Milk

by Mark Kurlansky

  In Europe, few people had refrigerators in their homes until much later, not even in France. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a French monk, Marcel Audiffren, invented the world’s first electric-powered household refrigerator. But he sold the idea to General Electric, and so refrigerators became American.

  During World War II, governments saw ice cream as an unnecessary frivolity, a waste of resources. It was banned in Britain and in Italy. The emperor of Japan forced the price below production cost so that no one would make it. Only Americans saw ice cream as a valuable morale booster. The International Association of Dairy Manufacturers and the National Dairy Council, two powerful lobby groups that played a vital role in expanding the popularity of dairy products—too much so, some argued—convinced the U.S. government to include ice cream on their list of essential foods. They did, however, try to restrict the number of flavors and the number of specialty items. The use of excessive sugar, mostly imported, did not fit in with the wartime economy.

  The armed forces had ice cream. They made it themselves, and by 1943 they were the world’s largest ice cream maker. They built freezer ships to send ice cream to soldiers on the front lines. In 1945 they spent a million dollars on an ice cream ship—an ice cream parlor on a barge.

  Certain flavors became American standards, among them peppermint stick ice cream. Peppermint is a hybrid mint bred for its strong taste, and it was extremely popular in both France and the United States. The first peppermint stick was of seventeenth-century German origin, but the red-striped peppermint stick did not make its appearance until the mid-nineteenth century. Soon it was being crushed for peppermint stick ice cream. This 1942 recipe is from the Southern novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings:

  1 cup boiled custard [beaten egg yolks and sugar gently heated with cream until thick] made with half the usual quantity of sugar

  10 penny peppermint sticks

  1 cup rich milk

  2 cups Dora’s cream [Dora was her cow, known for her unpleasant temperament and rich heavy cream, which Rawlings claimed was what made her ice cream so good]

  Crush the peppermint sticks and place with the milk over boiling water. Stir occasionally until the candy is entirely dissolved [some peppermint sticks leave a few small crunchy pieces]. Blend with the custard and chill. Add cream and freeze. This is a lovely pale pink and has just the right peppermint flavor.

  In Europe, especially in France and Italy, but also in the United States in places such as New England with a strong dairy culture, small shops continued to make artisanal ice cream. Also, a few entrepreneurs realized that there was a market for higher quality ice cream in small containers at high prices. In 1961 Rose Mattus and her husband, Reuben, developed such a brand and called it Häagen-Dazs. The success of this brand name proves that Americans like their food to have foreign names—the way they will use coriander only when it is called cilantro and the way sherbet has made a comeback under the name “sorbet.” The Mattuses intended “Häagen-Dazs” to sound Danish, though there is no umlaut in Danish. But if you wanted a word to look foreign, what could be better than an umlaut? For almost thirty years, it was the fastest-growing ice cream company in the world and was sold in twenty-eight countries. But its sale to the Pillsbury Company in the 1980s led to a series of corporate shifts and mergers, and Häagen-Dazs ended up a subsidiary of Nestlé.

  This has been the fate of most small quality ice cream companies that tried to grow. In 1978, two New Yorkers, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, having completed a correspondence course in ice cream making, opened an ice cream parlor in Burlington, Vermont. Soon they earned a reputation for imaginative flavors with humorous names such as Cherry Garcia, named after Grateful Dead star Jerry Garcia. Cohen, whose ability to taste was limited by an inability to smell, liked ice cream with a lot of texture, and their flavors became known for their chunkiness and textures, such as cookie dough. They were also known for taking environmental stands and, especially, rejecting the use of growth hormones in cattle. They had a huge following, not only for the quality of their ice cream but also for their causes. But in 2000 they sold their company to Unilever.

  Like Washington and Jefferson, the founding father of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, loved ice cream. His friend the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez recalled in his A Personal Portrait of Fidel that the leader once concluded a large lunch by eating eighteen scoops of ice cream. According to CIA documents declassified in 2007, the CIA noticed Castro’s ice cream fetish and tried, unsuccessfully, to plant a poison pill in his favorite chocolate milkshake. Apparently the assassin stored the pill in the ice cream freezer and it stuck and fell apart when he tried to take it out.

  The Caribbean climate is perfect for eating ice cream but much too hot for making it. Nevertheless, a number of Caribbean islands have a tradition of ice cream making. Jamaican Caroline Sullivan, in her 1893 The Jamaican Cookery Book, gave recipes for a number of ices and both banana and coconut ice cream. Here is the banana:

  Two bananas

  Three eggs

  One and a half pints of milk

  Sugar

  Make a custard of the eggs, milk and sugar to taste. When cold, add the two bananas mashed fine and smooth. Stir, mix thoroughly, and freeze.

  But Cuba had a different history than Jamaica. Finally free of Spanish colonialism in 1898, it was taken over by the Americans, who dominated the Cuban economy. Many basics came exclusively from the United States, including gallon containers of the big American commercial ice cream brands. Howard Johnson was popular. Then in 1962 the United States declared a total embargo on imports to Cuba, and the Cubans had to quickly learn how to make many of the things that they had always bought from the United States. Among them were soap, shoes, Coca-Cola, and ice cream.

  Fidel Castro took a personal interest in developing Cuban ice cream, and he was determined that Cuba would make better ice cream than the United States. He assigned the task to one of his closest associates, Celia Sánchez, who had successfully brought back the cigar industry after all the leading cigar makers left the island.

  Milk delivery in Jamaica, c.1900: This stereograph depicts a woman carrying milk in a can on her head and pouring it into a cup, while a girl waits nearby with her own cup. (Card by Keystone View Company, author’s collection)

  Sánchez, a fan of ballet, named her proposed ice cream shop Coppelia, after her favorite ballet. The logo was a pair of chubby legs in a tutu and pointe shoes—a warning to ballerinas who ate too much ice cream.

  According to legend, Fidel Castro was in possession of excellent recipes for thirty-six flavors of ice cream—some versions of the story said he had more, some less. It is not known where these recipes came from, but given the times, it is usually assumed that they were confiscated. He sent technicians to Canada to learn how to make the flavors and bought top-of-the-line machines from Sweden and the Netherlands. He wanted to build the world’s largest ice cream parlor with the world’s best ice cream for “the world’s best people.”

  The Cubans did indeed build the world’s largest ice cream parlor, as it claimed to serve 4,250 gallons to 35,000 customers a day. Customers had to wait in line for two hours or more, and that line at Coppelia has become part of Havana culture. Originally, Coppelia sold twenty-six flavors, including guava, muscatel, and crème de vie, which was an eggnog-like specialty served at Christmastime. Then the country fell on hard times in the 1990s, after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The long lines at the Coppelia have remained, but today’s menu board with its original twenty-six slots now has only two or three of those slots filled—usually with vanilla, strawberry, or chocolate. It’s a limited choice, but still of high quality. For where would a society be without good ice cream?

  Ice cream cones have become not only extremely popular but extremely profitable, far more so than milk, which has a narrow profit margin. Ice cream in general is more profitable than milk, but ice cream cones are one of the more profitable ways to sell ice cream. Alan
Reed, a dairy farmer in Idaho Falls near the Wyoming border, has a small shop in which he sells his farm products—fresh milk and cream, his own cheddar cheese, cheese sandwiches, and his own ice cream, sold in cartons or served by the cup or cone. He says his single most profitable item is his ice cream cones. Many retailers would agree.

  My own favorite ice cream dish—a childhood favorite that I rarely see anymore unless I make it myself—is coupe aux marrons, made with candied chestnuts. This recipe is from Chef Henri Charpentier’s 1935 memoir, Life à la Henri:

  2 pints vanilla ice cream

  ½ pint sweet cream, whipped

  4 tablespoons marrons glacés [candied chestnuts] in syrup. Cut.

  Place in bottom of a sherbet glass one tablespoon of marrons glacé, add one scoop of ice cream, surround with whipped cream and decorate with one whole marron.

  —PART TWO—

  DRINKING DANGEROUSLY

  I appeal to you as if you were standing beside a great river in whose current were constantly swept past hundreds of drowning infants.

  —Nathan Straus, letter to the National Council of Mayors and Councilmen, September 29, 1897

  10

  DYING FOR SOME MILK

  Until the end of the seventeenth century, the dangers of drinking milk were often discussed, but the subject lacked a sense of urgency. That changed in Europe and America when the practice known as “artificial feeding,” giving babies animal milk in nursing bottles, became common practice.

  There is not much literature on artificial feeding, but it had always been a practice, and in a few areas of Europe, such as northern Italy, southern Germany, Iceland, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Austria—strong dairy cultures—it was very common as far back as the Middle Ages. In some places, too, babies were fed milk with supplements, what would today be called formulas. Babies in Basel, Switzerland, were fed milk with flour and water, and the children there were thought to be healthy. King Louis XV, the long-reigning eighteenth-century French king, had a physician, N. Brouzet, who endorsed artificial feeding. He argued that the children in Iceland and Russia who were artificially fed were extremely healthy, and stronger and less subject to disease than the children in southern countries. In his 1754 book on child healthcare, he wrote that in Muscovy and Iceland, breastfeeding was virtually unknown: “soon after they are born they are left all day, by their mothers, lying on the ground, near a vessel filled with milk or whey, in which is placed a tube, the upper extremity of which the infant knows how to find, and putting his mouth to it sucks, whenever he is oppressed with hunger or thirst.” Brouzet said that these infants “escaped the dangers” of infancy better than in France and that “feeding children with the milk of animals certainly is not dangerous.”

  It is interesting that in eighteenth-century France—and in England, where this book was also popular in translation—artificial feeding was so exotic that it needed to be explained. Artificial feeding was a normal approach not only in Russia, Scandinavia, northern Germany, and Austria, but also in northern Italy, especially the Tyrol. Interestingly, too, in those areas where artificial feeding was dominant, wet nurses were almost nonexistent—and distrusted.

  Artificial feeding was not always a choice. In the seventeenth-century American colonies, women were few in number, and the chances of finding a lactating woman available for wet-nursing were slim so artificial feeding was commonplace.

  In Europe and America, one way to artificially feed a baby and not risk spoiled milk was to have the child nurse directly from the animal. In sixteenth-century orphanages, especially in France, it was commonplace for babies to suckle on goats. Goats and donkeys were kept for direct feeding in French hospitals, in both the provinces and Paris, into the twentieth century. In 1816 a German, Conrad Zwierlein, set off a trend across Europe of children suckling on goats with his book The Goat as the Best and Most Agreeable Wet-nurse. Whether because of their size, temperament, or availability, or because of a belief in the quality of their milk, goats have been used for suckling infants all over the world, from Arabian Bedouins to South African Hottentots. In Europe, pigs were also sometimes used.

  In the eighteenth century, scientists learned how to roughly analyze the content of milks, and found donkey’s milk to be closest to human milk. The second closest was goat’s milk. Donkey’s and goat’s milk became in great demand for feeding children. However, cow’s milk, though less favored, was most commonly used because it was most easily available.

  While there have always been some who saw milk as unhealthful, and we now know that huge numbers of people, especially children, have been made sick from milk, there was also a persistent belief that milk was healthful. The fifteenth-century French king Louis XI tried to improve his health by eating more cheese and drinking fresh milk, the latter practice unusual for a wealthy Frenchman of the period. When Francis I of France fell ill in the early sixteenth century, a physician prescribed donkey’s milk. He recovered and thereafter drank donkey’s milk whenever he was feeling ill.

  Cookbooks frequently had sections directed at the elderly and ailing that contained numerous recipes for milk-based remedies. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “milk water” was a common remedy. This was milk diluted with water with various ingredients added depending on the ailment. Eliza Smith gave two different milk water recipes. This is one:

  MILK WATER FOR CANCEROUS BREAST

  Take six quarts of new milk, four handfuls of cranes-bill [geranium], four hundred of wood lice; distill this in a cold still with a gentle fire; then take an ounce of crabs-eye [a tropical plant with poisonous seeds] and a half ounce of white sugar candy, both of fine powder; mix them together, and take a drachm of the powder in a quarter of a pint of the milk water in the morning, at twelve at noon, and at night; continue taking this three or four months. It is an excellent medicine.

  One indication of milk’s standing, at least among the affluent classes, was what was known in France as la laiterie d’agrément, the dairy of delight. This was a special miniature dairy designed for the enjoyment of wealthy women. Here, women could milk a cow or two, churn some butter, make their own cheese, and go for a country walk. Visiting fermes ornées, ornamental farms, where imitation farming was practiced, was also a popular pastime of the wealthy.

  The laiteries were perfect little idealized dairies adorned with art depicting mythology and scenes of idyllic nature. The top architects of the day were commissioned to construct them. King Louis XVI had a laiterie built in the woods of Rambouillet for his wife, Marie Antoinette, in June 1786. It featured porcelain bas-relief sculptures of graceful nymphs milking cows and engaged in other dairy tasks. The sculptures were the only dairy images ever produced by the celebrated French porcelain factory at Sèvres.

  In that same year, 1786, an ornamental farm at the Trianon of Versailles was also being constructed for Marie Antoinette’s amusement. When the king brought her to Trianon in June to present the farm to her, it was at first nowhere in sight. Then a curtain of branches was suddenly thrown back to reveal the surprise.

  The queen seemed to harbor a fantasy about the milking life, for she staged a play at Trianon in which she cast herself as a milkmaid and sang:

  Voilà, voilà, la petite laiterie.

  Qui veut acheter de son lait?

  (Here is the little dairy, who wants to buy some milk?)

  The Prince of Wales, the future King George IV (born 1762) churning butter on a farm near Windsor in 1786. From Social Caricature in the Eighteenth Century by George Paston (pseudonym for Emily Morse Symonds), London, 1905. (HIP/Art Resource, NY)

  How adorable, the king must have thought.

  By this time, there was a tradition of French kings building laiteries for the women in their family. Louis XIV had commissioned one for his grandson’s child bride, the Duchesse de Bourgogne, in 1698. She was said to have milked the cows and made the butter herself that was proudly served at Louis XIV’s table.

  Like the French aristocracy’s garde
ns, which had become very popular in the eighteenth century, the laiteries were places in which to get away and contemplate nature. And there was also the notion, pushed by leading thinkers of the day, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that women had a special relationship to dairies. The woman, after all, was a giver of milk.

  But alas, Queen Marie Antoinette never used her little dairy. It had not been completed when the king surprised her with it, and shortly after it was finished three years later, a revolution would end both their way of life and their lives.

  It is not a coincidence that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and even as far back as the sixteenth century, wealthy women who thought dairying a pleasant hobby were also mothers who wanted to feed their babies animal milk. This was reflected in their clothing, though there could be a chicken-or-the-egg debate here. Women’s clothing had been loose-fitting, making breastfeeding easy. But then the fashion for upper-class clothing changed. Women were wearing tight bodices, dresses that flattened and restricted breasts, clothing not suitable for breastfeeding and perhaps even damaging for lactation. They were being shaped by stiff leather corsets made with whalebone or even metal, laced up the back so tightly that their ribs were occasionally fractured or cracked. And, at the same time, the wealthy started viewing breastfeeding as a lower-class activity.

  As upper-class women stopped breastfeeding—and influencing the middle class to do so as well, as the upper class has always had a strong influence on the middle class—increasingly strident voices started to denounce women who did not breastfeed. And, once again, the loudest voices discussing the management of women’s bodies were men’s. In fact, in the seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries, if a wet nurse was needed, it was the husband who looked for one and negotiated her terms of employment. Bonaventure Fourcroy, a seventeenth-century French lawyer and friend of Molière, suggested that every French home have women breastfeeding their babies under the supervision of their husbands. A 1794 Prussian law required all mothers to breastfeed their children until their husbands ordered weaning.