Milk

by Mark Kurlansky

  Here is Carême’s recipe for the classic raie au beurre noir, skate with beurre noir sauce.

  Take a skate, wash and brush it and cut off the wings, place [the wings] in cold salted water, bring to a boil and remove from the heat and let soak for a half hour.

  Place a skillet over high heat, and put a piece of butter in it. When it begins to burn, toss in chopped parsley and two spoonfuls of vinegar and then cover the skillet to prevent the vinegar from evaporating.

  Drain the skate, pull off the skin [if you grab it from the cut side it can be removed with a strong yank], put on the plate, sprinkle with salt, and pour the sauce over it.

  Juliet Corson, a Boston-born social reformer and cooking instructor, tried to develop a popular cuisine for poor people through her New York School of Cookery and her books of inexpensive recipes. In her slim 1882 book, Meals for the Millions: The People’s Cookbook, she offers this less expensive beurre noir dish, “Eggs with Burnt Butter”:

  Break half a dozen eggs, putting each in a cup to keep them entire; put four tablespoons of butter into a frying-pan and brown it over the fire, slip the eggs into the hot butter and cook them to the desired degree; then take them up with a skimmer, lay them on toast and set the dish containing them where they will keep hot. Pour half a cup of vinegar into the butter. Let it boil up once, pour it over the eggs, and serve them hot.

  Another standard is white butter. Beurre blanc is made by cooking white wine, vinegar, and shallots together. As the story goes, it was invented by chance. Clémence Lefeuvre, a young nineteenth-century cook in the Loire Valley, where the kind of river fish that go well with a butter sauce are found, was preparing pike with a béarnaise sauce. This sauce, despite being named after the region of Béarn in southwest France, was a Parisian invention. Clémence supposedly started by reducing white wine, vinegar, and shallots, and then reached for egg yolks, which she meant to slowly beat into melted butter. But—oh, no!—she was out of eggs. She did have plenty of cold butter, though, and beat it into the white wine reduction, thereby making beurre blanc sauce. It is a good story for those who like to believe that ideas come about by accident. In any event, beurre blanc is traditionally served with white fish such as pike from the Loire.

  Milk or cream also started to replace flour and water in fish or clam chowder. At the end of the 1873 recipe for the fish chowder made by the Parker House in Boston were the words “If you do not find the chowder thin enough to serve well in tureen, add some fresh milk just before taking up and let it come to a boil.” And by the end of the nineteenth century, New England chowder meant a milk or cream soup.

  Cream soups became extremely popular in the nineteenth and twentieth century until, late in the century, cream and rich food began to lose popularity. In Le Guide Culinaire, published in 1903, Escoffier gave twenty-eight recipes for cream soups.

  Rufus Estes, born a slave in Tennessee in 1858, became a highly regarded chef and, in 1911, the first black chef to publish a cookbook. Tomato soup made with milk or cream was an old standard, but Rufus Estes, true to his black Southern background, added green tomatoes:

  Chop fine five green tomatoes and boil twenty minutes in water to cover. Then add one quart hot milk, to which a spoonful of soda has been added. Let come to a boil, take from the fire and add a quarter cupful butter rubbe[d] into four crackers rolled fine, with salt and pepper to taste.

  The most famous cream soup was a New York invention, developed by the Frenchman Louis Diat, who moved to New York in 1910, became a U.S. citizen, and worked for forty-one obsessive, workaholic years as the chef of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Each summer he would invent a cold soup for the hot months in New York, and in 1917 he came up with a crème vichyssoise glacée, or iced vichyssoise cream. It is sometimes claimed that the soup was a French idea that he simply adapted, and Diat did say that the idea came to him from his childhood memories of the area near Vichy. And there, the French did make a creamed potato-leek soup, though it was usually not chilled.

  I have to confess that this soup was one of my favorite treats as a child. I loved its presentation and taste, loved the way it was served in a metal bowl sitting on a dish of shaved ice, loved the way the bowl and the soup were so cold, loved the thick creaminess of the soup as I moved my spoon through it, and loved those bright green random dashes of chives. A Proustian thing, I can recall the taste as I describe it. There are many versions of this recipe claiming to be “the original,” but this is how Diat gave it in his 1941 book Cooking à la Ritz:

  4 leeks, white part

  1 medium onion

  2 ounces sweet butter

  5 medium potatoes

  1 quart water or chicken broth

  1 tablespoon salt

  2 cups milk

  2 cups medium cream

  1 cup heavy cream

  Finely slice the white part of the leeks and the onion, and brown very lightly in the sweet butter, then add the potatoes, also sliced finely. Add water or broth or salt. Boil from 35 to 40 minutes. Crush and rub through a fine strainer. Return to fire and add two cups of milk and 2 cups of medium cream. Season to taste and bring to a boil. Cool and then rub through a very fine strainer. When soup is cold add the heavy cream. Chill thoroughly before serving. Finely chopped chives may be added when serving.

  Many other milk and cream dishes also became popular. Here is Rufus Estes’s recipe for a now forgotten milk dish, “baked milk.”

  Put fresh milk into a stone jar, cover with white paper and bake in a moderate oven until the milk is thick as cream. This may be taken by the most delicate stomach.

  The French, probably the first to put milk in coffee, started doing so soon after the Turks brought coffee to Paris in the seventeenth century. But the Italian love of foamed milk and coffee began only in the twentieth century. In Isabella Beeton’s influential 1861 Book of Household Management, she did not write about milk served with tea or coffee for breakfast, but after her death, revised editions of her book kept being published, and in the 1890 edition were recommended menus for a week’s worth of family breakfasts. Every one included tea, coffee, or chocolate with hot or cold milk.

  Adding milk to chocolate had begun when the Spanish brought cacao back to Europe from the land of the Aztecs in the early sixteenth century and started serving hot chocolate drinks made with sugar and often other spices. Maria Theresa of Spain loved hot chocolate, perhaps her only solace while her husband King Louis XIV of France was sleeping with his many lovers, and it is said that the hot chocolate, or the sugar in it, was the cause of most of her teeth falling out.

  Despite this seemingly negative celebrity endorsement, hot chocolate grew in popularity. Thomas Jefferson thought that it was only a matter of time until it replaced tea and coffee as America’s favorite hot drink. In 1917 Alice B. Toklas and her partner, the writer Gertrude Stein, were in the south of France trying to help the wounded in Nîmes, and Toklas was so impressed with the hot chocolate there, which the “the Red Cross nuns in the best French manner served in large bowls to the wounded piping,” that she wrote down their recipe:

  3 ounces melted chocolate to 1 quart hot milk. Bring to a boil and simmer for ½ hour. Then beat for 5 minutes. The nuns made huge quantities in copper cauldrons, so that the whisk they used was huge and heavy. We all took turns in beating.

  This was the real hot chocolate and milk, not the powder with all the cocoa butter removed, a process invented by the Dutch chocolate maker Casparus Van Houten in 1828. There are many commercial uses for the extracted butter. Today, it is hard to find a real hot chocolate. In 1974 the great American food writer James Beard wrote, “Chocolate now has become something that is tipped out of a little paper bag, into a cup, dissolved with hot water and served with artificial whipped cream or a marshmallow stuck on top. This is not hot chocolate and it really pains me to think that a whole generation is growing up never knowing the glories of a truly well made cup of hot chocolate.”

  Given the way milk and cream were being used everyw
here in the nineteenth century, it was only a matter of time before bartenders started adding them to cocktails. The word “cocktail,” written then as “cock-tail,” was first seen in the Morning Post and Gazetteer in London on March 20, 1798, leading some to believe it was of British origin. The British have certainly always been cocktail enthusiasts.

  In the Americas, cocktails became popular with the advent of ice shipments to hot places like New Orleans and Havana, two cities that became famous for them. Only later did drinks made with sweet liqueurs and cream also became known as cocktails.

  One of the first of these cream cocktails was the Alexander, made with gin, chocolate liqueur, and cream in the late nineteenth century. Then Rector’s, a famous New York restaurant, started making that drink with brandy instead of gin and grating nutmeg on top—the brandy Alexander.

  The grasshopper—equal parts crème de menthe, crème de cacao, and cream—was invented in New Orleans. The two liqueurs were already old drinks by that time, the mint from the nineteenth century and the chocolate from many centuries before that. The idea of combining the two with cream was credited to Philibert Guichet, the owner of Tujague’s restaurant, a New Orleans landmark since the nineteenth century. The earliest known mention of it was in 1919.

  Other dairy cocktails followed. The White Russian—coffee liqueur, vodka, and cream or sometimes milk—was invented in the Hotel Metropole in Brussels in 1949.

  These dairy drinks had a reputation of being “ladies’ drinks” because they were sweet and low-alcohol. Aside from the sexist assumption that women didn’t like alcohol, not all milk drinks were low in alcohol. The Italian novelist Clara Sereni in her 1987 autobiographical novel with recipes, Casalinghitudine, loosely translated in the English-language edition as Keeping House, recalls one such “milk elixir”:

  1 quart milk

  1 quart alcohol for making liqueurs [usually a high-proof white fruit alcohol]

  2 pounds of sugar

  3 teaspoons vanilla extract

  1 lemon

  I cut the lemon into small pieces (all of it, rind as well as pulp) and I put it in a large bottle together with all the other ingredients. It is better to dissolve the sugar first in some warm milk. I seal the bottle hermetically and leave it there for two weeks, during which time I simply shake it two or three times each day.

  When the two weeks are up, I take a pan or bowl on which I put a colander in which I have set a tight-weave cloth napkin. I pour the contents of the bottle into the napkin-covered colander and leave it, as the filtering of the liquid is a lengthy process. The liquid will filter into the pan, and this of course will be poured into bottles and aged. A thick, yogurt-like cream, sweet-smelling and high in alcohol content, will remain in the napkin. This can be stored in small jars, and eaten with a spoon.

  Most of these drinks, like cream sauces and soups, have faded in popularity as people have become more health-conscious and moved away from consuming foods with a high fat content. The exception was the White Russian, which experienced a reprieve from obscurity after being featured in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski.

  The problem of harmful bacteria in milk has been conquered, but now it appears that dairy also contains other things that could kill you—such as cholesterol and fat. Eating heavy food has also gone out of fashion. And who would really want to have six slices of milk toast in a heavy milk and butter sauce for breakfast anyway? If you drank white Russians regularly, like the Dude in The Big Lebowski, wouldn’t you become enormously fat?

  —PART THREE—

  COWS AND TRUTH

  Their attention is complete as they look across the road: They are still and face us.

  Just because they are so still, their attitude seems philosophical.

  —Lydia Davis, “The Cows”

  15

  THE BUTTERING OF TIBET

  While China, which for millennia has had no dairies, is trying to become the most modern and productive dairy nation in the world, northern Tibet—a country with a culture and Sanskrit-related language very different from China’s—has had a strong dairy culture for centuries. In 1950, China took Tibet by military force and has been trying to assimilate it into Chinese life ever since. The Chinese have had some success in imposing both their Chinese architecture and the presence of Chinese people in Tibet’s cities and larger towns. But out in the country, there is a different story. Nothing shows the difference between the Tibetan and the Chinese better than dairying. Observing Tibetan dairy farming offers a glimpse into medieval times

  Xining is a fast-growing Tibetan city crammed with slender new skyscrapers, a strongly Muslim town with a lavish mosque. It is located in high mountain country, where some of the valley floors are almost two miles deep and lush with vegetation in summertime. Red-rock canyons have spectacular wind-carved pinnacles—like a land of banded red chimneys. In late spring, the banks of the nearby Yellow River are green, and the river is wide, rushing, fast-churning and, yes, really yellow. Climbing higher, the steep slopes are rich with green pastures in the spring and summer, brown and barren in the fall and winter. But even in the green time of year, the landscape is broken up in places by enormous sand drifts—it is as if a desert has been placed here and there. And in a sense, that is what it is: The sand drifts are part of the Gobi Desert of northern China and Mongolia. The Gobi was created when the rains were being blocked by the mountains of Tibet and the Himalayas beyond, and it is of some concern that the Gobi is now expanding into both China and Tibet.

  High up in this country, where the air is too thin for trees and at times feels too thin for humans, is a land of summer grassland inhabited by mountain sheep, yaks, and nomadic herders. At the tops of high mountain passes, dozens of wild streamers in bright colors stretch across the roads or trails, or even from one peak to another. They are placed here by Buddhists to bring good fortune to travelers as they go through the pass. Small pieces of paper with an image of a horse, one of the oldest uses of wood-block printing, are thrown into the air by the nomadic herdsmen so that their horses will fly through the pass, carrying good luck with them. Sometimes, too, the herdsmen tie arrows together vertically with yak wool, and there are ritual fires burning yak butter, juniper branches, and roasted barley, one of the few crops that grows here.

  The sheep of this country are not milked, because they yield too little. They are raised for meat—mostly mutton, though some rich people slaughter them when they are still small for tender lamb. But the main livestock and enterprise of these nomads is raising and milking yaks. The yaks are also combed for their wool.

  Yak

  Yaks hold their wide-horned heads below their great humped shoulders, making them look like huge, brooding, woolly, prehistoric creatures. They are bigger than cattle and tend to make guttural grunting noises. Their species name is Bos grunniens, which means grunting ox in Latin. A typical bull is five feet tall at the shoulders and often taller. Wild bulls can be nearly seven feet at the shoulders. The Tibetan word eYag, from which “yak” comes, is used exclusively for domesticated yaks. Tibetans work with both domestic and the larger wild animals, sometimes breeding a domestic yak with a wild bull. A few other places in Central Asia and Mongolia have domestic yaks, but Tibet is the only place in the world with wild yaks, and the Tibetans’ ability to breed the domestic with the wild variety maintains the domestic species.

  Wild yaks are always black, and domestic yaks are usually black, too. But occasionally a white one is born, and these are particularly prized for their wool. The white ones, although bred with the herd, are also a different and larger subspecies than the black domestic yak.

  Despite their bulk, yaks can move quickly, even at 20,000 feet. On rocky terrain they are as agile as goats, and even deep snow presents no obstacle to them. When a pass is closed by a heavy snowfall, the nomads need only to send a herd of yaks through to flatten the snow and open the pass.

  The nomads wear clothes made of brightly dyed yak or sheep wool, and each subregion has its own
variety of unique hats. Some of the hats look like cowboy hats, and some are much more elaborate, with fur and embroidery. But the use of fur on hats is fading—the nomads are Buddhist, and the monks have told them that it is wrong to kill animals.

  The nomads are completely dependent on the yak. They use the dark yak wool not only for their clothing, but also for their homes, which are large pitched tents. The yak is also their main means of transportation and, with the exception of mutton, barley, and a few roots such as turnip that they grow in their lower fields, their food supply. Despite the admonition of the monks, they eat the meat, which they grill on a fire, and prefer it dried because it is easy to travel with when they move to better pastures. However, their primary foods are yak milk and yak dairy products.

  The female yak, known as a dri, is not nearly as productive as a cow, but cattle can’t survive in these high altitudes. Yaks thrive and reproduce at altitudes between 10,000 and 17,000 feet. Below that, they become sluggish and don’t reproduce. Cows are usually inseminated at around thirteen months and give birth to their first calf when they are about two years old. Often yaks do not have their first calf until they are four years old, or in some areas, five, and unlike a cow, there are years when they have no calf. Nor do they produce a tremendous amount of milk for their size. They barely produce at all in winter, and it takes one thousand dri to produce about 130 gallons of milk.

  Their milk is of extremely high quality, lactose-sweet, and 6 percent butterfat—far higher than most other milks, including the 4 percent of cows. With all that fat, Tibetans make a lot of butter. People who live in cold high altitudes need a high-fat diet. Yak butter is rich in omega-3 fatty acids and has a lush, pleasant flavor—or it would if it were refrigerated. The nomads don’t have refrigerators, and the butter is allowed to go rancid, but they seem to be accustomed to the taste and smell.