of the cookbook was Muhammad Ibn al-Hasan Ibn Muhammad Ibn al-Karim al-Katib al-Baghdadi. Despite all the information embedded in that name, we know little about him other than the fact that he was from Baghdad.
From this Baghdad cookbook, it is clear that while the Muslims borrowed a great deal of dietary restrictions from the Jews, they never were concerned with the Jewish interdiction on mixing meat and dairy. Cooking meat with yogurt was common in the Muslim world. Also, in these recipes, yogurt is always referred to as Persian milk, showing that the Arabs, or at least the Baghdad Arabs of the Middle Ages, considered yogurt an idea that had come from Persia. Most historians think that this early yogurt was sour yogurt, and some think that it was thickened with rennet.
Here is one recipe from the Baghdad cookbook:
MADIRA [THIS NAME COMES FROM MADIR, WHICH MEANS “CURDLED”]
Cut fat meat into middle sized pieces with the tail. If chickens are used quarter them. Put into the saucepan with a little salt and cover with water: boil removing the scum. When almost cooked, take large onions and Nabatean leeks, peel, cut the tails, wash in salt and water, dry and put in the pot. Add dry coriander, cumin, mastic [dried sap from the mastic tree with piney aroma common in Arab cooking], and cinnamon, ground fine. When cooked and the juices are dried up, so that only oil remains, ladle out into a large bowl. Now take Persian milk as required, and put into the saucepan, add salted lemon [lemons preserved in brine] and fresh mint. Leave to boil, then remove from the fire, stirring. When the boiling has subsided, put back the meat and herbs. Cover the saucepan, wipe its sides, and leave to settle over the fire: then remove.
Evidence that yogurt came to the Arab world from Persia can be seen in the Persian borani, a popular yogurt dish, frequently made with eggplant, that in time spread to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Armenia, and Georgia. The dish was named for the Sassanid queen Boran of the ninth century, who was said to love yogurt. She was also said to love her husband, the caliph al-Ma’mun, and traveled with him on military campaigns. She was known for her sense of style. Great palaces and mosques were built both by her and in her honor. But none have survi
ved, only her beloved yogurt and eggplant dish. Boranis are often confused with the completely unrelated Indian dishes biryani, which comes from another Persian word and means “fried.”
The earliest surviving recipe that resembles modern eggplant borani comes from the fourteenth-century Kitab Wasf al-Atima al-mu’tada [The Description of Familiar Food], which may have been printed in Cairo but was based on Baghdad cooking:
Fry eggplant in sesame oil or fresh tail fat and peel them and put them in an ample vessel. Then pound them with the ladle until they become like pounded harisa. Then you throw on Persian yogurt in which you have garlic pounded with a little salt and mixed it well with it. Then take pounded lean meat and make meatballs from it and throw them in the tail fat and put them on the surface of the eggplant and yogurt. You sprinkle dry coriander and Chinese cinnamon on it, both pounded fine and it comes out well.
Yogurt and vegetables, yogurt and meat, and yogurt and fish dishes were popular. This chard and yogurt dish is from The Description of Familiar Food. The recipe says to boil the chard with salt, but the usual Arab practice was to boil green vegetables with natron—a naturally occurring bicarbonate of soda, i.e., baking soda, found in the desert—combined with other salts. This kept the natural colors bright.
SILO BI-LABAN. CHARD AND YOGURT.
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