Milk

by Mark Kurlansky

  They work with three breeds of sheep: the tête noire, tête rousse, and Basco-Béarnaise. They also raise Basque pigs, which, unlike the sheep, are a gentle, docile breed because their huge ears serve as natural blinders, cutting off peripheral vision.

  The family maintains a herd of three hundred sheep. Each November they get four hundred lambs. They keep the seventy best females and the one best male. The rest are sold for meat. The sheep graze wild on the high mountain slopes, eating the grasses and high-protein clover that help them to produce milk. In the winter the family supplements their feed with grains grown on their farm or other local farms. They harvest the grains and grasses in summer to use for winter forage.

  Farms with Basque sheep do not produce milk all year. They could if they fed the new lambs rather than letting them suckle, but the Basque believe that it is important “to respect the seasonal nature of sheep.” So at most, the sheep produce milk 265 days a year, having summers and early fall off. Jean-François and his family, on the other hand, have no days off. Jean-François hikes an hour up the mountain every day because the flock has to be kept together. If not, the sheep become agitated. Otherwise, “they live in the wild, feed off the land, and usually don’t need feed or medicine,” he says. The sheep also have to be milked by machine twice a day. Before 1992, they were milked by hand.

  The sheep’s milk is never pasteurized. A group of experts tests it every month, not only to make sure it is untainted, but also to access its fat content, flavor, and color.

  Most people in the world don’t know what Basque cheese is or what the difference is between a factory-made Basque cheese, a cow’s-milk Basque cheese, and an authentic sheep’s-milk Basque cheese. But the Basque people know, and it matters to them.

  Greece is known for goat’s and sheep’s milk, and there is a reason for that. The country is mostly arid and rocky, with very little grassland. The most important cheese in Greece is feta, which can now be made in a factory from any combination of goat, sheep, and cow’s milk, and with either raw or pasteurized milk. But of course, feta was originally made from raw milk, from either goats or sheep, and those trying to make true feta today still use raw milk—usually 30 percent from goats and the rest from sheep. Seventy percent of the cheese currently consumed in Greece is feta of one kind or another.

  Scientists have been studying Crete to try to understand the low incidence of heart and circulatory disease there despite the fact that 40 percent of its people’s caloric intake is from fat. What makes this especially interesting is that almost all of that fat comes from olive oil and feta.

  Feta is probably one of the oldest cheese types. Farmhouse feta was, and still is, made from the milk of free-range goats and sheep, curdled while still warm with the natural rennet from the stomachs of sucking animals. The curd is ready for cutting within an hour and is then placed in molds—traditionally, basket molds, but today metal ones, which are more hygienic.

  Another hour later, the cheese is ready to drain and salt. It is then cured in brine made from sea salt and left to ripen. On the island of Limnos, people cure feta with salt by leaving it in seawater.

  Greece has about four thousand dairy farms that provide milk for feta, and the typical herd numbers three hundred animals. The European Union says that in order to be called feta, the cheese has to come from one of six regions of Greece: Macedonia, Thrace, Thessaly, central mainland Greece, the Peloponnese, and Lesbos. There is a noticeable difference among the cheeses of the different regions. Feta made in Thessaly and central Greece is more flavorful. Peloponnesian feta also has a lot of flavor but is drier and more crumbly. Cheese from Macedonia and Thrace is milder, creamier, and less salty and has fewer holes.

  There are about fifteen hundred cheese dairies in Greece that make feta in this traditional way, and they are all located near dairy farms so that they can start making the cheeses immediately after milking. A few have succumbed to pasteurization, and though they use low-temperature pasteurization to do as little damage to the milk as possible, aficionados say that this feta is not as flavorful.

  The traditional feta makers are all competing with the feta factories, most of which are located in Europe and the United States. The factories use mostly pasteurized cow’s milk and industrial techniques. They need only 5.3 liters of milk to make one kilo of feta, whereas the Greek farmers need 7.3 liters. The factory-made feta does not really resemble the Greek handmade, but most customers have never tasted the original.

  Though feta dominates in Greece, there are also seventy other Greek cheeses, most of them artisanal. Almost every Greek island and peninsula has its own cheese, usually made from sheep’s or goat’s milk.

  In the Cyclades, a group of Aegean islands that includes some of Greece’s most popular tourist spots, are three less visited islands—Tinos, Syros, and Naxos. Venetians came to these islands in the fifteenth century and didn’t leave until the seventeenth. They left behind their Roman Catholic religion (whereas most of the rest of the country is Greek Orthodox), cows, and a love of cow’s-milk cheese.

  The island of Tinos, a barren rocky place near the much more famous island of Mykonos, has a few traces of its Venetian past. The majority of its people are Roman Catholic, and between them and the Greek Orthodox, the island, with a population of only ten thousand, is famous for its 575 churches. Several can be found in each rock-bound village, and people come from all over Greece to visit one particular Greek Orthodox church because it is believed to bestow miracles.

  Tinos is also known for its Gruyère-style cow’s-milk cheese. This traditional cheese that the farmers used to make themselves is a creamy, semisoft young cheese rolled into balls.

  The cow breed originally brought to Tinos by the Venetians is long gone, as are the native Greek cows. Now people raise Holsteins. It would be hard to imagine a less suitable place for them. The terrain seems better suited for sheep and goats than for cows, but the sheep and goats are used only for wool.

  In the summer, Tinos is a shrubby, brown, mountainous island. Some of the mountains look like piles of rocks. Geologists say that these rocky areas used to be at the bottom of lakebeds. The big round rocks are called volokos, which is also the name of the island’s most traditional village. Volokos has two-story whitewashed houses with small blue-trimmed windows. The houses are often built against large rocks, and their ground floors are used for storage. The streets are far too narrow to accommodate cars. Most Tinos villages were originally accessible only by donkey.

  Wild capers grow in the mountains between the rocks. In the winter the terraced slopes marked off with rock walls are covered with rich green grass. Winter is a good time for the cows here, though it is sometimes a bit harsh, with occasional snowfall.

  The island’s three dairies collect milk from ten farmers, who have a total of 130 Holsteins. The milk is used for making cheese, as well as yogurt, butter, and ice cream. The leftover whey is shipped to the nearby island of Paros to use in their cosmetic industry.

  Greece has fallen on hard times in recent decades, and many farmers have given up working the land and moved to Athens. In fact, all over the Greek islands, people are giving up and moving to Athens. Life is hard here. There is no doctor and no airport, only ferries that run three times a day to Mykonos and other nearby islands. Those farmers who remain support themselves by producing a little cheese, growing tomatoes and potatoes, and making raki, a clear 90 percent smooth alcohol distilled from grapes and anise.

  Near the main Tinos port and an unattractive sprawl of modern white buildings, Adonis Zagradanis raises thirty cows on 3,000 square meters of valley and steeply sloped land. Like all the farmers here, he also has a second job—he owns a butcher shop in town. He grows corn in the dirt-floored valley to feed his cows and also buys leftover corn from breweries in Athens and Thessaloniki. In the winter, he drives his herd up to terraced fields to graze on grass, supplementing the grass with corn and feed.

  Despite the landscape and summer heat, the milk produced
by cows here has a high fat content, especially after the spring grass has come in, making it ideal for cheesemaking. The farmers have milking machines available, but prefer to milk by hand because they say that the machines cause mastitis, an infection of the teats. But this usually happens only if the machines are not properly cleaned.

  Ionnis Armaos, another Tinos native, lives here, but his wife and young son and daughter live in Athens, where she works. They get together on weekends. Ionnis toiled as a construction worker for a while, but the trade pulled him away from his native island and so he decided to buy a dairy and make Tinos cheese. To do this, he hired an experienced cheesemaker, Polykarpos Delatolas, to teach him how to make the traditional cheeses and a few others of his own invention.

  Ionnis’s San Lorenzo dairy is located high in the mountains, where in the hot summer the temperature is almost 4 degrees centigrade cooler than in most of the rest of the island. In a spotless two-room dairy he receives 5,000 to 6,000 kilos of milk a day, out of which he makes 50 kilos of ten different varieties of cheese. His is a successful operation. He struggles to keep up with demand. Much of his product is sold retail in his little shop.

  His little dairy survives, the Holsteins survive, and Tinos remains a cheesemaking place.

  Some believe that yogurt promotes longevity. And that is key to the success of Icelandic skyr, which is really a fresh cheese but became popular as a yogurt-type food.

  For thousands of years, the sour taste of yogurt was greatly appreciated in some countries, including Greece, India, Turkey, Bulgaria, Iran, and the nations of the Arab world. But many deemed it too harsh and sour for Western palates.

  Then, in the beginning of the twentieth century, Élie Metchnikoff, a Ukrainian Jew who was deputy director of the Pasteur Institute, became the first to study probiotics, the beneficial qualities of bacteria and yeast. He also had a theory about immunity that earned him the 1908 Nobel Prize for medicine. He noticed that Bulgarian peasants sometimes lived past the age of 100 and that yogurt was central to their diet. He concluded that the live cultures in yogurt had properties that ate away diseases and slowed down aging.

  And that is how France became the first yogurt-eating Western nation. During the course of the twentieth century, many other Western nations followed its example, so that by the end of the century yogurt was a very common food in the West.

  But there was a problem: Westerners didn’t really like yogurt. They did indeed find it harsh and sour, and they didn’t like the way the whey seeped out between spoonfuls. So during the twentieth century, Western dairies started to change yogurt. First, they added sugar to mask the sourness. Next came sugary fruit compotes. Then low-fat dieting became fashionable, and skim milk and powdered milk began being used. And in 1970 frozen yogurt was invented. By this point there were no longer any live cultures in the Western yogurt and the Western yogurt eater probably wasn’t going to live as long as a Bulgarian peasant. As the food writer Anne Mendelson wrote, “Yogurt had been turned into a kind of premixed sweet-and-sour pudding or pseudo-ice cream.”

  But there were still some Westerners who wanted it plain, nonfat, and healthful, and they discovered Icelandic skyr, which the Icelanders and some Scandinavians have been enjoying since the time of the Vikings. It is a traditional food made from the milk of traditional Viking cows that graze on hearty Icelandic grass.

  Aside from the switch in Viking times from sheep to cows, there has not been much change to skyr over the centuries. It looks like yogurt but is denser and creamier. Since it is a cheese, it is also more expensive and time-consuming to make than yogurt. One liter of milk makes one liter of yogurt, but it takes three liters of milk to make one liter of skyr.

  Skyr is sold in the same type of plastic containers as yogurt and naturally contains zero fat. But like yogurt, skyr leaks whey. Realizing that this is an unpopular characteristic, the largest skyr maker, MS Iceland Dairies, developed something called ultrafiltration, which keeps the whey from leaking—an ironic historical twist, because originally skyr was made to produce whey.

  This new skyr has a silky creaminess and a higher protein content. Sales greatly increased, and the product also spread to America. At first, its makers were frustrated because the Americans thought it was yogurt and sold it in the yogurt section. The label clearly says skyr, not yogurt, but if Americans want to buy their cheese as zero-fat high-protein yogurt, why not? After all, zero-fat yogurt was very popular in the United States, while skyr was unknown.

  British cheese, like most British artisanal products, was hit hard by industrialization in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. One by one, many great and famous cheeses disappeared. But since then, farmers have been bringing them back, and now the British claim to make more different types of cheese than the French. This is a somewhat dubious claim, probably based on Charles De Gaulle’s famous question, “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” As was his habit, the general was understating the problem—there were probably more than 246 varieties at the time. Today, France lists about 450 types of cheese, and within those types are numerous varieties. Modern experts estimate that France makes about 1,000 kinds of cheese and Britain 700, though among the British offerings are imitations of such cheeses as Brie, now made in both Cornwall and Somerset.

  The British list of cheeses was probably longer in the eighteenth century, but it is much longer today than it was in 1950. Among the cheeses on the list now are Duddleswell, created in Sussex in 1988 and made from sheep’s milk and vegetable rennet; Lincolnshire Poacher, made from unpasteurized cow’s milk since 1992; and Stinking Bishop cheese, for which the cheesemaker Charles Martell of Gloucestershire revived a nearly extinct cow breed, Gloucester cattle. The milk for Stinking Bishop cheese is pasteurized, and when there is not enough milk from the Gloucester cows available, milk from neighboring Holsteins is added. The cheese has been mentioned in many films and television shows, adding to its popularity, as filmmakers can’t seem to resist its name. But actually, the cheese is named not for its smell but for the “perry,” a local pear cider, in which it is immersed during production.

  Milk Street, London, mentioned as far back as the twelfth century for selling milk (near Honey Street and Bread Street). This illustration by William Blake shows May Day, 1784. Milkmaids in garlands and chimney sweeps are dancing down Milk Street. (HIP/Art Resource, NY)

  Among the extinct cheeses brought back to life in Britain is the Wiltshire Loaf, one of the most famous cheeses of the eighteenth century. It disappeared because of its alleged similarity to cheddar, which started to be produced inexpensively in various factories around England in the nineteenth century. Wiltshire could not compete.

  In Saxon times, the area west of London known as North Wiltshire was used for grazing sheep, but in the thirteenth century, as more forest was cleared, it became pastureland for cows. Dairying was women’s work, but it was widely believed—and this idea endured for centuries—that for a woman to make cheese, she had to be married. Unmarried old maids would be bitter and their milk would sour.

  The word “dairymaid” came from the old English word dheigh, which originally meant a female dough kneader, a breadmaker, and head of household. After the Norman Conquest, when cheesemaking moved out of the house and into a special room, that room was called a dheigh and then a “deyhouse.” By the twelfth century, cheesemakers in Wiltshire were called “dairymaids.”

  By the seventeenth century, the valley of the River Avon, a soft north-to-south curve through the upper west corner of Wiltshire known as the Wiltshire Vale, was a dairy area known for its cheese. Pasturelands were tidily divided by dark-leafed hedgerows, and the average dairy had about a dozen cows, a small number compared to the herds of dairy farmers in competing cow-cheese regions such as Cheshire.

  Longhorns, the first English-bred cattle, were a beef breed whose milk did not work well for cheesemaking. They were crossbred with Dutch and Scottish breeds to make the
shorthorn, a smaller cow, and this was the breed that was favored in Wiltshire. Even when good cheese cows such as Ayrshires, Jerseys, and Guernseys came along, they were not popular in Wiltshire because local cheesemakers found their cheese to be too rich, or, as they expressed it, “too buttery.” In fact the Wiltshire farmers preferred their cows to graze in poorer-quality pastures so that their milk would not be too rich.

  English longhorn

  Shorthorn

  In the late eighteenth century, a small, ten-pound Wiltshire cheese was called a truckle, and an even smaller version, famed throughout England, was known as the Wiltshire Loaf.

  By the late nineteenth century, however, cheesemaking was vanishing. It was difficult to find dairymaids or any kind of dairy workers anymore, and the Wiltshire farmers were having trouble competing with the industrialized cheese plants. It seemed most people just wanted cheddar. Then in the 1930s, the British government started guaranteeing milk prices that made selling milk more profitable than selling cheese. And that was the end of Wiltshire cheese.

  At least it was the end until Chad and Ceri Cryer started making it again in 2006. Chad did not grow up on a farm, and when he was a child, he had a toy cow with six teats. He didn’t learn that cows had only four teats until he became a biologist. He was an expert on bees. While teaching, he met Ceri, another teacher, who had grown up on a Wiltshire farm. Her father, Joe Collingborn, an outspoken Wiltshire farmer, was the third generation on a dairy farm his family had owned since 1910. The farm was in the green, tall-grass valley of the Avon, a picturesque countryside with clay soil and fields that were ill-suited for anything but dairy. The Collingborns have been in Wiltshire since at least 1086; they are in the 1086 Domesday Book, which lists English landowners.