Lin Hua, a Beijing food writer, told me about another Cantonese dish, jiang zhuang nai, which literally means “ginger bumping milk.” She explained, “It is called this because the sweetness of milk acts on the pungency of ginger,” and gave this recipe:
Crush ginger (or grate it), heat milk, pour it over the ginger, and add a little sugar. Heat into a custard.
She also pointed out that the Cantonese do have a few milk recipes, but only because of the long-standing foreign presence in the region. She said that the one milk tradition in Beijing is Old Beijing Imperial Cheese, which is actually not a cheese but a light milk custard. Her recipe:
Put milk in a pan. Add rice wine, the liquid from fermented sticky rice (sometimes some of the rice is also included, but usually just the liquid is used). Mix and bake for 40 minutes. Cool and refrigerate.
Hua then opined that Old Beijing Imperial Cheese is really just a Chinese version of Western custard. Furthermore, she added, “Today it is usually made in a microwave.”
Old Beijing Imperial Cheese is sold in Beijing. Among its sellers is the Ma family, who own four small, clean, white shops, all just narrow rooms with a counter up front and a kitchen in the back. It is only a carry-out trade with no chairs or tables, but this is true of many Beijing prepared-food shops.
The Mas are Muslims, from the Hui people, a minority group that has a large population in Beijing. There are more than ten million Hui in China, and some Han are also Muslim. It has often been said that the Muslims are the only Chinese that eat dairy. The Ma stores are called Maji and have been in the family for generations. They live in Hebei Province, near Beijing, and once the location of the summer palace of the Qing emperors, where they ferment their own rice.
In the back of their shops they boil fresh milk with rice wine, cook it down until thick, add a little sugar, and pour it into plastic cups, which they then refrigerate and sell. The cheese is only slightly sweet and comes in plain, strawberry, blueberry, and taro.
The Mas also make other milk snacks, such as yogurt, brown crumbles of cooked-down milk scum, milk cooked to a soft dough and rolled with bean paste in the center, and milk cooked with almonds to make a light almond milk custard. They keep opening new stores because business is good and dairy food is newly popular in Beijing.
The Chinese are eating ever more dairy products, and fashionable young chefs are cooking a “fusion” cuisine with Western ideas incorporated into traditional recipes. This often involves using dairy products. Even Qu Hao, who is in his fifties and part of an older food establishment, confessed that he sometimes uses dairy products. When he makes the traditional white, fluffy, steamed buns known as manto, he adds a little milk to the batter. He likes the flavor it gives. And it makes the buns whiter. Today many Beijing cooks make manto this way.
China has become the world’s third-largest milk producer, after the United States and India, and to Westerners it seems that this, along with many other Chinese economic gains, was an overnight success. But it took a long time to happen.
At the time of the 1949 revolution, China had a population of 500 million people and 120,000 cows, of which only 20,000 were Holsteins. The cows were producing small amounts of milk, and China was producing only 21,000 tons of milk annually. Powdered milk, mostly used for babies, was imported, with 90 percent coming from the United States, but it was extremely expensive, more costly than pork. Most Chinese women breastfed.
In 1953, in the totally state-run economy that was established postrevolution, 4,700 milk cows were under state management. Each cow produced only about 12 liters a day. But in 1957, the government decided to institute a dairy program as part of an overall plan to develop Chinese agriculture, and put its control in the hands of the army. Some said the program was a mistake because the Chinese people were lactose-intolerant. But the goal was never to provide everyone with milk. In 2017, the Chinese population numbered 1,386 million, so even if nine out of ten Chinese did not touch milk, that would still leave them with 139 million milk drinkers—more than the population of any European country. So the Chinese reasoned, not irrationally, that even if most people did not touch milk, they could provide it to a very large number.
By 1978 the government-owned dairies were working 480,000 cows and producing the equivalent of 1 liter of milk per year for every person in China. But fewer people than expected were buying it, because most did not have refrigerators. Refrigerators did not become common in China until the mid-1980s. By 2002, however, 87 percent of Chinese households had refrigerators, and between 1978 and 1992, milk production in China increased tenfold.
Close to ninety thousand cows were brought in to China from North America, Europe, and Japan between 1984 and 1990. China had planned to import many more, but the outbreak of mad cow disease stopped the export of cows from Europe and North America.
Now China imports cows only from Australia and New Zealand. New Zealand produces a Holstein that is slightly smaller than the usual one and eats less but produces well. In 2013, China imported eighty thousand cows and continues to import a similar number every year. A Chinese-Canadian project in British Columbia is providing China with Holstein embryos that are implanted in the native Chinese yellow cow. The Chinese have also started importing Swiss state-of-the-art milking equipment.
Today almost 40 percent of Chinese drink milk, the highest percentage in Chinese history. And while the Chinese are consuming more and more milk, the Americans are consuming less and less. Americans drink 37 percent less milk today than they did in 1970. Already, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the United States, long the world’s leading milk producer, has fallen to second place behind India. It could in time fall to third. But China is not there yet.
Of the 40 percent of the Chinese people who consume milk, more drink imported powder than drink milk produced in China. In part, the rise in milk consumption is because breastfeeding has become less and less popular. Forty days after giving birth, most women have to go back to work, and breastfeeding becomes impractical. Also, many women want to appear fashionable and it is fashionable in China now to bottle-feed babies. Poor women who do not eat a rich-enough diet to produce sufficient milk also sometimes bottle-feed. This demand for milk for babies will probably increase since the government has dropped its one-child-per-family rule, and the birthrate is expected to rise.
The Chinese do not trust Chinese milk. That is why they carry it back from Tibet, or Australia, or New Zealand—wherever they go. In Beijing supermarkets, which are often enormous, they have aisles devoted to milk—mostly unrefrigerated UHT milk imported from New Zealand, though there is also refrigerated milk. UHT stands for “ultra-high temperature” and is a process of sterilizing milk by heating it to a very high temperature for only two seconds. A UHT carton that is not opened will remain unspoiled without refrigeration for up to nine months. UHT milk became popular in China in the days when there were few refrigerators. Some people don’t like the taste of UHT milk, but many Chinese think it is safer. As Lao Li, the deputy general manager of a large private dairy, told me, “Food safety is the big issue.”
Even in inexpensive markets for the poor, a considerable amount of space is devoted to milk. Organic milk costs twice as much as nonorganic milk, but people will buy it as well as the imported UHT milk, which costs even more.
Before 2008, people suspected that Chinese milk was full of additives that were not included in its labeling. And in 2008, everyone’s worst fears were confirmed. Sixteen babies in Gansu Province were diagnosed with kidney stones. They had all been fed Chinese-produced powdered milk that contained a deadly industrial poison called melamine. Why would anyone add such a poison to milk? In quality tests, the melamine made the milk appear to have a higher protein content. In the following four months, three hundred thousand more babies became ill from the milk, and six of them died.
At first, the Sanlu Group, one of China’s largest dairies, was found to be the source of the poisoned milk. But t
hen other dairies in different parts of the country came under suspicion, and many believe that not all the culprits were found. Rumors of cover-ups abound. Many countries will no longer buy Chinese dairy products, and dairy imports are more popular than ever in China. In 2013, European supermarkets restricted sales of infant formula to two per customer because the supply had been depleted by Chinese tourists wanting to take Western formula home.
Leo Li manages the Wondermilk dairy, which was founded in 2006, before the scandal, by Charles Shao, a Chinese-American software engineer working for Google in Los Angeles. Shao had visited China and become convinced that there was no good, undiluted milk that people could buy with confidence. He brought Holsteins and Jerseys from New Zealand to China and established two dairies near Beijing and one in Shanghai. His original idea was to sell milk to the many foreign families who live in those two cities.
The dairy’s name, Wondermilk, is designed to sound foreign. It is written in English on the front of the carton, and “won-der-milk” is written phonetically in Mandarin characters on the back. “People never believe that Wondermilk is Chinese,” said Leo Li gleefully.
China has a new and growing upper class concentrated in its cities, and, as has always been true in China, it is the urban rich who get the best milk. This is especially true because the wealthy crave everything Western—even the models in the advertisements of luxury products look Western—and dairy is Western. Ice cream is newly popular, and most of it is imported. Häagen-Dazs, dubious umlaut and all, is popular, as are Western-style ice cream parlors.
Yogurt parlors are in, too. Yogurt is regarded as new and hip. One yogurt chain, headquartered in Xining, Tibet, and popular in Beijing, is called “Old Yogurt” in Chinese, but signs reading I LOVE YOGURT in English are everywhere in the café. With the parlor’s chic Western décor, the ubiquitous I LOVE YOGURT signs, and a menu offering yogurt parfaits with fresh fruit, yogurt cakes, milk candies, yogurt gelato, and smoothies, it is hard to remember that you are in Asia, let alone China. The only reminder is the parlor’s excellent selection of Chinese teas. In 2016 there were seven “Old Yogurt” shops in fashionable areas of Beijing.
Coffee shops are also a new trend in China, started by Starbucks. The Chinese have not been coffee drinkers until recently. But now the affluent urban Chinese have a passion for cappuccinos and lattes. There is little interest in espresso—it is coffee with milk that everyone wants. Starbucks cannot open cafés fast enough, and there are many Chinese and Korean imitations.
Qiao Yanping, who has worked for the Chinese state dairy industry since the 1960s, said, “The Chinese now drink milk, but they don’t eat milk,” by which he meant that the one dairy product not popular in China today is cheese. This is the opposite of the situation in Japan, where cheese is very popular. There is one fast-growing cheesy product in China, however: The Chinese love pizza. Pizza Hut is opening store after store. Cheeseburgers are also becoming popular.
If 40 percent of today’s Chinese drink milk, that is impressive, because it is estimated that only 40 percent of the world’s people can digest milk. The other 60 percent are lactose-intolerant. So what happened to the supposed high level of lactose intolerance in China? One possibility is that it was always exaggerated. The fact that people do not consume dairy products does not necessarily mean that they are lactose-intolerant.
Li Cheng was a doctor in a Beijing hospital in the late 1980s when many patients started coming in with diarrhea and other typical symptoms of lactose intolerance. All these people had adopted the new fashion of drinking milk. Li Cheng and other doctors taught them to start by drinking only a little milk at a time and work their way up to more. Soon, they were drinking milk with impunity. Li Cheng and the other doctors contend that their patients’ lactose intolerance had been caused by not drinking milk, and that by slowly reintroducing it into their diet, their ability to produce lactase had been restored.
Western gastroenterologists who have studied the condition find this highly unlikely. Having the production of lactase genetically shut down is the normal human condition and once it happens, they say, lactase production will never come back. An increasing number of scientists, however, believe that while this condition cannot change in an individual, it can, over generations, change in a population.
It has long been recognized that different groups of people have different dietary needs. It is also generally thought that one of the reasons for this is that humans evolved to suit their environments. Before animals were domesticated, most scientists believe, all humans had their lactase shut off between the ages of two and five. Since their mothers were their only source of milk, their need for milk had to be shut down so that mothers were not in a state of permanent lactation. Originally livestock was not raised to produce milk. But once humans started raising livestock, the genetic shutoff of lactase, through evolution, started to disappear so that humans could take advantage of the milk provided by their livestock.
There is a field called cultural genetics that studies how cultural changes cause the evolution of genes. In this field, it is thought that a population that needs and produces milk can over generations mutate the gene that shuts off lactase and the population can lose its lactose intolerance. This may be happening to the largest population in the world.
17
TROUBLE IN COW PARADISE
In many homes in India, now the largest milk producer in the world, there are representations of two animals. One is of an elephant, the bearer of good fortune, whose image is always placed facing a doorway. The other is of a cow, the symbol of motherhood and therefore also of family and the joy of family life. This significance that Hindus see in cows has a simple logic: Cows give milk, milk sustains life, cows give life. But this is not to say that the use of cows and consumption of cow’s milk in India began with Hinduism. In the south, in 2000 B.C.E., before Hinduism had reached that part of India, there were once large cow herds, apparently kept for both their milk and meat. It was very unusual at this point in history to have such a large quantity of milk production. As in other parts of India, their dung was also valued, as fuel. Archeologists have found huge mounds of cow dung ash in the south.
Indians get a great deal of milk from water buffalo, and in Kashmir people milk the zomo, a cross between a cow and a yak. Goats are also prevalent in the region. But in India, many believe that cows produce the best milk. In 1906, a popular nineteenth-century Bengali food writer named Bipradas Mukhopadhyay rated the milk of goats, sheep, camels, buffalos, cows, humans, mares, and elephants and concluded that while human milk was the best, cow’s milk was second.
Mohandas Gandhi, the eccentric Hindu independence leader who ate almost nothing, did not agree. He drank goat’s milk exclusively and was a great believer in its health benefits. He even took a goat with him to London in 1931 when negotiating with the British, which outraged his already infuriated racist adversary, Winston Churchill, but charmed his Indian followers.
For Hindus, the cow is sacred. The origin of this belief, like the origin of Hinduism itself, is uncertain, but the religion probably began in the Indus Valley in Northwest India. Around 2000 B.C.E., Aryan horsemen from central Asia invaded, bringing their religion with them. They worshiped a number of deities, and in the Indus Valley, that number grew. This, many claim, was the origin of Hinduism, which worships many deities, too, and is the oldest religion still practiced today. The early believers preserved their religion orally in hymns that were passed down through generations and became the Rig-Veda, which mentions cows seven hundred times.
There are some references in ancient Hindu literature to a ban on killing cows, but unlike some of their descendants, the Aryans did not have many bans or prohibitions, and seldom for religious motives. It is believed that the ban was originally economic, not religious. Cows were an important item of trade and functioned almost as a currency. Their religious significance seems to have developed later.
Lord Krishna, one of the best-known Hindu de
ities, is often depicted playing his flute among grazing cows and dancing milkmaids, known as Gopis. In fact, Krishna is said to have originally been a cowherd. He also goes by the names Govinda and Gopala, which literally mean “friend and protector of cows.”
It was, and to a lesser degree still is, common practice for rural and even urban families to keep a cow for dairy purposes. Cows are still seen in the crowded, bustling traffic that clogs Indian cities, and it is considered a sign of piety for families to feed their cows before eating breakfast themselves.
Ghee, an oil produced from clarified cow butter, much like the smen used in North Africa, is a staple in Indian cooking, and is also burned during Hindu rituals. From the religious standpoint, ghee is sacred because it comes from a cow. Ghee is pure oil and so burns very well, far better than the yak butter in the Buddhist temples of Tibet.
This twelfth-century Khmer sandstone relief depicts the Hindu creation myth: Vishnu creates the world by churning a sea of milk. (Musée des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, Paris © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)
Ghee can be heated to a much higher temperature than butter without burning, and can be stored without refrigeration even in a hot climate. Here is a very clear and simple ghee recipe from Mahdhur Jaffrey, an Indian actress and popular food writer:
Melt one pound unsalted butter in a small heavy pan over a low flame. Then let it simmer very gently for 10 to 30 minutes. The length of time will depend on the amount of water in the butter. As soon as the white milky residue turns to golden particles (you have to keep watching), strain the ghee through several layers of cheese cloth. Cool, then pour into a clean jar. Cover.
Milk Page 23