Milk

by Mark Kurlansky

  Part of the increase in milk production per cow has been the result of higher-protein feed. Farmers today spend much more time growing high-protein crops such as alfalfa and corn than they did before. Today, even grass-fed cows are given fodder to get through the winter. Depending on what can be grown or reasonably purchased, a wide variety of crops—including oats, barley, corn, alfalfa, sorghum, millet, and clover—are stored for the winter. Some farmers ferment the mixture, which is called silage, or blend the cereals together, and these can be richer in protein than the grass that is available in the fields. This has created a long-standing argument about which way is the better way to feed cows.

  Farmers are also spending more money buying feed concentrates. In 1900 there were only six thousand acres in the entire United States planted with alfalfa. By 1986, that number had risen to almost 27 million, and it is considerably more today.

  Another change is the prevalence of breeding. High-producing cows and the bulls that sire such cows are now regarded as breeding stock. In the 1930s and 1940s artificial insemination was developed, which made breeding far more efficient. Today, a dairy farmer never has to see a bull, which makes most of them happy, because bulls are very difficult and dangerous animals. Farmers used to seek out a good-looking bull in the neighborhood. Today, the bull sperm can come from anywhere and is sold by performance records, not the appearance of the animal. Some argue that this is taking farmers further away from the true nature of their animals.

  The cow that has been settled on as the best by most farmers all over the world is the Dutch Holstein-Frisian, sometimes just called a Holstein or a Frisian. They are actually one of the oldest breeds in America—the breed that the Dutch brought in 1613. Today these very large black-and-white cows are bred to produce large quantities of milk, a goal that can only be achieved if they are fed huge amounts of high-protein food. A group of scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the University of Minnesota have calculated that 22 percent of the Holstein genome has been altered by human selection over the last forty years.

  Artificial insemination has made breeding extremely efficient. Sperm is produced in a limited number of places, and meticulous performance records are kept. Nothing like this could ever have been accomplished with naturally bred animals. Today’s breeding centers can develop superstar bulls and use their sperm extensively. In May 2012, the Atlantic reported on a Holstein bull named Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie, who was born in 2004. It was deemed ideal and had already produced 346 daughters.

  But the formula for success is complicated. A cow has to be pregnant in order to lactate, so fertility is important, but it seems that the higher the cow’s milk production, the lower its fertility.

  Holstein

  The Holstein-Frisian also has some disadvantages. They are extremely expensive animals to work with, as they consume an enormous amount of food.

  Technically speaking, the Holstein-Frisian is not the world’s most productive cow. There is a small cow from the island of Socotra in the Arabian Sea, part of Yemen, that produces more milk for the amount it is fed than any other cow in the world. It might seem as if this should be the most sought-after cow, but dairies generally go for the largest milk producer, no matter how much it has to be fed.

  In America, milk advertising often shows a pretty brown Jersey—and they are pretty cows. But they are rare in America now. Big black-and-white Holsteins are everywhere, making up about 90 percent of the dairy cows in America. In Britain, too, it is rare to find a Jersey, Guernsey, Ayrshire, or Shorthorn. Black-and-white Holsteins are part of the landscape. It is the same in most of the rest of Europe, and in Asia and Australia as well. A few farmers, especially those who make cheese, still maintain traditional breeds that produce a higher-quality milk, but they are unusual. In fairness, the Holstein does yield a good-quality milk; it’s just that the milk from a Jersey or Ayrshire is better. And there are others, but they are disappearing. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that two breeds of domestic animals become extinct every month.

  Modern dairying has become a very tough business.

  14

  MODERN CUISINES

  Nineteenth-century Americans, French, British, and Italians loved milk. It was an age of dairy sauces—milk, cream, and butter—milk and cream dishes, milk and cream soups, and milk and cream drinks.

  The idea of cream sauces seems to have started in France. When the English started making milk sauces, they termed their dishes à la crème.

  Savory cream sauces became one of the hallmarks of what was first known as “the new French cuisine” and later known as classical French cuisine. The taboo on mixing fish and dairy had long been forgotten, and dairy sauces were especially popular with fish.

  The most famous fish-and-cream dish was sole normande. French food historians date this dish to an 1838 banquet, and it was probably the dish that made normande an adjective meaning “in cream sauce.” Normandy was famous for its cream.

  But classical French cooking was extremely rich and loved cream. Auguste Escoffier, born in 1846, was the French chef who carried nineteenth-century cooking into the twentieth century. His cooking and such books as Ma Cuisine and Le Guide Culinaire are said to define French classical cooking. Escoffier’s motto was “Make it simple,” though he almost never did. In classical French cuisine, sauces are made from sauces that are added to sauces, so they are usually made in restaurants rather than homes. All you need for Escoffier’s sauce normande, though, is a good fish stock, another stock made from the trimmings of the sole after fileting known as fumet de sole, and a cuisson de champignon, which is minced mushrooms sautéed in butter, mussel broth, and a few other things. His sauce normande is intended to be served on top but is only one of the elements in his sole normande. Others include poaching the sole in fish stock and adding mussels, slices of black truffles, croutons, and shrimp. If you have the patience, time, and resources, this kind of cooking will reward you with a tremendous depth of flavor. Here is the sauce:

  Add to three quarts of fish stock, a deciliter of cuisson de champignon and broth from mussels; 2 deciliters of fumet de sole; several drops of lemon juice mixed with 5 egg yolks mixed with 2 deciliters of cream. Reduce by about a third on a high flame.

  Pass the sauce through a cheesecloth and then finish it with a deciliter of double cream and 125 grams of butter.

  Escoffier said that while this sauce was intended for sole normande, it could also be used for many other dishes.

  There are many easier ways to make a cream sauce. This is a recipe from Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, that appeared in her 1841 book, The Good Housekeeper. She recommended it for fowl, but it would also work for fish:

  Melt in a teacupful of milk a large table-spoonful of butter, kneaded in a little flour; beat up the yolk of an egg with a spoonful of cream, stir into the butter, and put it over the fire, stirring it constantly. Chopped parsley may be added.

  Probably neither of these sauces would be made today by leading chefs, the Escoffier because it seems overly complicated and the Hale because the use of flour in sauces is out of fashion, except in New Orleans where traditions seldom die. But using flour is a very old idea. The Romans, including the celebrated first-century A.D. cook Apicius, made sauces thickened with either plain flour or tracta.

  When Europeans started making savory cream sauces for their meat and fish dishes, they started by making a thickener of flour and melted butter. This technique later got a bad reputation because of heavy-handed cooks. The thickener, known as a roux, requires a light touch so that you don’t end up with flour paste.

  It is not certain whether the Europeans learned how to make roux from the Romans or if they simply reinvented it. There were numerous European names for the sauce of roux-thickened milk, but eventually it became known as béchamel.

  François Pierre de la Varenne, popularly known as La Varenne, was the most influential chef of seventeenth-century France
at a time when the new French cuisine was starting to move away from the lean, sharp, spicy, and acidic tastes of the Middle Ages and from Italian influence. La Varenne started several sauces with small amounts of flour and melted butter, but because he used a much larger amount of other ingredients, they did not become true milk or cream sauces.

  Vincent La Chapelle, an eighteenth-century chef for French royalty, most famously Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, proclaimed in his 1733 book The Modern Cook that French cooking had completely broken from its past. He offered a recipe called turbot à la béchamelle, thought to be named after his influential contemporary Louis de Béchameil, though if true, he misspelled his name. The turbot was poached in a court bouillon, literally, a “short broth,” a quickly cooked stock. Minced parsley, green onions, and shallots were tossed in a pot with large pat of butter; salt, pepper, and nutmeg were added, followed by a small amount of flour. The fish was added next, and then La Chapelle offered a choice—the fish could be cooked with milk or cream “or equally well some water.” Dairy had appeared in a savory dish, but it was still an afterthought.

  Soon after that, however, the so-called modern French cuisine came to mean the use of milk and cream sauces. William Verrall, an English innkeeper in Lewes, Sussex, who had trained under a French chef, became known for introducing many new food ideas, including the French use of dairy sauces, to England. The family inn, the White Hart, dated back to the Elizabethan period, but under the Verralls it became fashionable. His 1759 book, A Complete System of Cookery, was intended, the author wrote, “to show, both to the experienced and inexperienced in the business, the whole and simple art of the most modern and best French cookery.” The slim book was full of savory cream dishes such as gizzards and cream, peas and cream, spinach and cream, and “Breasts of fowls à la Binjamele.” The spelling was getting ever farther away from the late Monsieur Bechameil’s name, but the use of cream had become firmly established. Many of Verrall’s recipes were unreadable, but his book was very influential nonetheless. Here is one of his poultry dishes. It includes an orange, which may have been his own touch. No longer grown solely in the orangeries of the wealthy, oranges were extremely popular in the eighteenth century:

  Two fowls make two dishes, but in different ways; cut off the legs whole with the feet, and the next shall give directions how to manage them. But the breasts you must roast, but without the pinions [the last joint at the end of the wing], they may serve for something else: when roasted, take off the skin, and cut off the white flesh, slice it in thickish pieces, put it into a stewpan, and provide your sauce as follows, take about half pint of cream, a bit of butter mixt with flour, put in a green onion or two whole, a little parsley, pepper and salt, stir it over a slowish fire till it boils to its thickness, pass it through an etamine [cheesecloth]. Put it to your fowl in a stewpan, and then boil it till it is hot through: add nothing more than the juice of an orange, and send it up.

  This sauce may serve for any sort of white meat, and is now very much in fashion.

  Marie-Antoine Carême, a chef who straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, established the so-called grand cuisine that Escoffier inherited in the next century. He said that there were four kinds of base sauces, one of which was béchamel. Carême’s béchamel as described in his 1817 L’Art de la Cuisine, was a daylong project. First, a light meat stock had to be made and used to cook a “quintessence” of meat by simmering various cuts of veal, ham, and fowl in it. After the stock was reduced, the meat had to be pricked to open it up and more stock added. Then it was cooked down again. Eventually a flour roux was added and everything simmered for hours with herbs. Next it was clarified, and finally cream was added. At the end of his recipe, Carême commented:

  It is essential that the reduction of this sauce be done by a man who loves his station: for an insouciant man will let it take colour, and that is the worst thing that could happen to this sauce, which, moreover, honors the Marquis de Béchamel, who thought of the addition of cream to velouté and gave his name to this excellent sauce.

  Perhaps the reason Escoffier claimed his role as a simplifier, despite his complicated formulas, is that he came after Carême. His béchamel used only veal stock, and he claimed—some cried disgrace—that it could be made in an hour. Essentially the sauce is a butter and flour roux in a reduction of veal stock with milk or cream.

  Cream sauces had also become popular in Italy. The Italian chef Pellegrino Artusi said that his béchamel sauce was like that of the French “except that theirs is more complicated.”

  In 1928 Ada Boni, the editor of the leading women’s magazine in Italy, Preziosa, taking on the impossible task of writing the definitive cookbook of Italian cuisine, published Il Talismano della Felicità. Still regularly reprinted, it was the classic Italian cookbook, and in it were many cream sauces. Many started with flour and butter, but not all, including this unabashedly rich recipe for pheasant with cream:

  1 small pheasant

  3 tablespoons butter

  ½ onion, chopped

  salt and pepper

  1 ¼ cup heavy cream

  1 tablespoon lemon juice

  Place pheasant in Dutch oven with butter, onion, salt and pepper. Cook slowly, browning gently on all sides 2 ¼ hours. Add cream and continue cooking 30 minutes. Just before serving, add lemon juice to gravy and mix. Serve immediately.

  Like Boni’s pheasant, the most famous seafood-and-cream dish of nineteenth-century America, lobster Newburg, did not use flour. Louis Fauchère, a chef for New York’s famous Delmonico’s restaurant, opened a hotel restaurant in Milford, Pennsylvania, in which he claimed to have invented lobster Newberg. This is unverifiable, but what is known is that in 1876, Ben Wenberg, who traded in Caribbean fruit, demonstrated a new lobster-and-cream dish in a chafing dish to Charles Delmonico. His restaurant started making it under the name Lobster à la Wenberg. But soon angry words were spoken, the friendship was dissolved, and in a fit of vengeful dyslexia, Delmonico reversed the first syllable of “wenberg” to “Newberg.”

  In his 1894 book, The Epicurean, Charles Ranhofer, the chef at Delmonico’s from 1862 to 1896, gave the following recipe for Lobster à la Newberg:

  Cook six lobsters each weighing about two pounds in boiling salted water for twenty-five minutes. Twelve pounds of live lobster when cooked yields from two to two and a half pounds of meat with three to four ounces of coral. When cold, detach the bodies from the tails and cut the latter into slices, put them into a sautoir, each piece lying flat, and add hot clarified butter; season with salt and fry lightly on both sides without coloring; moisten to their height with good raw cream; reduce quickly to half; and then add two or three spoonfuls of Madeira wine; boil the liquid once more only, then remove and thicken with a thickening of egg yolks and raw cream. Cook without boiling, incorporating a little cayenne and butter; then arrange the pieces in a vegetable dish and pour the sauce over.

  Milk thickened with flour is a technique that constantly reappeared in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cooking. Milk toast, a dish so bland that a personality type was named after it, was popular. This recipe comes from an 1853 book, Miss Leslie’s Directions for Cookery, which is sometimes said to be the bestselling cookbook printed in America in the nineteenth century. Miss Leslie, born in 1787, lived most of her life in Philadelphia, except for a childhood in London, where her father managed an export company. Hers is another recipe that takes the precaution of boiling the milk first:

  MILK TOAST

  Boil a pint of rich milk and then take it off and stir into it a quarter of a pound of fresh butter, mixed with a small tablespoonful of flour. Then let it again come to a boil. Have ready two deep plates with a half a dozen slices of toast in each. Pour the milk over them hot, and keep them covered till they go to table.

  This dish is sometimes thought to be a precursor of French toast, which the French call pain perdu, lost bread, because it is a way of using up stale bread.

  In tim
e gourmets became opposed to flour in sauces, which can cause a gloppy or pasty texture and add only a blandness to the taste. The fact is that a cream sauce can thicken through reduction without flour. The idea was not new, either. Charles Carter, a leading eighteenth-century English chef known to have some French influence but whose cooking often showed originality, wrote this recipe in his 1730 book, The Compleat Practical Cook:

  Take good barrel-cod [salt cod], and boil it; then take it all into flakes, and put it in a sauce-pan with cream, and season it with a little pepper; put in a handful of parsley scalded, and minced, and stove it gently till tender, and then shake it together with some thick butter and the yolks of two or three eggs, dish it, and garnish with poached egg and lemon slices.

  There were also many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century butter sauces. Escoffier listed more than a dozen such sauces, some egg thickened like hollandaise or béarnaise, but many with butter bases such as lobster butter, shrimp butter, and beurre noisette, whose name does not refer to hazelnut butter but to color—it is a slightly browned butter. When the heat under beurre noisette is turned up, it becomes beurre noir, or black butter. Beurre noir can be heated slowly until it turns dark, and then an acid such as lemon juice or vinegar is added to stop the process. Capers are often added. In France the two most traditional plates served with this sauce are brains, either calf or lamb, and poached skate wing.